Dubbed "King
of comedy", called the "successor to Cary Grant" in the
mid-eighties, Tom Hanks is one of the very few American comic actors to
have successfully made his way to more dramatic roles, winning two Oscars
at that (for Philadelphia and Forrest Gump). Back in the
80's, Tom Hanks was not so sure about the looming profile of his career.
"Right now I'm hot. Next year I may not be" he said in David
Shipman's The Great Movie Stars 3. "As for the work I do, I don't
think I'll have too many real cracks at drama till I'm 40. My face is
funny and I have this image of a grown up kid. I'm not in much hurry to
change it..." Yet, Tom Hanks was 38 only when he won his first Oscar
for the most dramatic role of his career, as an AIDS-afflicted lawyer
in Jonathan Demme's Philadelphia. In Cast
Away, which teams him up again with Robert Zemeckis, he pulls
yet another tour-de-force, Oscar-potential performance as a modern-day
Robinson Crusoe stuck on a desert island for 4 years. "To be the
only person on camera from the beginning to the end is not a bad ego trip"
he said wittily during the press conference held in Paris. "But shooting
this film was also a grand adventure, a real acting test, a formidable
challenge"...
How difficult was
it to play the role of Chuck Noland?
I remember that interview
I saw on television... A journalist was talking to a famous American writer
about something that had happened to him during WWII. His plane was shot
down, or his boat was sunk, and he had to survive on a rocky island for
4, 5 or 6 days. It was the worst period he had ever spent in his life,
he almost died. This journalist was saying:
"Oh, really, this must have been quite an amazing experience to be
lost on an island like that!"
"No, it wasn't a good experience, I almost died, I don't ever want
to repeat it!"
"Well, have you ever thought of flying back to that island again
to experience it again?"
"No, I don't ever want to see that island, it belongs to my worst
nightmares!"
"What did you learn by being on that island for that period of time?"
"I learned that I don't want to be dead!"
So here was this
person who couldn't get it out of her head that it was a romantic notion,
that it was a clever, pleasant, romantic thing to experience, to be lost
on an island for a period of time. And I thought: 'Isn't that an amazing
dichotomy?' You would think that the solitude or the aventure would be
a wonderfully positive thing that you'd want perhaps to live over again.
And in fact the reality was that it was hell on earth, and I guess it
was the first inkling of an idea for the role. The shooting was a grand
adventure on one hand, but it was also a tough experience. It's not easy
to shoot a movie in the South Pacific, it's brutally hot, the elements
wreak havoc with both the equipment and the human bodies. I must say to
be the only person that was on camera from the beginning to the end, at
first it was magnificent, because I was the King of all I surveyed, nothing
happened unless I was in front of the camera, and actually that's not
bad for the head, that's not a bad ego-trip. But then that gives way to
just how difficult it is in order to communicate everything that needed
to be communicated by what Chuck was doing. So when Wilson finally appeared
on screen, I think that saved me from sanity as an actor as it did Chuck
from his dilemma. I think the crew was very happy to have somebody else
on the island too!
The film is silent
for the most part. How did it influence your work as an actor?
Many times as an actor
you'll get to the point where the screenwiter has loaded the screenplay
with so much dialogue, and it's really only there to describe what's going
on to all the people that have to read it, the production people, the
executives, everybody that's gonna have to help 'translate' it. And by
the time you get on the set as an actor, you're crossing lines off, 'I'm
not gonna say that, I'm not gonna do that, I'm not gonna bother with that...'
Maybe it's just that you don't want to have to learn so many lines, it
might be just the point of being lazy. But Bob (Zemeckis) and I came to
this conclusion sort of early on in the movie that once we got on the
island, Chuck was not gonna speak unless he had a good reason to.
Now that can be quite
luxurious as an actor. Because all you're doing is reacting to what's
going on. As long as coconuts are falling, then you have something to
react to. But after a while you have to actually create this brand of
communication that is solely visual. And as a modern actor, you can't
get off if you're lazy, because more often than not, you can take care
of your stuff with a piece of dialogue you can fall back on. And with
that gone, it was like an acting test, that if I failed somehow they were
gonna throw me out of the Screen Actors Guild or something. Boy, you take
away the voice and all you have left is the instrument, the body, and
that's half of what's actually available. It was a formidable challenge.
Chuck's experience
is cruel enough, but his return to the world seems to be even more difficult...
Well, I think that
was the real trick of what the whole movie was. Bill Broyles and I worked
on the script for the better part of four years, before Bob came along.
What we were never able to authentically capture on paper was whatever
it was Chuck was going through when he made his return from the island.
There was a lot of things we hadn't solved. We went down so many diferent
roads for what the character must be going through before we landed upon
what I think is the great truth. We had him loaded with self-pity at one
point for what he missed out, we had Chuck in wonder in front of all the
things that had changed while he was gone, we had him be like a nature
boy who's slept without his clothes and learnt how to make soup out of
ficus tree leaves, and things like that. And none of them were true, were
authentic.
And I think that when
Bob came around, we landed upon the reality that the time has gone by
for Chuck in the wink of an eye, and he is in shock, in physical shock,
he's gone through something that's been the most horrific, hellish four
years of his life, as if he'd been fighting Vietnam, or held captive somewhere
on the South Pole, and what he was coming back to was not a world that
had changed pleasantly and wonderfully, but a world that had cruelly gone
on without him, with no sense of solace and maybe a welcome home party.
I consider Chuck's position to be as though he's been dumped in ice water
and thrown out in the middle of a party and he has to just got to deal
with it. And it's not a pleasant kind of fairy tale understanding that
Chuck has learnt something deeply about himself, and now he's gonna be
OK. He actually has the biggest crisis of his life and he has to get through
in the first 72 hours that he's back in civilization. And that took six
years and one third of the creative team in order to figure out.
Do you think you
would be able to live on a desert island after that experience?
I might assume that
the show business crew is not allowed to come on the island, right? If
that's the case, then there's a couple of things that I need. If I was
gonna write down now a list of all the things I want to take, let me see...
How many pages of paper do I have? (laughs) But you know, it's not so
much a list of what to do, as a symbolic list of what not to do. It's
all precautionary measures, you know... I think I might be able to make
a fire, now. I think I might be able to figure out how to collect rain
water. But, man, I need a truck-load of hydrogen peroxide, tooth-paste,
and a few other things... and a pair of pliers, so I could pull anything
that would give me a problem (he pretends to pull a tooth out of his
mouth.). But it would be a formidable list of things I'd have to bring
along if I was gonna try this.
After that experience,
would you rather get the Oscar or see Wilson get a nomination for Best
Supporting Actor?
Ah, I think Wilson
should be rewarded for all of his hard work! And the acceptance speech
would be very brief! (laughs)
Robin
Gatto
Chatelin Bruno 
