by Paul Fischer
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Cranky Critic® Star Talk with Tom Hanks |
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Cranky Critic:
Well here we go again. Tom Hanks. Meg Ryan. Nora Ephron all
reteamed for another romantic comedy . . .
Tom Hanks: Well, you don't really treat it like a romantic comedy.
Essentially, romantic comedies mean somebody works a lot longer on my
hair than they usually do. The rest of it is you show up and Nora Ephron
works. Working on a movie with Nora is kind of like going to a dinner
party of hers. There's a lot of great conversation. There's a certain
amount of screwing around but, by and large, you wind up talking about
what Nora dictates you're going to wind up talking about. The screenplay
of You've Got Mail is just like people talking.
The fact that we're in Manhattan and in real restaurants and coffee houses
made this thing almost as though I wasn't even at work. There was a very
small level of fakeness to it -- my hair rarely looks as good as it does
in real life, as you can probably tell.
Cranky
Critic: Is it easier to shoot in New York than, say, in Hollywood?
Tom Hanks: New York is a pretty jaded town when it comes to such
things. Actually, I think they're still reeling from The Mirror
Has Two Faces up on the Upper West Side. As soon as they
see trucks, they're afraid that Barbra Streisand's back making another
movie. (Oh, she's gonna love that, isn't she?) New Yorkers take it all
in stride, y'know, "Oh look Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan are eating hot
dogs in Gray's Papaya. How interesting."
Cranky
Critic: When The Shop Around The Corner, the
film on which You've Got Mail is based, was
made back in the black and white days, pen pals were the vogue and computers
were the stuff of pulp sci-fi magazines. Now that we've modernized, how
active are you on line?
Tom Hanks: I don't have time. I'm in my child rearing years here.
Other than bang out a couple of e-mails I just don't have time. We use
it a lot at the office, research people go off and come back with 60 pages
of history on the brown shoe.
Cranky
Critic: Have you ever done the chat room bit?
Tom Hanks: No, not really. I went in a chat room once, for fans
of 2001: A Space Odyssey. There was nobody
in the room.
Cranky
Critic: Do you think the kind of story that plays out in You've
Got Mail is possible for real thirtysomethings, like the
characters you and Meg play?
Tom Hanks: I think anybody can be enraptured in some sort of anonymous
relationship with somebody. Obviously a chat room is the perfect thing.
I wouldn't be surprised if there were hundreds of thousands of people
who could say the same thing that happened in the movie. There's something
thrilling about the power of being anonymous. People want to feel as if
they're special and loved and I think they respond to it wherever they
get it, even if it's somebody with a 6 digit identifying number typing
"Hey! You sound pretty great!"
Cranky
Critic: But you don't have that anonymity anymore.
Tom Hanks: Oh gee, poor movie star. I used to go to baseball games
alone, and just sit there and keep score. I can't do that now. There's
a lot of stuff that I can't do with my family. Sometimes being a movie
star in a public place is kind of like being the man with the chicken
on his head, hard to hide the fact that you have a chicken on your head
and everyone is looking at you. By and large, I've had a long time to
get used to it. Usually, when I'm in a hotel room, I strip down naked
and walk around naked on the patio, which is as close as I can get to
a feeling of anonymity and power. The pictures will be on the Internet
in another 45 minutes [grins]
Cranky
Critic: Is there pressure to do movies with Meg Ryan
because the team seems to work so well?
Tom Hanks: No, none at all. You kind of hope that you'll be able
to work with people that you like again. In the course of the history
of the movies there's an awful lot of creative teams that periodically
got together. Sometimes they're men, sometimes they're women. With Meg,
this is the 3rd movie I've made with her and we pick up where
we left off.
Cranky Critic:
What is it about Meg Ryan . . .
Tom Hanks: Meg is very smart. I always feel as if I have to be on my toes
around Meg. Honestly I don't think we've ever talked about
the making of the movie, the three movies that we've made. We talk about things
like paradigm shifts and [laughing] quasi great questions of philosophy. The most
two actors can wrangle with. She is not driven, so it's not about power. She's
not a diva although quite frankly she has her professional responsibility very
much together. I think, in the best of all ways, we're absolute peers and absolute
friends but she's constantly challenging me by the nature of how she does her
job. It's unspoken. It's not a can you top this. The first day we worked together,
which was on Joe vs. The Volcano (she was the role of
Didi, the mousy brown haired girl that I worked with in the office) and I literally
didn't recognize her. I thought I was talking with an extra at the coffee table.
Then she says, "Nice chatting with you Mr. Hanks" and wanders away.
When she was walking away I could tell by the walk "that's Meg!" Truly,
I had talked to her for 15 minutes without knowing it. It wasn't flashy. It was
just doing it. By and large I think Meg gets really good work out of me because
if that. It's like a great tennis match. She's on the other side and she's a very
good player and she makes me better.
Cranky Critic:
Do you recognize a Tracey-Hepburn kind of connection in your role playing?
Tom Hanks: I wouldn't raise us up to the level of Tracey and Hepburn but
by and large yes. On this movie there's a scene towards the end when I'm wooing
her and trying to tweak the situation (oops, sorry). We would just start, improvising,
and eventually we'd be aware that the camera was running. We'd hear noise and
Nora say "Action" and we would keep the scene going with what it was.
That started from the very first moment we sat down. It wasn't an exercise. It
was just being. I've worked in really good tandems before and you really are quite
aware of when it's natural and when it's right. It is with Meg.
Cranky Critic:
Your characters discuss corporate strategy and battles in language right out of
The Godfather.
Tom Hanks: Yeah, and how does Nora come up with this? Not The
Godfather 3 mind you but certainly Godfathers Part 1 and
2. Everything you need to know you can learn from The
Godfather. The sad part is you have to kill your brother.
Cranky Critic:
OK then, at what point do you as a performer allow yourself comfort with the comparison
to Tracey and Hepburn
Tom Hanks: Never. These are the true icons. The Mount Olympus type legends
of the genre, of the art form. It would be tantamount to some artist saying "I
am the next Picasso." No way. That will be defined over a long period of
time but I can't lay claim to that.
Cranky Critic:
People say you have the potential to be the next Jimmy Stewart.
Tom Hanks: I'm sorry. It's lovely. I can't ask for better praise but I'm
not about to say, "I've made a couple of movies that were just as good as
It's a Wonderful Life." I can't do that. Our movies
are good and nice and of this generation but, as far as making the timeless classic
or even defining the give and take banter of the art form like Hepburn and Tracey
did, we haven't done anything like that yet.
Cranky Critic:
How far do you think you can stretch yourself as an actor as your career movies
on?
Tom Hanks: Well, not every movie is You've Got Mail.
I had one other movie out this year which I think was very different from
You've Got Mail and I hope I can be as continually different
from this to that.
Cranky Critic:
Oh boy did I misphrase that question. I'll get back to Saving Private
Ryan in a moment. You have maintained a good set of "nice guy"
roles. All positive, all sympathetic, even when you're pushing the boundaries
of what some people might consider immoral (as in Philadelphia).
Have you ever thought about doing a complete 180 a la the nice guy who is truly
an evil man.
Tom Hanks: I am always looking for something that's going to be different,
be demanding something new of me, no matter what the logic is. I'm making a movie
right now called The Green Mile which is about death row prison
guards in 1935. A very different kind of thing. But I'm never looking for change
merely for the sake of change. It's not I'm so tired of being a nice guy I want
to play someone who's venal and evil. I could play an evil bad guy tomorrow but
there'll be no connection to the part. I won't feel as if I'm examining anything
about the human condition. I'd just be playing the next Bond villain who wants
to take over the world. There's no future in that. There's nothing to be gained.
I look at movies in the past and think "My God if I had been able to do Bill
Macy's role in Fargo; that was most magnificent. And you
easily could see me playing that guy. So it's all a matter of the logic of the
piece when it comes around ‘cuz by and large playing the bad guy means you're
playing the antagonist in the standard antagonist-protagonist narrative and it's
just not that interesting to me. But when it comes along, I'd leap at the opportunity.
Cranky Critic:
There's been Oscar® talk about Saving Private Ryan.
Your role excepted, any thoughts?
Tom Hanks: Well, it's a good thing. It's a fine thing. Hope we make the
playoffs, we have a pretty good team. We had a pretty good season. We'll find
out. The whole trophy run season is so big and so long and so all encompassing;
it now starts in February and goes straight through to the following February
so we'll find out. It'd be a wonderful thing if the movie is singled out.
Cranky Critic:
How's your interaction been with WWII vets been since the release of the movie?
Tom Hanks: We get quite a lot of response. It's pretty much ongoing. It's
not so much to me, they're still talking about the movie. I think it was a bit
of a watershed.
Cranky Critic:
What do you do in your leisure time?
Tom Hanks: I go to the dentist. I've got three kids so by and large that
devours your leisure time. I wish I could say I parasail in the Indian Ocean but
I just haven't done that.
Cranky Critic: The kids can do that . . .
Tom Hanks: Not during the school year.
Cranky Critic:
Do you want to take time off and just hang with the family?
Tom Hanks: Yeah. The last year has been much more hectic than I was anticipating
and it does stack up on you. Between From the Earth To the Moon, Private
Ryan, You've Got Mail and The Green Mile, it's
been a long, long heads down working process and I do need to read for myself.
That question about reading? It's tough to read for your own enjoyment.
Cranky Critic:
What were your favorite books to read?
Tom Hanks: When I first started reading I read all the books of Leon
Uris, because they were kind of like these non fiction, full of turgid melodrama
at the same time. Chaim Potok, the man who wrote "My Name
is Asher Lev," I've read almost everything that he wrote. But growing up
there was the "Catcher in the Rye" thing. That's a big thing to go through.
I take credit for never having read that Tolkien trilogy. I read
"The Hobbit" in 5th grade, but got 20 pages into the Trilogy
and went "Yeah. Right. Frodo, Bilbo, Middle Earth. Yeah, thank you."
And I was done. So I never bothered with the rest of it. I'm actually taking claim
for not having read something, which I'm very proud of. I never read the trilogy.
Cranky Critic:
Last question: What's the status of Toy Story 2?
Tom Hanks: That's an ongoing thing. They call you every 5 months and say
can you come back into the studio to do some more recording. I think I‘ve
done 5 sessions of it.