Not long ago, I was preparing to interview Tom Hanks at Symphony Space, a theatre on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, for an audience of seven hundred-plus people at The New Yorker Live. Hanks had just published a novel called “The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece,” and he was hitting the road for a while. Symphony Space was the first stop on the tour. Someone from Knopf, his publisher, let me know that I would embarrass Hanks if, in my introduction, I went through the litany of movies he has starred in since the early eighties. In fact, if I had, that would have been the whole evening. The list is long and shimmery. Hanks is that rare thing, a real movie star who has sustained a four-decades-and-counting career. It’s not just that he has won two Oscars in a row (for “Philadelphia” and “Forrest Gump”) or made box-office hits including “Splash,” “Saving Private Ryan,” and Steven Spielberg’s most enjoyable film, “Catch Me If You Can.” He’s also capable of taking on a predictable vehicle, such as the recent feature “A Man Called Otto,” and pumping some life into it while attracting a sizable audience.
What surprised me is the degree to which Hanks, particularly in front of a live crowd, in no way resembles Jimmy Stewart, the laconic Hollywood icon to whom he’s most often, and most lazily, compared. When we met beforehand, then onstage for an hour and a half, and, finally, over a long dinner at a local Greek restaurant, Hanks was about as laconic as Muhammad Ali. Or a hand grenade. He is funny, sarcastic, self-knowing, and a tireless raconteur, particularly about his day job. In our interview, he sometimes answered questions as he might in a more private setting than Symphony Space; far more often, he took some element of the question as a cue for a prolonged, well-polished anecdote, performed at the edge of his seat. Hanks’s novel is all over the place at times, undisciplined and overstuffed, but it contains extended passages and set pieces describing how movies are made that are entirely worth the ticket.
As an editor, I’ve always been frustrated by the degree to which the gatekeepers of the Entertainment Industrial Complex, as Hanks calls it, bar reporters from watching how a film gets made, limiting inquisitive journalists to a few distant glimpses of the process and then a concocted interchange on the official press junkets. And so I began our conversation at Symphony Space, which was recorded for The New Yorker Radio Hour and is published here in edited form, with my parochial complaint and a discussion of how Hanks sees things from inside.
Tom, I want to start with your novel, “The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece.” I have a question, and of course it comes in the form of a complaint. In 1952, The New Yorker assigned Lillian Ross to write about the making of “The Red Badge of Courage,” a film by John Huston.
Starring Audie Murphy.
And it wasn’t until almost forty years later that another journalist, Julie Salamon, got similar access to the making of another film, which you were in, “Bonfire of the Vanities,” for her book—
Why do the makers of movies make it so mysterious to the rest of us how movies really get made, which I suspect is something that’s behind this novel?
Well, it’s not a conspiracy. No one is hiding anything. If anybody who is what we call a “noncombatant” or a “civilian” wants to visit the making of a motion picture, they’ll be bored out of their skull. Nowadays, you’ll go onto a soundstage, and there’ll be a blue screen, and there will be guys up on a cherry picker moving some cables around. And you’ll think, Is that it? And the answer is . . . yeah. Because they have to move those cables around, and because somewhere somebody is being put into a harness, and they’re going to be dangled above an air mattress, and they’re going to have to make out with somebody else. And you’ll wonder, What’s going on in this movie? And then, when you see that moment from the movie, it’ll turn out it’s the most passionate, important beat in the film. And you were there!
Do you think moviemaking defeats journalism and required writing a novel? Also, writing a novel is hard. Why did you want to be the guy to reveal how this is done?
Writing a novel is not that hard. Writing a novel that anybody wants to read is hard. Anybody can sit down for a few hours every morning for a couple of months and bang out something that’s going to last about three hundred and sixty pages. Whether or not it’s a piece of crap or not—that’s where it’s going to come down. I don’t think there’s anything more fascinating than hearing anybody talk about what they do for a living, what their passion is, and how they ended up doing that. That, to me, is a great story.
You have this passage early in the novel: “Making movies is complicated, maddening, highly technical at times, ephemeral and gossamer at others, slow as molasses on a Wednesday, but with a gun-to-the-head deadline on a Friday. Imagine a jet plane”—I love this—“Imagine a jet plane, the funds for which were held up by Congress, designed by poets, riveted together by musicians, supervised by executives fresh out of business school, to be piloted by wannabes with attention deficiencies. What are the chances that such an aeroplane is going to soar?” So, do you feel, when you’re in the midst of this weird combination of boredom and chaos, that a movie is going to come out of this?
Let me put it this way. You ran away from your miserable life and your horrible, abusive family to join the circus when it came through town, because it was a number of things: It was glamorous. It was an escape from your life of missed opportunities. And you work on that circus now, and you join it, and you are on the road, and you tear down that tent, and you put it back up every Thursday. What’s required of you, as a member of the circus, is to make sure that the net for the trapeze artists will actually save their lives when they fall from the sky. Suddenly you’re not just a member of the circus. You have a life-and-death responsibility for the safety of somebody else that you work with every day. Making a movie also has this vicious reality to it: they last forever. So, if you’ve done a shitty job in whatever your responsibility on that movie is, it will haunt you for the rest of your days.
Do you know when you’re acting well, in those little snippets of thirty seconds of filming?
You don’t. All you can do is have some kind of faith that your instincts have joined you. All you can do is open a vein, bleed it out. You dig around in the riverbed long enough and say, Here’s the gold dust, here’s a nugget, please do well with this, Mr. Director, editor, scorer, Foley artist, sound mixer, dialogue mixer. Please, I entrust my family jewels to you. My manhood is in your hands. And then they will do what they do.
Oftentimes, when you go to work as an actor, they can almost ask you this question: What mood are you in today? You say, “You know, I feel pretty good. Had a great night last night. I slept. The Knicks won. What are we doing today? Oh, that’s right. We’re doing the scene where I have to have a nervous breakdown and weep copious tears and go to such a deep and dark place emotionally that it’s going to take me a day and a half to recover.”
That’s one thing that can happen. The other thing that can happen is “Hey, how you feeling today?” And you say, “I’m sick. I have a terrible headache. I had the biggest fight in my life with my wife. We can’t stand each other. My kids are all going through horrible troubles. My brother has called me and asked me for money. I don’t have a passport, so I can’t leave the country. My business manager has stolen millions of dollars from me. I’m going to be destitute if this movie doesn’t work. And, quite frankly, I’m at the end of my emotional rope. I don’t want to work. I don’t want to be alive today.” Well, that’s too bad, because today you’ve got to fall in love with the dog. That is the requirement of being an actor sometimes.
Now, here’s a story from a famous movie. Are you ready for it? “Forrest Gump”!
[Big applause from the audience.]
Thank you! Thank you! I made it thirty-seven years ago, ladies and gentlemen. I was big in the nineties. Remember the nineties? Weren’t they great? Before streaming! VHS was making money hand over fist for everybody.
Anyway, we were shooting “Forrest Gump” in Cherokee Square, in Savannah, Georgia. We’re on the world-famous park bench. We’ve got various props. There was so much dialogue. And I was so exhausted because we had shot twenty-seven days straight. Remember how Forrest ran across the country? Well, there’s only one way to get those scenes, in those days. You had to fly to the goddam place, put on the costume, run for an hour and a half, then go back, get on the plane, and then fly to, say, New Hampshire, and do it all over again. So I’m exhausted. I don’t know what’s going on. The scenes on the park bench have oceans of dialogue, and we shot them in a day and a half. And I said to Bob––the director, Robert Zemeckis––“Bob, my head is fragile, frazzled. We’re doing all these scenarios with different people, and every one of them has a page and a half of dialogue. I will never be able to keep this in my head.”
“Oh, don’t worry, Tom. We’ll shoot it like ‘I Love Lucy.’ We’ll have four cameras. We’ll put the words up on cards if you need it. You can just read ’em.”
I said, “Oh, great, thank you. Let’s make this an even more artificial atmosphere!”
Now, the good news is, we got it all down pretty fast. But at one point I say, “Hey, Bob, I got a question for you.”
“What, Tom?”
“Is anybody going to care about this movie? This guy sitting on a bench, in these goofy shoes, in this cuckoo suit, with a suitcase full of ‘Curious George’ books? Are we doing anything here that is going to make any sense to anybody?”
And Bob said, “It’s a minefield, Tom! It’s a goddam minefield. We may be sowing the seeds of our own destruction. Any footstep we take could be a Bouncing Betty that’ll blow our nuts right off.”
And so Bob Zemeckis, God bless him—I’ve worked with him more than once—landed on the absolute truth of anybody who has gone forward and said, We are going to commit something to film today. You do not know if it is going to work out. You can only have faith.
So you worked on “Bonfire of the Vanities,” which didn’t succeed, and you worked on “Saving Private Ryan,” which did. Don’t you know if they’re going to be any good while you’re in the middle of making them?
No. There’s no way to tell, because the process is so slow. And so specific. You can only have faith and hope—and what’s bigger than faith and hope? You have to trust the entire process to collaborators who you hope are working at the absolute top of their game farther down the line.
You write in the book, and I’ve heard you say elsewhere, that you take enormous offense at the notion of anybody hating a movie.
Oh, yeah!
Why is that?
O.K., let’s admit this: We all have seen movies that we hate. I have been in some movies that I hate. You have seen some of my movies and you hate them. Here are the five points of the Rubicon that are crossed by anybody who makes movies.
The first Rubicon you cross is saying yes to the film. Your fate is sealed. You are going to be in that movie.
The second Rubicon is when you actually see the movie that you made. It either works and is the movie you wanted to make, or it does not work and it’s not the movie you wanted to make.
That has nothing to do with Rubicon No. 3, the critical reaction to it—which is a version of the vox populi. Someone is going to say, “I hated it.” Other people can say, “I think it’s brilliant.” Somewhere in between the two is what the movie actually is.
The fourth Rubicon is the commercial performance of the film. Because, if it does not make money, your career will be toast sooner than you want it to be. That’s just the fact. That’s the business.
The fifth Rubicon is time. Where that movie lands twenty years after the fact. What happens when people look at it, perhaps by accident. And a great example of this is “It’s a Wonderful Life,” which was made [in 1946] and disappeared for the better part of, I’m going to say, twenty years, locked up in a rights issue. It wasn’t even viewed at the time as being a commercial hit. Enough people liked it, so it was nominated for Best Picture. [The film only became a universally admired Christmas classic after the copyright ran out in 1974 and it entered the public domain, becoming a television constant.]
For me, it happened on a movie that I wrote and directed called “That Thing You Do!” I loved making that movie. I loved writing it, I loved being with it. I love all the people in it. When it came out, it was completely dismissed by the first wave of vox populi. It didn’t do great business. It hung around for a while, was viewed as being some sort of odd, kinda quasi-ripoff of nine other different movies and a nice little stroll down memory lane. Now the same exact publications that dismissed it in their initial review called it “Tom Hanks’s cult classic, ‘That Thing You Do!’ ” So now it’s a cult classic. What was the difference between those two things? The answer is time.
How is it different to work with a director like Nora Ephron, for example, as opposed to Steven Spielberg?
Steven Spielberg has been thinking in cinematic terms since he was eight years old. And you can look at his films, what he did when he was a kid, and you can see his DNA all over them to this day. Nora Ephron was a journalist. She wrote her screenplays from a journalistic point of view.
What does that mean? Writing a screenplay from “a journalistic point of view”?
There is a type of authenticity to the dialogue that is very, very, very particular. It scans in a different way. It’s not necessarily human behavior. It’s a give-and-take between the characters that propels the story. Not unlike a journalist. She also rehearsed her movies as specifically as she wrote them. A lot of her scenes go on for eleven, fifteen, seventeen pages sometimes. We rehearsed them in real time so that, by the time we got to the set, we knew that it would be broken up into eight different sort of setups throughout the geography of an apartment or a restaurant or what have you. You land on the same specificity then, when you’re shooting them, as you did when you rehearsed it. And Nora, she was tough. She would say, “Hmm, I know what you want to do with that moment, but I hate it. And so, therefore, let’s not do it that way.”
I was very cranky, particularly when I first met her to do “Sleepless in Seattle,” because I was really big and, you know, I had some hits under my belt. We got together, and we were going to make this movie about a guy and a kid and a la di da di da—“Sleepless in Seattle.” And she was very intimidating, right off the bat. When we were working on the rehearsals for it, I realized that one of the things that was driving me nuts about the project is that Nora and Delia Ephron, who helped on the screenplay, are—
Sisters.
Sisters, but they are also mothers. It was a movie about a father. And I said, “You guys are the wrong gender to understand what’s going on in this scene between me and my son.”
A remark like that always goes well.
And she loved it. “Oh, Tom, tell me more.” And the argument I had was “You have written a scene in which a father is undone by the fact that his son is upset about him going out with a woman.” Oh, no. I said, “There is not a father on the planet Earth who is gonna give a rat’s ass what his son thinks about him going out with a woman. Because you know what that father wants to do? He wants to get laid. And that’s what’s missing from your little gender-ish scene that you wrote.” And she said, “Well, then, why don’t you say that?” That was a very empowering moment. She would often say this: “Well, when you’re right, you’re right.”
Later on, I said, “It was great that you let that happen, in the cumulative, collaborative process of making a movie.” And she said, “Well, you wrote that.” I said, “No, Nora Ephron, I did not write that. I complained at you in rehearsal, and you decided to put it into the movie.” But she said, “That’s what writing is.” I said, “Writing is sitting down and complaining on paper? That’s what writing is?” She says, “Mmm, yeah.”
You had a stronger role in conceiving the idea for “Cast Away.”
I had read that huge jumbo jets filled with nothing but envelopes and packages flew across the Pacific Ocean twice a day, going to Australia and back. Four people fly this plane? That’s either the greatest gig in the world or the worst gig you could possibly have as a pilot. Turns out it’s a really good gig, because they don’t have to put up with jerks like us, the passengers. And I thought, What happens if one of those planes goes down?
I wanted to reduce a guy down to someone who was not going to survive unless he had the five elements necessary for human life: food, water, fire, shelter, and company. We worked on “Cast Away” for eight years before we ended up making the movie. That’s how long it takes. Bob [Zemeckis] had this idea, which was “You know”—this goes into how you make a movie—“are we really gonna go down to, like, Fiji, and put you in a fat suit, and then take the fat suit away, and stick a wig on you, and glue a beard on? That stuff won’t even stay on your face down in that humidity and with all that salt water. If we were really bold, you know what we’d do?”
“What would we do, Bob?”
“You’d get really fat, and we’d go shoot the first half of the movie. Then we’d take a year off and you’d lose all that weight and we’ll shoot the second half of the movie.”
And that’s what we did. And it would be virtually impossible to do now. You could probably do it through C.G.I.
We also had a screenplay that was loaded with dialogue, in which I, as Chuck Noland, would have lines like this: “Well, I am all alone on this island. Look at me, all by myself. Holy cow, there is no one on this island to talk to except me. I better find a source of food and water. Shelter would be nice, too. And how in the world am I gonna make fire?” We had all this dialogue in it, and, when we got down there, we shot one scene where I said something like “Hmm, what am I going to do now?” I said something like that to myself, and I turned to Bob and said, “Bob, I don’t think there should be a word of dialogue out of Chuck.” And he said, “I don’t think so, either.”
I said, “The only time I should talk is when I think somebody is there—‘Who’s there?’ ” And the other one is if I see, if I think someone is out there: “Help!” And I end up talking to Wilson, the volleyball.
In Keith Richards’s autobiography, he says at a certain point, as a public person, you’re dragging around your own persona like a ball and chain. Practically every time there’s a feature story about you, you’re compared to Jimmy Stewart. How does a persona work for an actor? Is there one? Are you aware of it?
There’s nothing you can do about it at all, except never ever, ever, ever talk to the press. Honestly, think about it. There are some artists out there—some filmmakers, some actors—you don’t know anything about them, because they do not go off and promote their movies or open themselves up in any manner. Maybe it affects their ability to work; maybe it doesn’t. But the truth is, no matter who you are, you carry your countenance with you into every single job you do. So much so that now the first two paragraphs of any review of any of my movies are actually about all the other movies I’ve ever made. The last movie I did was “A Man Called Otto.” I’m going to say nine reviews out of ten said, “Giving up his ‘Forrest Gump’ nice-guy persona,” or “Not unlike Jim Lovell, in ‘Apollo 13,’ Tom Hanks’s ‘Otto’ blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.”
We were talking about this backstage a little bit: All arts have highs and lows. Epic poetry, drama, the novel, whatever it might be. And I said to you, my wife and I were looking for a movie to go to the other night, and we couldn’t find one. I mean, revival houses aside. Superhero movies especially aside. It’s not as if I was looking to be hypercritical. I just wanted to go to a movie on Saturday night. And you agreed with this quandary. Where are we in movies now?
As far as our choices of what to invest in for our own entertainment, the options are myriad. If you want to spend time looking at something that is more or less curated by somebody else for your enjoyment, you can start with YouTube and watch any damn thing you want. I mean, I’ve gone down the YouTube hole just looking at commercials from the nineteen-fifties. “What’d you do last night?” “For eight hours, I watched commercials from the fifties and sixties, and I remembered every fucking one.” You can be entertained till the cows come home––television, streaming services, what have you. You can literally watch anything you want that is available at any time.
What we’re really talking about here is the decision that we all make: to be in a room at 7:15 with a bunch of strangers who have made the same decision to go and be in that room along with us. I’m not Cassandra here. And I’m not clairvoyant. But the number of movies that we’re going to get to choose to go and see are going to be fewer, as far as going to that room full of strangers and paying money and being there at 7:15. But the option to be enthralled by somebody’s storytelling is going to be—we have an infinite number of options at our fingertips, and we will land on them individually.
Be honest: How many times have you—and maybe you alone, or you and your family—said, “Hey, let’s watch something tonight”? Great, you pick up the remote and it takes you forever to agree on what you’re going to watch on Apple or Netflix or Hulu or Amazon Prime. “Oh, no, not that. No, not that. No, not that.” So forty-five minutes later you have decided, by way of bitter compromise, what you are going to watch—which is not what you really want to watch, but you’re going to have to go along with it because three of the rotten members of your family have voted in favor of this thing and you’re on the losing side. You turn down the lights. You enter your fucking password. And the code comes along and it asks for your billing address. And someone has to go through their phone, come up with a billing address. Because why did they reboot this? Who rebooted it? So there’s another fifteen minutes that are lost to the process. Now you’re finally ready to start the movie that you have all “agreed” to watch. And you think, At last, let’s watch the movie. Seventeen minutes into it, you think, I have no investment in this movie whatsoever. I don’t like this movie. I’m going to leave the room and not bother watching the rest of this movie. Right? How many times?
That doesn’t happen if you’ve been in a room full of strangers at 7:15. You’re hugely invested in it. All of your sinews, all of your money, all of your time and intent you have mapped out in your life says, I’m going to be in this cinema. And that option is not going to go away. And, if you’re lucky, you will be held in its thrall.
We have some questions from the audience. This is great: Did you do your own swimming in “Splash”?
Oh, God, yeah. Absolutely. “Splash” is the first motion picture I really made. I made a low-budget slasher movie on Staten Island once, but this is the first thing I’d done on one camera, save for an episode of “The Love Boat,” in 1980. I got that job because everybody turned it down. All the A-list movie stars—
Name names. Who turned it down?
Who was an A-list movie star in 1983? Dudley Moore. Warren Beatty. A ton of people. Nobody wanted to make a movie with Opie Cunningham about a mermaid for Walt Disney, because their previous hit was “Gus,” the field-goal-kicking mule. Nobody wanted to make this movie. So I had a meeting with Ron Howard. He said, “Listen, you got the job. You’re perfect.”
And I said, “You’re kidding me!”
He said, “No, but I need you to do a test with Daryl Hannah.”
“Well, I’ll do the test. Can I get fired if I do this test? Or, you know, like—”
“No, no, no, but you gotta go out to this scuba-diving school and learn how to scuba dive.”
I said, “Are you kidding me? You’re going to pay me to learn how to scuba dive?” So my job, as an actor in a movie, consisted of this: I’m in the Bahamas—like some combination of James Bond and the Beatles, for crying out loud. And I leave the hotel at 6:45 in a Speedo and a T-shirt. I walk down to the beach and get in a speedboat that takes me out to the camera barge, [and] then we’re towed out two miles away from the island. And we shoot all the stuff with me swimming in the ocean. Is this not the greatest freaking job on the planet Earth?
We were shooting in thirty feet of water in the Bahamas. And, because we’re all down there, it takes . . . you cannot go up to the surface and have a conversation. It has to be all planned before you go out there. Daryl is in her incredibly uncomfortable mermaid tail. She’s connected to a cable so she can move the thing. She and I are supposed to look at each other and fall in love. I do not have a mask on. You cannot see anything without a mask on. I see this blurry shape of orange and blond, which is Daryl. And I’m supposed to be underwater with a look of awe and love on my face. But actually I’m quite confused and scared for my life, because I have no oxygen tanks on, a safety diver is just out of camera, and I literally have twenty-pound weights in the pockets of my pants to hold me down on the bottom of the sea. So I am this far away from making headlines as a tragic moviemaking death in the Bahamas. “Tom ‘Bosom Buddy’ Hanks Tragically Lost in Unfortunate Moviemaking Accident.” Ron swims by in his scuba outfit and signals over to me to come. Two guys then dragged me over to what we called the underwater sound booth, which was a dome of plastic weighted on the bottom of the sea floor with enough air pumped into it. So there was about this much of an air pocket, twenty-five feet under the surface of the sea. So I’m in an air pocket. And Ron Howard’s head pops up. And he’s got his regulator in his mouth and his mask, and he pulls it back out of his mouth and says, “Try to be more in love with her!” Then he swims back away.
You know what I did? I went out there and I tried to be more in love with her. That was what my job was. And, if you look at that moment in the movie, you see a guy in his street clothes falling in love with a beautiful mermaid, and they swim off to Mermaid Land together at the end of it. And you buy every moment of it, because that’s the contract we as individuals have with the movie that we are seeing.
Writing is horrible. You lock yourself in a room, and you’re all by yourself. And if you are lucky—if you are lucky—at the end of the day, there might be a page or two. And it’s inevitably bad. And people become very—I mean, I work with writers all day long. They get irritable. They’re a disagreeable group. It’s really hard. Why put yourself through this?
Well, first of all: I don’t have the slightest fucking idea. I don’t think I became any sort of serious writer with a sense of drive and curiosity that is necessary in order to do this, except for somewhere in the last sixteen years. Part of it is because there is nothing better for the soul—and I don’t think there’s anything better for the artistic reach—than to be involved in something that scares the living daylights out of you, in which you cannot come into a job and say, “I know exactly what I want to do here. Stay outta my way, everybody, because I am going to blow you away. Can someone cover my bald spot for me, please?”
How do you view this quandary that we all face, whether in work or life or love or family or just in our brief time on this planet: the business of getting older?
I will tell you that, no matter where you are in your arc, no matter where you are as far as your age goes, your body, your wherewithal, you still get to come back to this empirical truth: you start at the beginning of whatever story you’re telling, and you just work your way through it. I am sixty-six years old. I got my first job as an actor when I was twenty, at the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival, in Cleveland, Ohio. And the requirements then were the same exact ones now: Learn the lines. Start at the beginning. Tell the whole story till you get to the end. ♦
