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.