Louise Bishop/Mom Start

I got to talk to Han Solo.

Well, it wasn’t really Han Solo, but the man who made the scruffy-looking nerf-herder an icon for generations … the one and only Harrison Ford. If my 9-year-old self knew that I would be in the same room with the actor, talking all things Star Wars decades later, her brain just might have exploded.

But there I was, part of a group of mom and dad bloggers holding court with the 73-year-old Ford, who came in possessing a Solo-like confidence and no-nonsense demeanor. He was calm, soft-spoken and game to talk about why Star Wars remains so important and the role it plays in the lives of families.

On the brink of the release of the seventh installment, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, here’s what Harrison Ford had to say about …

Coming back to the Star Wars legacy 30 years later.

“It was familiar, same thing only different. I was there in service of a script that I thought was very good, a sort of road map for the character that I thought was worth coming back to, with a director whose work I admired and who I knew from a previous film 25 years ago. It was an altogether attractive prospect. If we were trying to do exactly the same thing … if I dyed my hair and pretended that 30 years had not gone by, I would be much less comfortable, but this acknowledges the reality of the passage of time. It deals with the question of what happened while I was off stage for 30 years and it deals with it in a really smart way.”

Star Wars as a family tradition.

“Listen … if it were not for the fact that these films have been passed on by parents to their children – at an appropriate juncture in their lives – and that generations have thus been introduced to me, I probably would have a much different career. So, I’m very grateful for the fact that these were family films that have been passed on as though there were some nugget of useful information or at least entertainment, recognizing their value to the audience gives them significance to me.”

Whether he has a favorite Star Wars moment from then and now?

“No. I don’t have an anecdotal memory, I don’t have much of a memory at all.  I could make something up but I’m not generally disposed to do that. I don’t come away from camp saying, ‘we all had a great time and we love each other and it’s great,’ although I could. I mean, it’s great to be back with Mark (Hamill) and Carrie (Fisher).  I spent a little time with them and Peter Mayhew (Chewbacca) and a lot of the crew, some of the older members of the crew have worked on the earlier films. But more often than that, there were sons and daughters of the people who worked on the original film and are now in the same craft business and were back to work with us.”

Whether he realized that Star Wars was going to be huge the first time he read the script. 

“No, No. You’d be locked up if you came to that conclusion. But in the context of making that first film, I did recognize both the utility of my character to the telling of the story and there might be some really strong elements that people would relate to. What I recognized was that I didn’t know much about science fiction, I didn’t care much about science fiction at that time and probably still don’t, although I find it often gives us the chance to explore places and things that we haven’t seen before and that’s cool.  But what I recognized was that there is a kind of fairy tale structure in the characters and in the story. Grimm’s fairy tales have lasted for the last 400 years, so there’s a strength that I recognized and when you have a beautiful princess and a callow youth and a wise old warrior and then me… it was easy to figure out my place in that structure.”

On whether he has any Star Wars toys. 

“I just don’t get caught up in the toys. I really don’t care personally. I mean, that’s great but that’s for other people. This is a service occupation, storytelling is a service occupation much like being a waiter. You deliver the food.  You don’t bang it on the table in front of them.  You wait until the right moment, you slip it down. You keep your eyes scanning the crowd. It’s a public service job, and the toys are for them, they’re not for me. I’m not the customer, but I love working here.”

We’re certainly happy he has the job. You can see Harrison Ford back in Han Solo’s boots on December 18.