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This month the ever laconic and, at 71, increasingly gruff Harrison Ford stars in Ender's Game, the long-gestating adaptation of Orson Scott Card's best-seller, in which precocious children are the ones in charge of protecting all of imperiled mankind. Ford plays a military official who helps prepare young Ender (Asa Butterfield) for interstellar alien war. Here, the actor manages to give a couple of full-sentence replies.

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You've had a disproportionate amount of success with science fiction: the Star Wars trilogy, Blade Runner, now Ender's Game—

That's three out of forty-one.

Although it's three of the more prominent ones, right?

If you say so.

I was going to ask you what draws you to the genre. But maybe you don't see it that way.

I don't see it that way at all. It really is a very small percentage of the films that I've done.

Between Ender's Game and the Hunger Games franchise, why do you think we're so entertained by kids killing one another?

[long pause] Beats the shit out of me. Ender's Game is a very different kind of movie and a very different kind of warfare.

In the book, your character, Colonel Graff, is a stress eater and struggles with obesity. How come that aspect of the character didn't make it into the film version?

I'd just finished doing a movie [the Jackie Robinson biopic 42] in a fat suit. I don't think I was up for that.

Were you troubled at all by the political beliefs of Ender's Game author Orson Scott Card, who opposes gay marriage and believes that Obama is going to mobilize gangs of urban youth to enforce his will?

The issues that are coming up now are not part of the book, which is twenty-eight years old. So they don't really concern me. [long pause] Concern me are really not the right words. I think it's better to say that they are simply not issues; his point of view on some of these issues that are getting such attention now is not promoted by or part of the story that we're telling.

Are you enjoying the gruff-authority-figure phase of your career? You get to play a lot of colonels and high-ranking ecutives and generals these days.

I don't remember a general, but maybe I'm just not paying attention.

What was it like filming a space movie in the age of CGI? Does it force you to work differently?

No. Acting is about using your imagination.

Is there a trick to making seemingly ridiculous dialogue like When the aliens first invaded... work?

Yeah. That's my job. That's why I get paid.