Shumita Basu: Hi, Tom. It's really nice to meet you.
Tom Hanks: Nice to meet you over the glories of Zoom.
Basu: I'm looking forward to talking about your book, which I read, I want you to know, I read and really enjoyed.
Hanks: [LAUGHS] Isn't it funny how that you have to make that announcement sometimes? Hey, listen, I'm gonna talk to you about your movie, which I saw.
[BASU LAUGHS]
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Basu, Narrating: This is "In Conversation," from Apple News. I'm Shumita Basu. Today, Tom Hanks on what it takes to make a movie.
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Basu, Narrating: Tom Hanks has been making movies for almost 50 years. But if you ask him, he's not the star, or at least not the only star, of the show.
Hanks: The making of the movie is not about some individual vision. It's not even about the laser-like attention of the director or the screenwriter or anybody in it. That movie is made by an awful lot of people who, using their expertise and their taste and their practiced talents, solve one problem after another.
Basu, Narrating: This is the foundational idea behind Tom Hanks' debut novel called "The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece." It tells the fictional-but-based-on-some truth story of how a multimillion-dollar superhero movie gets made, literally every part of it. The comic book that inspires the movie. The casting of its stars. The grueling days on set.
I caught up with Tom before SAG-AFTRA, the union that represents actors, decided to strike, joining the writers union. And although we didn't talk about the strikes in our conversation, his book is a good reminder, in this moment when Hollywood is in such a state of crisis, about what it takes to make the entertainment many of us take for granted. Tom writes in rich, real detail about the people behind every step.
Hanks: When I had the opportunity to say, "Okay, well, would you like to write a novel?" Because I had written a collection of short stories. And I said, "Of course I wanna write a novel." [CHUCKLES] "What should it be about?" And my editor Peter Gather says, "Well, you have a job that's people would love to hear more about." I said, "I'm not interested in writing something about, oh and here's how this movie got made." But as soon as I said that, I said, "But I would like to write about the people that I make movies with because they are actually how movies are made."
Basu, Narrating: This book is jam-packed with character studies. It's the story of the many, many people who never appear on screen except for the rolling credits. It's a love letter to the human power that makes movies happen. And it's Tom Hanks' way of telling us in the making of a movie, nobody's story is a detour.
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Hanks: There's an adage, [CHUCKLES] there's a truth, and one of the characters talked about it. Inez Gonzalez Cruz, who is new to the motion picture business. She's asked, "Who do you think has the most important job in the making of a movie?" And she says, rightly, "Everybody at some point." You'd be amazed when you're making a movie how the day shooting cannot go on save for one thing. Now there's a generator that powers the lights and all the electricity on the base camp. If that generator goes down, you don't shoot that day.
Basu: Sure, yeah.
Hanks: If there's a prop that does not work or that is missing, that can't happen, that means that scene is delayed that much time. I was once making a movie in an actual location in which a payphone kept ringing during one of the shots. And every time it rang, we lost everything that we were doing, and we couldn't do anything…
[BASU CHUCKLES]
Hanks: …until the prop guy, who had a pair of wire cutters, just reached over and snapped the wires off on the payphone that was on the wall. And so, you know what that guy did that day? He solved a problem, and we kept the movie going.
Basu: Yeah.
Hanks: There was one time, this has happened a couple of times. Once certainly I was on a truck, and I was talking to one of the old guys that had been on the movie for a long time and I was talking to him about how in the world he got started with it and he got in the business. He talked about how he got this job offer a long time ago from the da, da, da, da. And he walked me through his career, and I said, "Well, what was your first paying job?" He said, "My first paying job." And he said this, he says, "Well, I had just got back from Vietnam." I said, "Had you been drafted?" And he said, "Yeah." And I just thought, here's a guy now who is finding me the prop I need in order to make this rather perhaps silly movie. And he starts off the story of his career saying, "Well, I'd just gotten back from Vietnam." And that's the nature of everybody that you work with. And it ends up being a window into everybody's common lives that have nothing to do with the glamor or the excitement or the luck, or the serendipity or the achievement of making a movie.
Basu: You know, I have to say the specificity of so many of these stories and characters makes me wonder how much is based on real life experience for you?
Hanks: Everything in here.
Basu: Everything.
Hanks: I'm gonna say, yeah. I've either witnessed myself or I've heard stories of from reliable sources, or I've actually caused myself or I've been the source of it. There's an actor who gets let go and everybody says, "Who's that based on?" I said, "Everything that guy says is something that I've said at some point. Everything that he wants. Every idea he's had is some version of…"
Basu: Really? And just to be clear for a listener, this is the really egotistical, braggy main lead.
Hanks: Filled with hubris and ego and his own sense of self-importance. And I will tell you that there's a time in, certainly in my career, and plenty of others, where I'd worked a lot, I'd made a lot of movies, I thought I knew what it was. And I wanted to start throwing my, quote… Everybody was saying, "Well, here, you can get whatever you want. Anything you want." And so, you start trying to throw your weight around because you make this huge, huge, huge mistake. And that mistake is you can't be replaced. That you can cause problems. That you can cause problems as opposed to solving. And a lesson that I learned from a long time ago and is that it's my stock answer to, you know, what is required, is you have to show up on time. Because if you're late, you do not get a shot. And if you do not get a shot, that means you don't have a part of the movie. It's like you go up on with a deck with only 51 cards and you can't play any game with a deck with 51 cards. You have to know the text. And by text, I mean certainly your dialogue, your lines, but even if you don't have any lines, you need to know what emotional beat, what dramatic puzzle piece is made of that scene that you're shooting today. You need to know how it fits into the grand scheme of things.
Basu: Mmm.
Hanks: And the last thing is, is you have to have an idea in your head that is not in the script, that has not been given to you by somebody else. That is you studying it through saying, "Oh," It can be something as silly as I'm going to play this scene as though I have a big wad of pocket change.
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Hanks: And you'll go to the prop guy. And you'll say, "Hey, you got a bunch of quarters and nickels? I just want to have it in my pocket for this." And you can just be standing in a scene and what you do is you just kind of put your hand in your pocket and you start playing around with the coins in there. And it doesn't say that in the script. But what it does is it adds a sense of physicality to the scene that you would not have, and no one asked for it. So you have to come to the entire project with ideas in your pocket that all you do is show people. And by the way, they don't always work and off they go. And you know, someone will say, "Hey, you can't do that because we keep hearing the clicking of the coins over the track." So, okay, great.
Basu: Right, right.
Hanks: And that's what is required. And that character who is filled with ego and hubris and demands is contrary to all those things. He is late. He does not know the text. He's not even agreeing about what the movie is about. He just took it because he thinks he's the cock of the walk at that point. And they will have to do what he says. And guess what? Not the case. Not the case. There's famous, famous stories of replacements that have happened long after they would think that they would be safe to it. In the book, there is a number of people that I've worked with who always start making movies on a Wednesday because by you time you get to Friday, you find out the people who are causing problems and not solving them, and you've replaced them and you have somebody else come in on Monday. There's a section of the book that is called the Friday Night Massacre. And I have…
Basu: Yeah. I was wondering how much that was real. [CHUCKLES] So that's based on real experience?
Hanks: It's very real. Extremely real. And so I have, at some times, waited for the phone call about the results of the Friday Night Massacre, and there's been other times I've been in the room for the Friday night. Now, it doesn't happen on every movie, but there are sometimes you just get together, okay, we've shot three days. We know what the footage is, we know if we've made our days or not. We know who's in, out. Is there anybody who is causing more problems than they are solving? And if the answer is yes, you have a very, very serious conversation, and sometimes it's someone who's having a trouble in their life and they can't work to a hundred percent. Other times it's people that just don't get it, that aren't really engaged the way you need them to be engaged and off they go.
Basu: Yeah. It is so surprising to hear that any element of that really terrible egotistical character is based on some truth that you have actually…
Hanks: Well, I've never carried it to that. I would like to… I'd like to hope I didn't carry it to that extreme, but I've had moments…
Basu: [CHUCKLES] Yeah, because he's pretty awful.
Hanks: Oh, yeah. Yeah. He's a jerk. And there's other words you could use for jerks. I will tell you the closest I came to it once was I just really… I got mad, as a matter of fact, this was early on in my career. It's a sunny day. Why can't I wear sunglasses? Why can't I be cool and wear sunglasses? They have sunglasses in "Cool Hand Luke." Sunglasses are a part of living. Why in the world can I not wear…? Oh, and it just came down to it. It was like some combination of the DP said, "Well then we'll lose your eyes." And really, really what it came down to is my not understanding that I don't think your character can wear sunglasses, man, because he's not a sunglasses kind of guy.
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Hanks: And I finally had to acquiesce. Now, I didn't cost the, you know, it didn't take forever in order to do that. But there's been plenty of times when you end up going back and forth for fighting for the quality and the vision of it, and then to the point of you're actually causing a problem as opposed to solving it. But it happens.
Basu: Right. Well, that sounds like a minor version of what we see play out in the book at some point. But I mean, I'm pretty sure you already know this, but you, Tom Hanks are probably one of the longest running people considered America's sweethearts. You have an extremely good reputation as being a good person.
Hanks: I show up on time and I know the text and I have an idea. Yeah.
Basu: It sounds like you've kind of gotten it down to a list of things that you know you need to hold yourself to, but seeing this play out in the book where this egomaniac character gets consequences, has to face consequences is not always something that you see happen in real life. And I just wonder how you personally have decided to navigate this in this industry.
Hanks: Well, by saying no, which is a really hard thing to say. By saying no to that thing that you don't want to do, even though there's a lot of reasons that you should do it.
Basu: Hmm. What do you mean by that?
Hanks: Saying yes is a bunt. Saying yes, "Oh man, I'd love this material. I'd love to work with these people. And I can already imagine some of what this is. So yes, I'm in." That can happen in a nanosecond. No can be, "Well, the story is interesting. I think I know what I would like to do with it. The filmmakers have made some good films and I like this one, I like that one. They're gonna pay me a dump truck load of money in order to do it. I'll get to go to a place that sounds pretty glamorous." But the no has to come about because despite everything, it is not a theme that I wish to explore, that I don't think it's an artistic examination of some part of the human condition. And I'm not saying I always say, no, you can go look over my checkered career. And there's all sorts of stuff that I thought, "Oh no, I know what to do with this," and I didn't. Or "I know the movie that we're gonna make here." And guess what? It wasn't the same movie that everybody else was making. That happens.
Basu: Hmm. Mm.
Hanks: But I think that particularly… Look, I've been working professionally since I was 20. All right. I don't know how that happened, but nonetheless, and I've been on film since I was 24. And I have learned that the difference between showing up and saying, let's go. Let's go, means I'm gonna come up with stuff. So watch me. And tell me to do something else or just let me go and as long as I'm doing what you want, we're fine. So I think I have a work ethic that is based on we're all in this together. We're all making the same movie. How can I help you? You know, the relationship, a lot of time between an actor and a director is… Penny Marshall, when we were first working on "Big," and I made two movies with Penny, that and "League of Their Own." At first she drove me nuts because it just seems she was, I said, "Penny, this is like movie making by attrition. We just keep shooting and shooting and you have another idea and we shoot that and you do another thing and all these angles and it's takin' forever." I said, "I mean, what do you want?" And she said, "I don't know what I want, Tom. But I'm gonna be sitting in an editing room eight months from now, and I'm gonna need a closeup of you doing this. And if I don't shoot it today, I'm not gonna have it."
Basu: Right, right.
Hanks: And I literally, I said, "Oh. So you need me to solve that problem for…" You know, it's just a lesson that you come around. So I would say that, you know, I think I have a good, solid work ethic that comes from the fact that I came out of repertory theater and when I was doing three seasons of classical Shakespeare repertory, Dan Sullivan, the director that we had, he yelled at us one day. He said, "You people are lazy, you're hot, you're tired. You're hungover from the party from the night before and you all need to show up on time, know the text and have an idea." He yelled at us and I was sitting there in a bit of a fog, and I was young enough to realize that. "Oh shit. That is our job, isn't it?" [CHUCKLES] It's not just to get up on stage and be cool. The job is actually come and contribute to the problem-solving process.
Basu: And it's not just solving your problems but seeing everyone's problem as the collective thing to be solving.
Hanks: Oh. Hello. Hello. This is a moment like, stop moving around back there. It's not your scene. "Well, I thought I would do this." It's not your scene, and that's not what the scene is about. So the answer is no. The other side of it too is this. This is a bad example of it, but hey, "Cross to the window and look out." And you say, "Why?" "Come up with something." I said, "Well, I don't understand why I would, I don't think I would cross." That is not allowed in my book. A director says, "Hey, cross to the window." I said, "Watch this." And then I'll cross to the window. And if someone says, "Why are you crossing to the window in that scene," I say, "Because I just realized I left the window down in my car outside, and I think that my camera's sitting on the passenger seat. I just wanna make sure no one's breaking into it." Now, that's not part of it, but I got it. You know.
Basu: I've come up with a reason. Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Hanks: That's the reason. And let's just say the character of O.K. Bailey in the book, he doesn't do that.
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Hanks: And so he doesn't survive the Friday Night Massacre.
Basu: Right. I should say that this book is full of footnotes sometimes explaining industry terms, but often just adding even more exposition or detail behind a character. And I laughed when I got to the very last page of this book. It is the "About the Author" page. And there is a footnote there about you, Tom Hanks, and it says, I'm gonna actually just read it, "For an idea of the depth of his career, consider that the New York City bank where he once was down to his last 27 dollars is now a Bubba Gump Shrimp Company restaurant."
Hanks: Mm-hm.
Basu: What did you wanna say about yourself with that footnote?
Hanks: I think that there's a shorthand for a guy with a career like mine. It's, you know, look, it's like, two time academy, this, that, you know, all the other stuff, beloved, that goes on and on and on that in some ways makes it all look predestined. Anybody's career somehow is just a simple matter of they decided to discover penicillin and they did, or they discovered to fly around the world solo and they did. There's a lot that goes into it. And that anecdote, number one, is true. But it's the yin and the yang of, I think, time travel. Because there was a day when I was standing in the Chemical Bank there at 44th and Broadway and I was married and I had a kid, and I didn't know how I was gonna pay my rent, and I didn't know how I was gonna be able to afford groceries because I was waiting for a big check to come in that was way overdue. And I was scared, and I was petrified and I was young and I was 20 years old, maybe 21 years old. And you flash forward and the same exact space is now named after a movie that I was in and everybody knows it. So that is, if I'm going to put down a thing that, here's a note about the author, if I get to be in charge of that, I'm going to put that anecdote in here because if you go back and look at all of the career, all of the stories of the people that are in the book, they have the same version of that. Kenny Sheprock, who was based on a makeup man that I knew, he slept in his car in Los Angeles for a long time. Directors that I know that started off literally hanging wallpaper in sets as what they call a set decoration. They end up sleeping on the floor of their friends when they first came to Los Angeles, just because they were trying to get into show business. Any woman, they have all had to put up with any kind of accounts of scary sexual harassment moments. And so I wanted, I wanted that little bit to be a reference to. It's a massive dose of serendipity of how we anybody ended up having the opportunity to do what they do for a living. And there's no small amount of moments of great fear and sacrifice and wondering if you're gonna be able to cross the Rubicon and actually get into the business or just always stay on the other side as some version of didn't happen.
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Basu: Well, Tom Hanks, I'm very glad that all the unexpected turns in your career have led you to writing fiction and writing this book. So thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me about it. I really appreciate it.
Hanks: Thank you. I really enjoyed talking to you. Thank you.
Basu, Narrating: You can find Tom Hanks' book, "The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece," on Apple Books. We'll link to it for you on our show notes page. And if you're enjoying this show, "Apple News: In Conversation," please don't forget to rate, review, and follow us on Apple Podcasts.
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