“Once in a while, we’d have an issue with that”: Harrison Ford Wouldn’t Dare Do the One Thing With Taylor Sheridan in 1923 That Led to Open Clashes Between Him and George Lucas in Star Wars

Taylor Sheridan may be one of Hollywood’s most in-demand scriptwriters right now but Harrison Ford has been in the industry longer than Sheridan has even been alive. But that barely stopped the showrunner from casting two of Hollywood’s biggest names in a television prequel spin-off show.

Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren’s parts in 1923 could not be played by better actors, in hindsight. But during the casting process, Sheridan stunned Hollywood into silence by drawing two of the biggest names in the A-list roster. It seems, however, that the calculated move did not play out in vain.

A Testament to Taylor Sheridan’s Talent for Words

Say what one may about Taylor Sheridan’s fake cowboy-land fantasy (despite his claims, he didn’t grow up on a ranch; his father was a cardiologist), it is still impossible to overlook the Yellowstone creator’s mastery of dialogue. What Sheridan couldn’t achieve in his acting career, he delivered a hundred-fold with his ability to manufacture Oscar-worthy scripts.

It is no surprise that an A-lister as venerated, experienced, and maverick as Harrison Ford would bow down to Sheridan’s talent after reading the script of 1923. Perhaps for the first time in a long time, Ford consciously stopped himself from huffing his way through a project without changing or ad-libbing any lines.

Famously, however, some of the most well-known and oft-quoted one-liners did come from Harrison Ford’s ability to throw a quippy unscripted dialogue into the mix. The famous “I know” as a response to Princess Leia’s “I love you” has become legendary in pop culture lore along with Indiana Jones’s witty comeback, “It’s not the years, honey. It’s the mileage.”

It’s stuff like this that makes one wonder how perfectly scripted Taylor Sheridan’s stories might be that even Star Wars and Indiana Jones-famed Harrison Ford felt it undeserving to change or add even one line during filming.

Taylor Sheridan vs George Lucas: Who Did It Better?

They say history is written by the winners. But in the film and television industry, where every frame and each take (be it 1 or 127) is recorded in the reels of movie films, it is hard to escape or even erase history. As such, the behind-the-scenes controversy on the sets of Star Wars is well documented by the filmographers of that era.

Harrison Ford’s hatred for his Star Wars character grew to such an extent that he lashed out at Lucas over his clunky dialogue saying, “George, you can type this sh*t, but you sure as hell can’t say it.” (Later, however, he did concede saying, “I was wrong. It worked.”) Even then, Ford’s constant clashes with George Lucas and Irvin Kershner over dialogue is a well-documented history in film lore [via HuffPost].

In a 2023 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Ford further reinstated his claim, “I’m a guy who says, ‘If the words don’t fit my mouth, we’ve got to change the words.’”

However, that was not the case when it came to Taylor Sheridan’s writing. After being cast in 1923 as Jacob Dutton, his fascination with dialogue made him take a step back from trying to outdo the director and the writer. Speaking of Sheridan’s strict no-no rule about rewrites, Ford revealed:

Once in a while, we’d have an issue with that. But life doesn’t do rewrites. You get a shot at something, and that’s what happened. I really committed to saying Taylor’s words because it’s fun for me to puzzle it out.

With Yellowstone almost coming to a close, the cowboy universe that Sheridan built up from scratch is far from seeing its last sunset. Two additional spin-offs, 1944 and 2024, are in the waiting line of production at Paramount. Although Matthew McConaughey and Michelle Pfeiffer have been reported to be circling the lead roles in those series, nothing has been set in stone yet.

1923 is available to stream on Paramount+