Talk Easy with Sam FragosoToday, we're revisiting our special conversation with actor Tom Hanks.
We begin by discussing his debut novel, The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece (5:58), his nomadic upbringing across California (13:28), and the Stanley Kubrick film that made him want to be an artist (19:40). Then, we talk about his early work at the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival (24:00) and moving to Los Angeles for his television debut in Bosom Buddies (28:30), before pivoting to dramatic roles in films like Philadelphia and Forrest Gump (32:44).
On the back-half, Hanks describes the transformative, eight-year process of making Cast Away (39:00), receiving an AFI Lifetime Achievement award for his work at age forty-six (41:35), the vital performances that followed (42:40), and his insatiable desire to reflect the human experience (46:23).
To close, Hanks reflects on the kinship he found with Yankee hall of famer Joe DiMaggio (59:08), his formative friendships with actor Holland Taylor (52:30) and the late Nora Ephron (54:40), and the Cecil B. DeMille story he hopes to keep telling (55:50).
Thoughts or future guest ideas? Email us at sf@talkeasypod.com.
Pushkin.
This is talk easy. I'm stand fragoso.
Welcome to the show.
Today we returned to my conversation with actor Tom Hanks. Tom and I sat down last summer around the release of his debut novel, The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece. The book is a love letter both to movies and the people that make them, a deep dive into the complicated process of creating a film, from scripting to casting, to production and beyond its the system Hanks is incredibly familiar with and wanted to celebrate after four decades in the industry with over eighty films and two Oscars to his name. If you're curious to check out his book, it's now available on paperback wherever you do your reading. As to hear in our conversation, after all these years, Tom's curiosity has not faded away. In fact, if anything, Hanks, who just turned sixty eight years old, is more interesting than ever in telling a range of stories that reflect how we move through this world. So today we walk through the makings of Tom Hanks, which begins with his nomadic upbringing in California, his early love of Stanley Kubrick films, his defining work in Philadelphia and Forrest Gump, the transformative process of making the iconic movie Castaway, and how the writing of the late Nora Ephron stays with him today. Tom Hanks has done a whole lot of interviews, as you can imagine, He's even been on a few different podcasts. But I have to say, if you've ever heard Tom Hanks on a show, I promise you today's conversation is going to sound a lot different. To his credit, Tom sat down and from moment one was open and vulnerable and gracious and frankly honest in his assessment of his life and his work. And so I want to thank Tom again for coming on the show and for being such a good sport about it all, and to you listening, whether it's your first time here or you're back for a re listen, thank you. I hope the summer is treating you well. We will be back this Sunday with a new episode featuring journalist now author Taffy brotheressir Ackner. If you haven't checked out her new book, Long Island Compromise or her first book, Fleischmann Is in Trouble, I cannot recommend those two books enough and so until then, I hope you enjoy this very special conversation with one and only Toms Tom Hanks. What a pleasure to have you here. How are you doing?
I'm all right, Sam, It's nice to be chatting with you. We're just kicking off the week long. Let's not work until after the fourth of July.
Am I your last work obligation?
This is not work?
Oh? Okay, good.
This is what we do all the time, you know. Down at the office, all we do is lean in each other's doorway and say, hey, I read this goofy thing yesterday. I saw this crazy nutty thing. I said, what do you think of that? Do you have any opinions of it? That's all we do. We don't do any real work at the office. We just compare opinions and then try to decide if it's going to be pizza Thursday or not.
You know, it's funny you say that, because I have read a funny goofy thing recently, and it is your debut novel, The making of another major motion picture masterpiece.
You got it, don't forget masterpiece.
In there, beautiful correction, it's called the making of another major motion picture masterpiece.
Yes, yes, keyword there, and that's.
What this conversation is going to be, by the way, just a masterpiece in the making. And I want to start here because, as I understand it, you are someone who wakes up every morning with quote stories in my head and questions that I want to ask. So as you woke up each day over these pretty turbulent past few years, yes, what were the stories and the questions that you wanted to work through in the novel?
There is nothing more interesting And there is no better way to turn a stranger into an acquaintance than asking them how they do what they do for a living and why even if people hate their jobs. That's hours of conversation there, man. And when I took on this task, I woke up over the last five or six years trying to figure out what the verbiage, what the more common language is going to be that would somehow communicate this odd way of making a living. So the stories that I wanted to tell when they were focused on writing the book are not that different from the ones I just wake up with in the generalists, How does anybody get by in this cuckoo world when it's just one damn thing after another, no matter what the theology is or whatever the formula is, they so rarely take into account the basic human condition of wanting to have significance in connection and sincerity in presence. And that's what I did, and I will say that's what I do in preparation to Talk Easy with Sama Fragoso.
You you saying the title of the show's it's very strange.
Can I just can I do you have those interstitials? Can you just run with this and just say in three two one you're listening to Talk Easy with Sam Pragoso. Can you just put that in every now and again?
We've never done it, but if we were to start doing it, it would be with you. Although I think you have to tag it at the end saying this is Tom Hanks. So maybe you want to do what you want to do another take of it.
Oh okay, I can do that. You want to do that?
I mean, I hate to direct to you, but okay, yeah, sure, ready and action.
You're listening to Talk Easy with Sam Pragoso. I'm Tom Hanks and we'll be right back.
Wow, I'm never gonna have to do a mid roll interstitial again. You just save me hours of time to the next year.
There you go.
You know the thing that you are hitting on about. There's nothing more interesting than talking to someone about how they do. What they do is basically the premise of this show. And so I want to sit with an early passage in the book okay, that explains how films are made. I have your book right here? Do you have a copy near you?
Hold one? Hold one second?
All right?
No, wait a minute here, wait a minute. Rather than having to go somewhere, how about if I just buy one right now? How about that? That would be kind of helpful, wouldn't it?
Does the money go right back to you?
Well, the problem is is yes it does.
But that's a problem.
I've spent it, so I've already spent it on the book. So one second, one second, and there you have it ready? All right? 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 the Friday. Imagine a jetplane, 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? There you have the making of a movie, at least as I saw it at the skunk Works. What that is is a description of how a civilian, meaning somebody who has never made a movie before, if they were to visit the set, they would honest to say what is going on? And the skunk Works, of course, is a reference to test facilities where a lot of experimental aircrafts were built and crashed, killing everybody that was on board and dashing the hopes of everybody had anything to do with the building of it.
As you were reading that, I was thinking about all the films you've made over the last forty years, and now it's a miracle that any of them turned out as well as they did.
It is I think.
All movies are some kind of miracle.
You know, it starts at the very beginning. I heard long ago that George Lucas said that all movies are binary. They are either double zeros and they do not work, or they're zero one and they work. And that divide begins at the inception of the movie in the brain of whoever first comes out with it. Hey, you know what I think would make a good movie. And then every step of the way that is always a coin toss between zero zero and zero one. Everything about it. The movie has made so many different times, and you start fresh every single day. I've been incredibly fortunate because you know, look, I'm going to say, I think I'm probably back, you know, in the high three hundreds.
That's the Hall of Famer.
Well, I you know, maybe the excuse me nothing, did I say three hundred? Excuse me? I'm going to take that back. I'm going to walk that back. I think I'm I'm betting like two ninety five, and if I have a good enough season, maybe I can get to get above three hundred. It's a huge alliance of collaborations that go into it, and that's why long term directors always work with the same people, because they can finish each other sentences. They know the type of stuff that they're going to get. As Bob Zumachis once said to me when we were sitting on a park bench in Savannah, Georgia, wondering if this story of this goofy guy was going to mean anything, and he just said, we're walking a minefield. Tom, We're walking a minefield. We have no idea if we're selling the seeds of our own destruction. And that sounds pessimistic, but actually it's not. It's actually incredibly pragmatic to understand that all you can do is follow your instincts and not walk away satisfied with what you have. I think a lot of the days ending up making a movie is you sort of want to upchuck behind the stage door because you don't think you really nailed it well.
I promise that we will get into all of that up chucking in a little bit. But you know, in both this novel of yours and your latest film, Asteroid City, there's a kind of nesting doll structure at play. And while the book and the movie are certainly different, they both seem bound by this love of storytelling, which I think, for you begins, like most things, at the beginning. You're born in Concord, California, nineteen fifty six. By the time you're five years old, your parents divorce and become what you've called pioneers of the dissolution laws for the state of California.
Marriage dissolution laws Yeah, my parents got divorced when one of them had to up and establish residency and renoted event which my dad did for six weeks and one night he showed up, and three out of the four Hanks kids were hustled up to go live in Nevada with a whole new group of very nice folks, as I recall, for the better part of three years after that.
Well, by the time you're ten years old, you've lived in ten houses in five different towns, with two sets of families. And it's around then that you begin taking trips to and from a small northern California town called red Bluff, where you'd visit your mother. Now, was it on that Greyhound bus in the window seat where you discovered this passion for storytelling?
I discovered the escape of being completely alone for a big chunk of finite time. A bus ride from Oakland to red Bluff took somewhere between four and five and a half hours. I might have had a couple of comic books. I might have had a pen and a notebook, but mostly what I had was a window seat that looked out on the entire passing human condition. I would look out that window and saw moments of humanity flash by. We might pass a car that would be loaded with a family, and they'd have, you know, pillows and blankets and food all around them. We'd pass trucks, and because the Greyhound bus was up high, I could see into their cabs, and I could see burly guys with mustaches or incredibly skinny guys smoking cigarettes. I could see things dangling from their mirrors. We would pass pretty girls in Volkswagen Beetles who would be talking and waving their hands with each other, and they couldn't see me. And I would see the countryside roll by, and sometimes it would be city corners in places like Balleo or Sacramento, and other times it was the lonely clapboard houses that would be out on a piece of land, and there might be a waiting pool in the front yard that was kind of gone to moss. There might be kids, bicycles or boats up on blocks. And so I would get all these kind of gescht at moments in which naturally I would envision the longer stories, the backstories, and what was coming down the pike for all those people. Where are they going? Where does that guy live? Who lives in that house. How can there's no kids in the pool right now? I did that four times a year between the ages of seven and seventeen, So I racked up a lot of downtime by myself, and I didn't look upon it as a chore or it was never boring. It was actually always fascinating.
With all those stories you moving outside the window, living in the world. As a young preteen, in and out of different schools in towns. You've said before that you would unleash what you've called some sort of inner charm mind monster when meeting new classmates. Was that some sort of self defense mechanism, and if so, why did you feel you needed to employ something like that.
Well, it certainly was a self defense mechanism, but it was also combined with I had no fear walking into a new classroom, no fear none. I had no problem outside of sizing it up pretty quick. Essentially, once I said something out loud that somebody reacted to, then I it was Katie barred the door. I was fine, and I was funny, I was outgoing, I was loud. I never wanted to skip school because there was action there, and I think I developed some sort of chops remember Jay Lennar used to have this thing that was always a comic. I wanted to be a comic, you know. And it's like I'd be funny in school. And the teacher was like, well, mister Lano, if you are so funny, perhaps you'd like to get up and entertain the class. And said yeah. So you know, I was in fifth grade, so I got I did a solid ten minutes, you know. So that's kind of like the way I looked at it. There was action at school.
Did you have any material that you would do in front of classmates.
I would take stuff that I would take stuff, funny voices, take stuff that my brother would do in the quiet of our own home and take it to school. I remember one point I did. We were briefly going to the same class, and he heard me say something that made everybody laugh that he had said the night before. They say, hey, that was my joke, but he didn't have the courage to do it in front of everybody, and and I did. You know, look, I just wanted to have a good time myself. I just wanted to experience joy, and if that meant spreading it as well, then I'm your man.
I heard that you would even take your brother Larry's tape recorder and record different sort of bits on there for him to find later.
I'd do stuff. I do stuff. It's coming, the title wave is coming. We recommend that you all ye to high Land as quickly as possible. People, it's coming. The title wave is yeah. I would do that, you know, just part of it was just to hear my own voice, but also to write the material.
You know, they gave you a sad card right then and there. I'm certain of it.
All they should have. I should have been doing voiceovers even back then with my squeaky voice. And also was you know, a craig reel to reel tape recorder. This was a miracle who had tape recorders in their house. He had to be a rich kid. I don't know where my brother even got this, For all I know, he shoplifted it from some cheap electronics store.
You know, we're trying to pinpoint the beginning of your love of storytelling, but I want to try to identify the beginning of your desire to be an artist, which I think happens at around thirteen years old. You're lying in bed trying to fall asleep the night before you go to see two thousand and one Space Odyssey in the theater that was it.
I viewed it all as a very romantic quest, the idea of sale across space and space suits and helmets. I was not enthralled in the adventure of it as much as I was sort of like in the beauty of it. And I had actually seen this book prior to seeing the movie itself. Was called the Making of two thousand and one of Space Odyssey, which I couldn't understand because I hadn't seen the movie yet, but it had photographs in it of the making of the movie, and knowing that I was going to see and I understand in nineteen I'm going to say this was sixty seven. I guess sixty seven, sixty eight.
The movie came out in sixty.
Eight, Okay, so this is in the fall of nineteen sixty eight. We went down to the cinerama domes. It was a big deal and had lobby displays and what have you. And it was the first time I was in a theater where I noticed that the sound system was the most advanced I had ever heard. It wasn't just coming from the screen, it was coming from all around us, and there was actually an overture. So I walked into the theater and it still lit up, but Leghetti's overture is playing. And when it began, I was used to movies as they had always been John Wayne movies and Kirk Douglas movies and movies that you saw in Charlton Heston. You know, movies had dialogue, and they had bad guys and protagonists, so you never really there was very little irony or mystery. Everything was spelled out for you. And hear this movie unspooled and there isn't a word of spoken dialogue until about twenty seven minutes into it when a lady says, here's your level, sir. And prior to that, we saw the entire history of humankind played out via Stanley Kubrick's vision. Now that was I'm thirteen, and I see finally and understand that cinema is this combination of light and image and performance and procedure and behavior. And I was able to figure out that what we were looking at was man learning how to use a tool in order to beat his way in getting what he wants. And then from that comes the greatest time cut in the history of cinema in which a bone is thrown up in the air and when it comes down, your thirty thousand years into the future and man has conquered space and is flying to the moon like it's relatively routine. And I can't say that I understood any of that movie when I saw it, but I knew that it was great, and I knew that it had blown the back of my head off as far as consciousness wise. But I reveled in every small, tiny detail of it, so much so that I went back the next week by myself in order to see it again. And I've been looking at it ever since, because there is a story about as big as you're ever going to get it. That is that is still nothing more than odd dialogue. I mean, there's no narrator that says and it was at that moment that Moonwatcher real life. There's nothing like that in there. The only the only supers are, you know, beyond the infinite. There's nothing in there that makes it easy for you to comprehend what's going on outside.
After you saw the movie, you said, once I started asking this question, how do I find the vocabulary for what's rattling around inside my head.
Yeah. The thing about being an actor is you're speaking with somebody else's vocabulary, but it goes through the sieve of your own consciousness. I gravitated to acting because I could get up in front of people like it was nothing at all. Other people can't do that, you know. I realized that that was a difference. And the vocabulary of communicating ideas by way of the first, of course, the words of a playwright. Well, it's one thing to learn the dialogue, but it's something totally different to understand what the heck you're saying at the same time, what it is that you're trying to communicate. In some ways, all you need to do is trust the language. But something else happens that I learned about seven years later when I was twenty and found myself doing Shakespeare. Dan Sullivan, who at the time was directing us at the Great Lake Shakespeare Festival, got mad at all of the professional actors in the room because they were hungover from a party the night before, and he said, look, you guys have to show up on time, and you have to know the text, and you have to have an idea. I understood showing up on time because we get yelled at if we were not up on time. That's true. I didn't have a lot of lines to learn because it was pretty much carrying a spear and only had really one scene as an actor. But nonetheless you had to know that die but the thing that he said about and have an idea that was new. I thought, we're told what to do, we're told when to move, we're told what. No, no, no. He was actually saying, you have to come in with something grander than is what is just written down on the page. And I didn't even know how to do that for another fifteen years or so, but I understood that that was the differenentference between doing it professionally and doing it for the Parks department. You had to you had to do something more than just read the play and learn the lines. You had to study some aspects of human need and human behavior and the particulars I'm going to tell you right now. I played Fabian in Twelfth Night, and Fabian, I believe, is the worst role ever written in Shakespeare. And he is in one scene in which he and somebody else sits in a tree and laughs as Malvolio reads a fake letter, and Fabian has this line. The worst line in Shakespeare is this line. Sauterer will cry out on it, though it be as rank as a fox, Sam Fragoso, Do you have any idea what that means? Sauder will cry out on it, there would be at rank as a fox.
Sam Fragoso doesn't.
I'm not sure what it means either, But I was instructed to say it as though it was the funniest retort you could possibly imagine saying, and we had to laugh around is off afterwards. The story that you have to come up with, the idea that you have to have in your pocket, has to be able to make sense out of saying a line that bad.
So that's you at twenty years old. I want to understand about the ideas and questions rattling inside your head looking for a vocabulary, a vocabulary of.
What it was, the vocabulary of playing it by ear. If that makes sense, I think.
I not loneliness.
Well, I filled up loneliness by being that guy who happily walked into the room I did. I mean, but there's a combination between being why are you lonely? Are you lonely because no one has paid attention to you. I can't say that was the case. I think I was. My loneliness came about because of confusion, because no one ever really explained to me where we were going or why outside of a couple of teachers and the parents of friends of mine. Sure anybody ever put a shoulder or a hand on my shoulder and said, you know what, this has nothing to do with you, and you're going to be okay, And all I have to do is trust your instincts. I just figured out that I had to trust my instincts. I knew people that would rationalize a way, any possible move or anything that I can't do that because I have a job, or I can't take this gig because of that. I was a bit of a blank canvas when it came down to people's coming up to me, particularly at the Great Lake Shakespeare Festival, in which people were telling me, based on their observation of me, they said, Okay, if you want to be an actor, here's what you need to do. I never addressed the first part of their advice, which is, do I want to be an actor? Is it even possible to be an actor? Who's an actor in this world? Well, they were, and they were telling me you are too, and so here's what you need to do. You need to go to New York City. Going to New York City is only things that Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds did in motion pictures. I didn't go to New York City. I was from Oakland, for goodness sake. Maybe I'll get drafted or something like that. But so the vocabulary is looking forward to was I think the vocabulary of options beyond the ones that were immediately around me. I realizing that, oh I can do that. The vocabulary of saying, well, let's see what's going to happen.
Well, here's a little bit of what happened. I'm going to do in a bridge run through here for.
Us, my fascinating life. You bet bring it on. I'd love to hear it.
So you do move to New York City after a formative run at the Shakespeare Festival in Cleveland. Then you do two seasons of Bosom Buddies in Los Angeles where you're kind of doing a riff on Tony Curtis from Some Like It Hot.
Yeah, yeah, fair enough.
You then get a big break and Ron Howard splash, followed by a string of films that I'm not going to pass any judgment on whatsoever. By the time nineteen eighty eight nineteen eighty nine rolls around, you said once that I had experienced enough bitter compromise that I had overcome. There was stuff that should have destroyed me, what should have or could have destroyed you that didn't.
Any one of those jobs coming to an end. Quite frankly, how I blundered into being put on a TV show with Peter Scaleri. I have no idea, but I bowed down in hubble submission to divine Providence.
Or dear Holland Taylor.
And Holland Taylor, I mean Holland is still one of my dearest friends on the planet Earth. Yeah, we lost Peter last October, unfortunately, my Bosom buddy. And then when it's done, you have to put it all behind you and never ever look back on that as being the be all and end all. You have to only look at it as the vehicle that got you to this morning. There were money issues I had by that time. I had a family I had when Bosom Buddies was over, I had two kids, and there was no guarantee whatsoever that I was going to be able to keep my house. I had a sense of responsibility that was really always about what do I have to do and be and what do I have to create in order to get the next job? And an awful lot of that comes down to two things. You have to do. You have to wait, and you have to be ready. And a lot of people can't wait, and a lot of people can't be ready. Somehow I was able to do both those things. But you know, look, this all happened for me ridiculously fast, and there was all sorts of serendipity that went into it, not the least of which other people not taking jobs. I mean Ron when he directed Splash, he was just getting started as a director. He was Opie Cunningham. He'd been on Mayberry and Happy Days, and he wanted to be a director, and who in the world was going to trust him? And so that meant everybody who was really an a lister at the time wouldn't give him the time of day. And he had a movie to make, And so I came along, and I had waited and I was ready. The bitter compromise then comes around to that same challenge of am I creating art. Am I being authentic? Are my ideas good enough in order to propel this along and make it unique? And all the rest of the world catches up your life, believe it or not. Saan Fragoso is one damn thing after another. And you don't know if you're stepping down into a bear trap that's going to, you know, clamp down on your leg and give you blood poisoning, or if you're skipping through a field you know, to overwhere your car is parked and you get to go.
Home well through bear traps and maybe not so great films.
Let me tell you something about being not so great films. I'm a two ninety five hitter without a doubt. That means, you know, it struck out a lot, a lot of pop flies, a lot of ground outs, but you never stop. You every day you learn something, and granted sometimes what you're learning is what not to do, but you also experience those moments in which, holy cow, that happened without my even having to think about it, how was it that that came down the pike? And all you do you try and try and try, and you work and you work and you work, and if you're smart, you don't let your own personality get in the way too much. And if you're lucky enough, you have somebody that comes around and says to you, why don't you knock it off? Why don't you concentrate on the work at hand. If you consider yourself a professional, it's like you got to have you got to have those people in your lives too.
You know when you were mentioning, you're referencing the am I making art? Am I being the artist that I want to be. I get the sense that that really came into focus for you after you're nominated for Big in eighty nine. Then you make a league of their own, and after that you have I have this conversation with your agent Richard Lovett in the early nineties where you say.
What I said, I don't want to play I don't Now, I'm going to use a word here that has two different connotations, and I'm doing the non anatomical version of it. I said, I don't want to play pussies anymore, And by that I meant there was a whole school of economic motors, of types of movies about the goofy guy, you know, is trying to fall in love and he has advancers again, and I that was coin of the realm and an awful lot of development in motion pictures like comedies. Sometimes they were good movies, but more often not they were you know, they were just kind of like Grade B kind of like passes, almost a type of formula that I always thought there was enough stuff in there in order to make it worthwhile doing. But I also just said, look, I'm an actor and they're asking me to be in a movie, and I believe my job as an actor in movies is to make movies. And so I threw myself into stuff again and again because hey, I can show up on time. Hey I'll know what the text is, and hey, I got some ideas for these moments. But the truth is, what did we say at the beginning of this fabulous talk? We said, movies are binary. They're either double zeros or they're zero and one. I wish you can't change it after the fact, you just really can't. So number one, I got older. Secondly, I ended up having more kids. I met Rita on a movie and we've been married for over thirty five years now. But in order to be Joe DiMaggio, you had to start having a different type of demands of yourself. You had to stay out on the field a little bit longer and work a little bit harder, and also say a word that is very, very very hard to say. Sometimes you had to say no. Saying yes to something is easy. You'll make a lot of money, you'll get to work with somebody great, you get to go shoot somewhere and they'll pay you, and you'll be done and it'll come out and be fun. It's very hard sometimes to say no in that this is not going to scratch the itch that I am feeling, and in order maybe to stay unpointed, this isn't going to teach me a new vocabulary. I wanted to be a different type of actor, and I also wanted to be a different type of artist that would start bringing even more to that binary formula double zero or zero one.
After the break more from what hold on, Tom, I want to take it.
You're listening to talk easy with Sam Fragoso. I'm Tom Hanks, and we'll be right back.
In that decade that follows, you do say yes to a handful of projects, and by my estimation, it's one of the best decades an actor had in the history of motion pictures from Philadelphia to catch me if you can. No, I think it's true. I think it's true. Yeah, And I want to know, at this point in your life, which film best captures your spirit as an artist and a storyteller, that makes you go, this is why I do the work I do.
I will tell you it. I would if I had to. And by the way, this is a pressure. I would never do this on my own, but I will do it for the sake of our talk Sam. It was castaway. Castaway completely came out of our own shop, and it was an incredibly deep throw from the get go because I read a story about FedEx. And I did not know this when I read this story, but I didn't realize it. Jumbo jets filled with nothing but letters and packages traveled from the United States to Australia every day across the vast specific and the first thing I thought was what happens if one of those plants goes down? And from that came the story of FedEx. I was talking with Bill Broyles, he was one of the original co writers of Apollo thirteen. We were talking about actually another project, and he said, so, what else are you talking about? And I said, well, I have this idea about a FedEx guy and he crashes, and I only have kind of like the first act in my head, but the narrative would be hanging around on him staying alive with fire, water, shelter, and food and then whatever else is necessary. And from that brief conversation that was about eight years before the movie came out, so eight years of working on it constantly. And it also was a great trifecta because I had the first act, Bill had the second act, and we did not have a third act until Bob Zemachus came into the picture and he said, well, you know what you guys are missing here, And from that came not only the movie as it played itself out, but also the way we made the movie. To answer your questions, I would say that was a handmade house that designed myself, allied myself with a handful of other people, and out of that came that not just the zeitgeist of the human condition that I wanted to examine, but also the deep throw of the type of movie and the movie making experience that I wanted to have well, which just said no one had ever made a movie like that before. Now without pirates showing up.
It's fascinating because this decade we're talking about. After Castaway, you are celebrated in two thousand and two winning a AFI Lifetime Agieman Award at the age of forty six. You're the youngest person to win this award, And I wondered, what did it feel like to be given a lifetime Achievement award when you're only halfway through your life? Like they don't tend to give out two lifetime Achievement awards.
Yeah, I sort of said, are you guys sure? I mean, I've had a pretty good run here. But I took it exactly as it was offered that I think I had enough of a body of work that if I had gotten hit by a bus the day afterwards, would stand up on its own. I took it as a very very wonderful night to get together with a bunch of people that I've known for many, many years. We had a wonderful party right after that that you could only get in if you had a personal relationship with me. And I took it in that brand of spirit, Hey, I've done enough good work in order to warrant a pretty good clip package. And at the end, of the day. That's nothing to.
Sneeze it almost in spite of that benediction, You've spent the last twenty years, writing, producing, performing, playing not the everyman, but instead, I think the best of man, folks like Sully, the pilot who landed the plan on the Hudson River, Ben Bradley, the fearless editor of the Washington Post. Mister Rogers, I'm not going to do an inch on him. As an armchair historian, as you've called yourself. Do you return to these figures because they fortify in you the belief that truth and decency matter? Do you return to them because they refuse to have their hearts calcified?
Truth and decency does matter. Not to everybody, but it certainly does. But the roles that you're describing right there, and also throwing Richard Phillips from Captain Phillips, they were all very good at what they did for a living. To get back to the what do you do for a living and what do you like about it? How do you end up in there? But they also faced a type of pressure that would snap the spine of lesser people. Not just the landing of the plane and Sully saving all those lives, but then also everything that went along with that, after the National Transportation Safety Board was ready, was ready and wanting to find something other than a mechanical problem. He was fighting for his life in his career, like certainly as Captain Richard Phillips did. What was offered by way of playing Fred Rogers was Fred Rogers seemed to be fighting a battle against everybody else in the world, particularly in the commercial television business that wants to make money off of sell them toys to kids. All of those are some version of people who wake up in the morning, and because of their chosen professions and because of the mode by which that's sort of like the ethical codes by which they live, they do have to fight in some ways, that never ending battle for truth, justice in the American way, and that's a noble undertaking. To me, it's what the great stories have always been about. I don't think it's a far cry from Hamlet to all of those people, or any of the other great heroes of ongoing literature. Every Jean Valjean has some version of a Javert that is chasing them down. And Javert is really good. Some times. Javert refuges the morals of everybody else in the world, you know. But I'm fascinated by people who stick to their guns, that are actually viewing some version of I can't live any other way unless I do it like this, and so I have to do it like this in that it's it's uncompromising, and I think that there's a bit of a default setting of cynicism that goes around there. In an awful lot of it, it says, well, come on, stop being such a goodie to choose. And I don't view it that way. I actually view it, well, what would you do in this circumstance? That's what I always ask myself when I see movies. What would you do? And I think that's the honorable question that those roles, and I think those movies ask in.
The spirit of sticking to your guns. I have to ask you something because as you're saying this, it's hard to square away the hope you have that I can hear in your voice with the state of this country, where we have pockets of people throughout who've made it their life mission to restraint bodily autonomy postdobs to strip rights away from LGBTQ plus community, to dispose of history that they render inconvenient or self incriminating. You've made work in some form or another about all of these subjects through the years. And so I wonder, as we sit here, has your faith in this nation and the people in it hasn't been shaken these past few years? Have you been shaken tested?
Not so much shaken. Here's something that will, can, nay always happen. You can have your heart filled with any type of stereotypical prejudice. You can be a bigot, you can hate al awful a lot of people. You can feel as though a victim from people who have taken advantage of you, could feel stabbed in the back, you can feel as though you're on the losing end of every proposition comes down, and you could do it because of any number of reasons and any number of people. Now, cynicism, that's part and parcel to the culture exchange that goes on, and it seems to be very, very loud at times, and we are always in a massive flux. There has never been a you know, I spoke at a graduation not too long ago and said, every graduating class has graduated into the most tumultuous times in the history of the world. There's always so much that has to be done. But here's what seems to us happened over the long course of things. It's gotten done. I think eventually tyrants fall. Sometimes they fall because of laughter, sometimes they fall because of gravity. And I think at the end of the day, we do have a process that is in place here in which the vast majority of people that I know and have come across give other people a fair shake. At the end of the day.
At sixty six, you know, soon to be sixty seven, Yeah, do you still feel the need and desire to be a reflection of us, the good and the bad?
Yes? I do, because I go back to what I learned at the Great Lake Shakespeare Festival in nineteen seventy seven. I was backstage and I had to make an entrance right after Hamlet gave his advice to the players. And every night I heard Shakespeare, by way of Hamlet, say hold the mirror up to nature. And that's my job. Human nature is what we reflect back to everybody. And it's some version of that same question, what would you do given the same circumstances. I feel as though sometimes you play a bad guy, but in that claying of the bad guy. You do hold a mirror up to nature, because there are some people that are doing things for the wrong reasons that can be construed as be given. There's a lot of Look, there's an awful lot of stuff I don't bother with, all sorts of stories and movies that I that hold no interest to me because I don't know necessarily by the standard antagonist protagonist dynamic of an awful lot of stuff that's out there, But there is plenty of other stuff where Hey, people have different motivations that they have to be examined, and they have to meet their natural ends and natural conclusions. So I remain I must say a type of artist slash actor that I think that is job number one when it comes down to doing any story that I tell, any story that I'm involved with, is that life is one damn thing after another, and it's sometimes it's very very hard to say no, it's very hard to do the right thing. But there are some inner ticking clock inside all of us that the thing, more oft than not, in seventy percent of us will turn to a true north.
You know, you've said my name, I think seventeen times in this conversation.
I think it's been eighteen, Sam Fragoso.
Well, in that reflection of us, Tom Hanks, you've made it look so goddamn easy, almost like you're Joe DiMaggio.
Yeah.
Out there in center field.
I met Joe DiMaggio, who were at a restaurant called Coco Pozzo. Rita's mom was alive. We were having dinner with her and some friends. I think one of our kids might have been there in a high chair.
As a matter of fact, are you asking me to confirm you're looking at me?
Oh? No? And at the major d came over he says, excuse me, mister Hanks. Joe Demagio is in dining with us tonight and he wondered if you might come by so he could introduce himself. And I was out of my chair before I said Joe dimitt So I went and dude, Sam Fragoso, nineteen, I have I met Joe DiMaggio, and he couldn't have been He was very elegantly dressed. He said, Tom, I always wanted to meet another Bay Area boy because he knew I'm from Oakland and he was from San Francisco. And we started talking a little bit, and I said, oh, what a plate. I sat down very briefly with him, and at the conclusion of it said, you know, mister Demaggio, he said, oh, call me Joe. So you know, at one point someone I read there actually this had been written about me, some review that got a good review, and someone says, Hanks is like Jodamaggio out there and makes it look easy. And I said, there has never been a greater compliment than I've received than saying that, like Joe DiMaggio in Centerfield, I made my job look easier. And he said to me, uh, yeah, it looks easy. But then he held his hand over his heart and he said, but it never was in here. And I understood exactly what he was saying. He was that guy, like I said, Jodamaggio. He did the work, he did the wind sprints, he showed up, he waited, and then he was ready. And in his own way, of course, that was an extraordinary moment and also a bit of a challenge. Isn't it that he was not ready to rest on any kind of laurels. He would just said, dude, I worked my freakin ass off in order to make it look easy. And this I understand.
You feel that.
Oh oh my, yeah, Now here's the thing. I love it. Look, I still come home at the end of the day wondering, Man, I wonder if we really got that or not. But I feel as though I've done all the work I can now. That being said, if they come back and say, hey, we'd like to reshoot what we did, yes or I said great, because I'm like another shot at it.
You know, yesterday I had a call with our dear friend Holland Taylor.
Oh you know, Holland, Oh my.
From one dust mote to another.
Ah desmote thirty eight yeah, And.
I asked, what is your shared connection? And she wrote just the greatest thing to me this morning over text, she said, Tom and I we both celebrate the infinitely tiny place we hold in the universe, and our remoteness, our status as Specs makes our marching gaily fourth in the vast void sort of majestic.
She's saying, the work we do is noble because we care so deeply. We don't want to just do it right. A lot of people can do this right, but there was inside that, this unquenchable, unstoppable, and actually, I think in a lot of ways unaccomplishable desire to capture something in every line, in every moment in a bottle that no one else could ever have created or captured. It's an elusive task and sometimes it happens by accident, sometimes it happens by magic. Sometimes it doesn't happen at all. But what matters is the desire and the try.
You know, speaking of you know, fuck, sorry, can I at your age, after all you've done, you still want to do it, right, don't you? Well?
It's like, no matter how old your kids are, I want a long drive with them to be a fascinating time spent talking to one another. You know, yeah, I just wanted to I do. I still want it to be magical and discoverable. And look, I will tell you that I worked with people who have remained at the top of their game. I'll just say because they passed away, and I always think I'm going to be able to go to New York and have tenor with Mike Nichols and Nora Ephron. They were all possessed by their desire in order to keep doing it, not just well, but keep doing it magically, to keep capturing something that no one else could that only they.
Saw she, of course, is in the acknowledgments of your book.
I wouldn't be a writer if it wasn't for Nora Ephron. Nora Ephron told me that the work I was doing in preparation for Sleepless in Seattle, in which I was fighting and cranky and having suggestions and wanting and always asking is this enough? Is this enough? I don't get it. I don't get it. She put in something that had come out in our rehearsal process, she and her sister Delia. And when it was done, she said, you wrote that. And I said, I didn't write that. I was just complaining during rehearsal, and you put it in. He says, well, that's what writing is, isn't it. And so that was And from then I always would send her something and say is this writing? And she would always come back he says, it is writing, But you ain't done writing it, So get back to work.
My last question, mister Tom Hanks, we're talking about specs of dust, the passing of time. What was that story that you like to tell about Cecil b Demel about checking the gate?
Oh? Yeah, when you use film, when you shoot on film, not digitally, you're literally talking about a physical process of when cellul lloyd goes through through the camera and it has to go through and it goes through the lens and where it passes in front of the lens and actually captures the image as a photograph. It goes through the gate of the projector. And because it's film, because it's celluloid's made out of petroleum products, it's possible that part of the film can break off and get stuck in the gate. So you will shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot. And when you were finally think you were done with the scene, and this has happened in any number of kinds, they will say, check the gate, and the camera operator takes it apart, pulls the gate out, looks at it. There oftentimes is a splinter from the film that is in there, and so they don't know if the image is going to be a pure one. There could be a big hashmark in there, It could be a scratch. They say, no, no, sorry, They will call it a jam in the gate. Now there's dust in the gate, they will say, and they got to put the gate back in, and you have to redo all of that magazine, About ten minutes worth of film in order to recapture what you did somewhere on the other side. If you've worked your if it worked like crazy, if you've made it look easy, and you are done, you have to say, okay, great print that check the gate, and the set is sort of on tenter hooks. As the first camera operator, the focus puller, pulls the gate out of the camera and looks at it, holds it, has to hold it up to the light and lost the time will have a flashlight and go around the periphery. And when he says all right, the gate is good, that means you're done and you get to move on. And maybe you're done for the day, maybe you're done for the week, maybe you're done for the entire film. But nothing is finished until someone says the gate is good. You're a lucky person if you can say, okay, I think we're done. Check the gate. Pause, pause, pause, pause, Wait the gate is good. Okay, then you're finishing and you get to go. You don't want to have dust in the gate.
Well, we have looked back on a whole lot of good work, a life lived, movies that you look easy when I know it was not, And I just want to thank you for leaning into that vocabulary of loneliness all those years ago, for making meaning through all these performances of yours, which in turn, I think has given us a vocabulary and language to better understand ourselves. And I know there is no gait in audio, but I've checked it anyway.
And the gate is good. The gate is good. You've been listening to Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso. I'm Tom Hanks. Join us again soon for another episode of Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso. Hey, I enjoyed that. Thank you, my friend, Tom Hanks.
It's been an honor.
It's been my pleasure. Thanks so much. I enjoyed talking to you as truly did.
That's our show. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to leave us five stars on Spotify, Apple, wherever you do your listening, if you want to go the extra mile, sharing the program on social media, writing a review on those platforms, all of it is really still the best way for new listeners to find the show. I want to give a very special thanks this week to Holland Taylor, Jody Lee Leips, Heather Fain, Aaron Hartman, Christy Ostler, and of course our guest today, Tom Hanks. His debut novel, The Making of Another Major motion Picture Masterpiece, is available wherever you do your reading. If you haven't seen him in Wes Anderson's Asteroid City, he is maybe my favorite part of that movie. The film is currently in theaters in limited release, will also be available on vod later this week. If you'd like to learn more about Tom and his work, or check out our edited transcript of this episode, be sure to visit talk easypod dot com for more conversations with other great actors. I'd check out our talks with Michael Shannon, Michelle Williams, Oscar Isaac Matthew McConaughey, Laura Dern, Edwin Norton, Tessa Thompson, and of course Hollin Taylor. To hear those and more, Pushkin Podcasts listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen. You can also follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram at talk Easypod. If you want to purchase one of our monks they Come and Cream or Navy, or our vinyl record with writer fran Leebowitz, you can do so at talk easypod dot com slash shop. As always, Talk Easy is produced by Caroline Reebok Our executive producer is Jenick Sobravo. Our associate producer is Caitlin Dryden. Our research and production assistant is Paulina Suarez. Today's talk was edited by Clarice Gavara and mixed by Andrew Vastola. Our assistant editor is c J. Mitchell. Our music is by Dylan Peck. Our illustrations are by Criscia Shadowing video and graphics by Ian Chang, Derek Gaberzak, Ian Jones and Ethan Seneca. And I'd also like to thank our team at Pushkin Industries, Justin Richmond, Julie Martin, John Stars, Carrie Brody, David Glover, Heather Faine, Eric Sandler, Jordan McMillan, Isabela Navarez, Kira Posey, Tara Machado, Maya Knig, Jason Gambrell, Justine Lang, Lee, Tom Mollard, Malcolm Gladwell, and Jacob Weisberg. I'm San Fragoso. Thank you for listening to a very special episode of Talkies. I'll see you back here next week with a new talk. Until then, stay safe and solo
