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Working Girl, starring Harrison Ford as Jack Trainer and Melanie Griffith as Tess McGill depicts a scene showing Jack and Tess in bed having a discussion on how Jack acquired a scar on his chin that Tess has noticed while she is stroking his face with her fingertips:

TESS: How'd you get this scar?

JACK: Some guy pulled a knife in Detroit.

TESS: Really?

JACK: No. No. I was 19 and I thought it'd be cool to have a pierced ear. My girlfriend stuck the needle through and I fainted and hit my chin on the toilet.

It is well known that Harrison Ford has an actual scar on his chin due to a car accident when he was younger. Steven Spielberg actually incorporated the scar into the script for another one of Harrison Ford's films, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

Unlike the explanation of the scar in the Indiana Jones series, the discussion surrounding the scar in Working Girl does not have anything to do with the plot of the movie and does not seem to add anything significant to the story.

What was the reasoning behind the filmmakers decision to incorporate Harrison Ford's real life scar into the script of the film? Is there any evidence to indicate that filmmakers chose to add this into the script after Harrison Ford was cast in the film?

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    Not add anything significant? It's used to bond the two characters through an intimate moment. It's used to relate the character to the audience. It may not be important to the plot, but it's important part of story telling. It creates sympathy.
    – cde
    Oct 23, 2016 at 4:30
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    @cde Uhm...okay. I guess that I didn't interpret it that way. They could have used several different subjects as "pillow talk" If filmmakers chose to create the dialog using Ford's real life scar specifically for that, then...awesome. There's the answer.
    – steelersquirrel
    Oct 23, 2016 at 4:33
  • If the purpose of the pillow talk was simply to bond the characters and not relevant to the plot, it's possible the actors were just ad libbing - talking about whatever random things they thought of, but staying in character while doing so - and this little nugget was good enough to keep.
    – Steve-O
    Nov 19, 2016 at 3:28

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As explained in this New York Times article, the movie is significantly different from Kevin Wade's original script, in part due to Mike Nichols's way of working:

In the collaboration among Ms. Griffith, Mr. Wade and Mr. Nichols, many of their contributions were designed to make Tess more sympathetic, lest moviegoers find her struggle to climb the corporate ladder self-serving and her methods distasteful.

[...]

In the end, the makers of ''Working Girl'' overhauled the plot even before the other Wall Street film's release. Tess now temporarily assumes her boss's identity, only to be accused of stealing the senior woman's ideas. It was felt that the heroine's unwitting participation in a form of illegal trading would turn off audiences.

By the sixth rewrite, Tess was not unlike her creator, Mr. Wade.

Once Nichols got on board with the project, it became a collaborative affair:

Once the team was assembled, they spent three months researching the characters, which consisted primarily of treating secretaries to lunch and pumping them for ideas. Suggestions poured in, such as the note from a Fox employee about the secretarial duty she found most humbling. Her boss, also a woman, lifted her skirts before meetings so her assistant could spray her clothing with anti-static spray. A similar scene was filmed, though ultimately dropped.

The article also points to the pre-filming rehearsals as a source of changes and improvements:

The movie also benefited in the two weeks before shooting from Mr. Nichols's running the actors through the type of improvisational comedy shtick he perfected in an earlier career as a stand-up comedian.

For instance, in a pivotal love scene between Harrison Ford's character, Jack Trainer, and Tess's character, the script simply says the characters make love. What makes the scene fresh are the impromptu flourishes borrowed from ordinary life: a briefcase jams the apartment door; the two lovers are thrown off by a maze of bow ties, buttons and shirt tucks that make up standard Wall Street attire, and Tess inquires about a real-life scar that Mr. Ford has on his chin.

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