“Writing a novel is not that hard. Writing a novel that anybody wants to read is hard,” Tom Hanks says, in a new interview.
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?
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.
Anyway, we were shooting “Forrest Gump” in Cherokee Square, in Savannah, Georgia. We’re on the world-famous park bench. We’ve got various props. There was so much dialogue. And I was so exhausted because we had shot twenty-seven days straight. Remember how Forrest ran across the country? Well, there’s only one way to get those scenes, in those days.
So you worked on “Bonfire of the Vanities,” which didn’t succeed, and you worked on “Saving Private Ryan,” which did. Don’t you know if they’re going to be any good while you’re in the middle of making them? The second Rubicon is when you actually see the movie that you made. It either works and is the movie you wanted to make, or it does not work and it’s not the movie you wanted to make.
The film only became a universally admired Christmas classic after the copyright ran out in 1974 and it entered the public domain, becoming a television constant.For me, it happened on a movie that I wrote and directed called “That Thing You Do!” I loved making that movie. I loved writing it, I loved being with it. I love all the people in it. When it came out, it was completely dismissed by the first wave of vox populi. It didn’t do great business.
And that’s what we did. And it would be virtually impossible to do now. You could probably do it through C.G.I. We were talking about this backstage a little bit: All arts have highs and lows. Epic poetry, drama, the novel, whatever it might be. And I said to you, my wife and I were looking for a movie to go to the other night, and we couldn’t find one. I mean, revival houses aside. Superhero movies especially aside. It’s not as if I was looking to be hypercritical. I just wanted to go to a movie on Saturday night. And you agreed with this quandary.
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