‘I DIDN’T KILL MY WIFE!’  An Oral History of The Fugitive: 

There was no finished script or even an ending and a key cast member became fatally ill during the production. Three decades after the release of the landmark Hollywood thriller, the cast and crew look back at the film’s chaotic creation and reflect on the legacy of the instant classic that almost fell apart.

When Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert sat down at the end of 1993 to pick their 10 favorite movies of the year, they largely selected prestige, Oscar-bait films like The Piano, The Age of Innocence, The Joy Luck Club, and Schindler’s List. They skipped nearly all of the big multiplex hits of the year, including Jurassic Park, Sleepless in Seattle, and Mrs. Doubtfire, making an exception only for The Fugitive. It’s an honor they didn’t give to Die Hard in 1988, The Terminator in 1984, Aliens in 1986, or many other great action movies of the VHS era.

But The Fugitive, starring Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones, is a special work that rises above nearly every other movie of its kind. Based on a long-running — and slyly subversive — TV show from the Sixties, the film grabs you right from the opening scene where Ford’s character, Richard Kimble, a respected doctor falsely accused of murdering his wife, escapes from police custody when his prison bus collides with a freight train. And it keeps up the relentless pace until the final scene where dogged U.S. Marshal Samuel Gerard, played by Jones, tracks him into the bowels of the Chicago Hilton. There’s no CGI, romantic subplots, or anything that distracts from the central narrative or feels the least bit inauthentic. (Well, besides Kimble’s swan dive off a dam that almost certainly would have killed him.)

“Thrillers are a much-debased genre these days, depending on special effects and formula for much of their content,” Ebert wrote in a four-star review. “The Fugitive has the standards of an earlier, more classic time, when acting, character and dialogue were meant to stand on their own, and where characters continued to change and develop right up until the last frame. Here is one of the year’s best films.”

To celebrate The Fugitive‘s 30th anniversary, we compiled an oral history of the movie featuring new interviews with actors Tommy Lee Jones, Joe Pantoliano, Sela Ward, Daniel Roebuck, Jeroen Krabbé, L. Scott Caldwell, and Tom Wood, director Andrew Davis, screenwriters David Twohy and Jeb Stuart, producers Keith Barish and Stephen Joel Brown, editor Don Brochu, and casting director Candy Sandrich. (We tried to track down Harrison Ford, but much like Samuel Gerard, we just couldn’t seem to catch him. To be fair, he’s just a teeny bit busy at the moment.)

Read the whole thing.