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On camera, in Jack's rumpled gray business suit and red tie, Ford throws himself all over the place. He bruises his coccyx (for real) when he accidentally stumbles backward onto the root of a large tree. Inside the cabin, he crashes spectacularly through wooden boards mounted on sawhorses. At one point, Bettany smashes him so violently against the wall that a trapezoidal chunk of it breaks off. Honestly, it's hard not to be impressed. The old guy is still in amazing shape. ''There's no other actor I know of who, besides Jackie Chan, you'd even think about letting do this stuff,'' says Terry Leonard, a Firewall fight coordinator who famously stunt-doubled for Ford when Indiana Jones slid under the Nazi truck in Raiders of the Lost Ark. ''And he likes it. You wouldn't keep doing this to yourself if you didn't like it. It gets the adrenaline pumping.''

Ford's adrenaline must be surging when he steps over to the lapping waters of the river for an interview after a day's roughhousing, because he's a different, more outrageous animal than the (by his own description) ''not naturally gregarious'' star who would field Indy 4 questions many months later. As a freight train chugs along directly across the river, Ford's first asked why he does all this tough stuff himself, when stunt guys might seamlessly take over for some of it.

''If the audience has spent 80 minutes hopefully getting emotionally related to my character, I want 'em to feel his exhaustion and his pain,'' he says emphatically. ''I want them to be there in a moment of triumph, and they can't if they're on the back of some stuntman's head. They can't if they're not seeing the OOOOH!'' — he smashes himself in the cheek with a slow, sloppy palm and contorts his face into something ugly — ''...that smoosh in your face, with the spit falling out, and all that kind of s---. But there are ways of doing it that are technical. I'm not being a cowboy idiot here. I'm working very precisely.''

Tell him that Terry Leonard insists Ford knows more about stunts than most of the stunt guys in Hollywood, and Ford will go off.

''I don't do stunts!'' he protests, fake blood congealed around his ear. ''I do physical acting! That's a big f---ing difference. A stunt is a fall, a car crash, a roll. That's a stunt! Like a fire gag — you won't ever see me on fire. Well,'' he halts himself mischievously, ''a little bit, maybe.'' He chuckles briefly. ''But it is a difference. For me, I have no ambition to do stunts. I have an ambition to tell a story with physical action.''

Watch him for a while, and it's soon obvious that Ford not only knows how to perform ''physical action'' — he knows how to shoot it, too. During setups, he's a whirling funnel cloud of peculiar energy, very vocal with his ideas on where the camera, his co-star, and the edits should be. He must be at the point by now, we suggest to him when he's still wired, where he can plot out action sequences like these all in his head.


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