Happy Sad Confused - Tom Hanks, Vol. II

Episode Date: November 4, 2024

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for the great imposter syndrome. Not so much the night before we start shooting, but I think as soon as you got a couple of stuff in the can, you realize that I am now at the mercy of something that is beyond my power. Prepare your ears, humans. Happy, sad, confused begins now. I'm Josh Horowitz, and today on Happy, Sad, Confused, Tom Hanks is back.

It took him 30 years to reunite with Robin Wright on his new film here, but only two years to come back on the podcast. to come back on the podcast. That's true of this latest work. Which is the biggest celebration here, Josh? I'm not going to answer that. I'm just going to post a question to the audience, Tom. I should remind the audience also this latest work reteams you with the great Robert Zemeckis for another audacious and emotional journey through time. It's truly unlike anything you've ever seen. And it brings Tom Hanks, yes, back to the podcast where he belongs. It's good to see you, sir. Congrats on the film. To you. Yeah. We're away. You know, isn't it isn't,

Doesn't every movie trying to do, you know, present you something that you've never seen before? I mean, everyone, everybody says, they try. It's like, oh, my, what? This is never done before. Who do you people think you are trying to do something like this? And it's like, I believe every movie tries to do something you've never seen before. But the difference, as you well know, Tom, I had your friend Bob on the podcast the other day. And I said this to him, of one, a filmmaker is lucky to have, like, one of those in their career where they're like, I actually did something that no one is.

ever done before. Bob has done it like a half dozen times. So credit where credit is due. Yeah, he lives. He kind of like lives at what I think he's been doing it ever, you know, ever since he first picked up, you know, like a Bell and Howell, you know, 16 millimeter processed into Super 8 kind of camera. Many times, I see the, I see the language behind his eyes, you know, all I do is talk about a moment, you know, what if we did this? What if we did not do this? A lot of times it's like, let's not do that. Let's find some other. some other way in order to tell this story. And I know that behind his head, he's thinking he's thinking about some aspect of something he read about or what he can do. And he might say,

well, yeah, you know, if we had any guts, we would blank. And he said something that like is a completely unimaginable to me. But his point of view is always, well, you know, why don't we give it a shot? Early on, it was, of course, we, like all these movies we've made, we could have made them without these Zemeckis flourishes. You know, we could have had, you know, we could have actors playing John F. Kennedy, you know, and in Gump. And Bob said, no, I'm going to actually put you there with Kennedy.

And all the jobs that we've done, castaway, we broke all these kind of rules. Even the studio said, no, you can't do that. You can't take a year off between shooting the first half of the movie and the second half of the movie. And Bob says, well, you know, actually, we can. Well, okay, you can, but you can't have silence on the island. And he said, well, why not? There's nobody there. There's nobody for him to talk to, you know, like stuff like that. So

Bob is always willing to kind of say, well, you know, anybody could do that. And even this movie, even here, could have been made in a completely different fashion. But he's, look, he's a creature of cinema, man, and he wants to kick that cinematic can, that reel of film, you know, farther down the road so that no one can quite see where it's coming from. No, as a film fan, thank goodness for folks like Spielberg, Zemeckis, Cameron, those that are keep pushing the envelope. I love it.

And all it is is technology, man. Everybody freaks out about what it's going to mean. It's like a better process shot, you know? Right. make movies is all. 100%. Okay. So before we circle back around to here, I'm curious because this has been kind of this

press store has been fun to see you and Bob and Robin because it's kind of been this like, you know, reunion, celebration of Gump as much as it is here. I'm curious on the flip side, if you'll indulge me. So many Tom Hanks successes, what's been the press tour that was the toughest for you? When maybe you knew the film wasn't clicking with an audience or critics and you kind of had to soldier through, does anything pop to mind? Oh, man. How about every other one?

You know, there's there's kind of that. In order to get through this, you really just have to embrace the life experience of what it is. Okay, so we get on a train out of, I'm going to say, you know, Houston Station or something in London, and you get off the train in Cannes in the south of France. And for the entire journey, you're being interviewed to talk about, you know, the great fabulous scabbin fun scavenger hunt that was the da Vinci code right that that was just like four hours of we are going to put our heads down and enjoy this experience at the end of the day all you're doing is talking about movies which is what we do all the time anyway and if you can divorce yourself

and that is required sometimes from uh you know the pure commercial aspect about hopping your wares it's always a pretty good time, you know, you can. But there's a volume at business aspect of it in which you, there was a period of time not too long ago in which the object was to leave no stone unturned. If there was a camera and a microphone with someone who wanted to talk about that movie, you visited them and you talked about that movie no matter, no matter where it was. So I like to call it the combination of the beast and the celebrity mule train. Let's just get on board and drive it and answer the questions as honestly as we can.

Okay, so here's some honest questions about here. So this is, for those that don't know, this is a very unique framework, essentially a single perspective, mostly on a home. Sometimes the home's not even there about a family, but multiple families. You and Robin Wright are a couple and you go through a large age span. in the course of the story. I'm curious. Dinosaurs walk through the window

and suddenly we were back in a primordial world. What is it? Dinosaurs and Tom Hanks. What more do you want people? Indigenous people, Benjamin Franklin, Michelle Dockery,

does a lot of folks that walk through the time span of this movie. You play older, you play younger. It's interesting because, look, obviously the effects

do a lot of the work, the makeup does some work, but the physicality is important, too. You have to walk and talk like, I don't know how old are, maybe late teens, 20-year-old Tom Hanks. I think we're still in high school at the beginning of this, yeah. And the trickiest thing for you, sir, we have documentation. I know what Tom Hanks looked and sounded like at that age.

I can compare and contrast. Well, it does exist in the Ether Web, and those were actually what they use in order to create this thing. But you've landed on the great. what's the word two-dimensional challenge of all this was is the physicality. You know, there is a way a 17-year-old stands, walks, sounds, leaps up off a couch, you know, chases his little brothers and sisters around. And with 50 years between that and the actual man who's having to do it day in and day out on the set, there was no, there's nothing we could do except, you know, buck up.

Luckily, you know, I'd like to say I haven't been a shit face. artist. I'm not one of those guys who, you know, has a stiff cocktail every day at 4, 430, 3.30, 315, 2 in the So, you know, I have maintained the temple as best as I can. Doing great. And we can get there where we want. The cosmetic effect of it, you know, the supercomputer that took all those images and, you know, meld with them into me at 17 or me at 22 or me at 32. That stuff's fascinating. And it goes very fast. And it, but it's only the most obvious version of it. Robin and I talked an awful lot about hello, our posture. Yeah. You know, because gravity has a tendency to pull us down. And I got to say also Bob's longtime collaborator,

Joanna Johnston with the costumes, we really layered these things on for a specific task and a specific purpose. And also taking in that, well, you know, you're only 28 years old in this So you're going to have a different carriage. You're going to have a different level of energy. You're going to have a different metabolism that goes by. And on the flip side of it, Kelly and Paul, I'm at least 25 years older than those folks, right? And they're playing my mom and dad. So they had to do the opposite kind of thing.

They had to show up and slowly have been closer and closer to the grave, as they say in the aging process. And so there were times when we were all looking at each other and none of us were the actual age that we are. So we were all in masquerade. And as you well know, if that doesn't work, the film collapses like a house of cards. Like, okay, I'm laughing at this on the screen. I can't bind to the drama. The emotion doesn't work. Yeah.

There's an element of it that on one hand, it's the, it was the luxury of doing it. For example, I mean, we didn't, a lot of times you make a movie, you make a movie. And there's a two-minute scene in the movie, right? Well, that two-minute scene actually takes close to a day and a half to shoot because you're talking about a master. You're talking about the concept shots. You're talking about camera positions. And then you break it down into what is called coverage, you know, the two shots, the close-ups, the over-the-shoulders. And so the energy that you have this, that a scene has, dissipates very quickly because the amount of man-hours is actually.

actually, it takes 18 hours to shoot what is a two-minute scene. This was not the case because once we had trimmed it, pounded it, physicalized it, examined it, edited it in our own heads, take 35 or take 42, or sometime take 7, had it. And so that meant we were done with those two minutes of that movie, and we just had to then go and prepare for the next one. Now, one hand, pressure galore, you know, because if you don't have it, you do not have it. But on the other side, if Bob is satisfied, and Robin is satisfied, and I am saying,

I don't know what else we can ring from this, Bob's your uncle, and you're finished. That being said, there is a huge difference between a scene that lasts 17 seconds longer than it should. So you've got to go figure out a way in order to take out those 17 seconds. and have it still ring true to human behavior, as well as the needs of what the script and Bob's narrative is. Spoiling in some ways because we got to walk off the set satisfied, but debilitating some ways

because I think we had it on take 47, but maybe take three was actually a little bit better, but you don't know until you get to take 47. I also love, and I talked to a little bit about this with Bob, like, you know, again, we talk about the bells and whistles and the tech, but his films are emotion. And they are, and there are some themes that recur. He is clearly obsessed as we all are with time and the choices we make and the regrets that we have.

And I was saying to him, it reminds me, like I was watching this. I think of Back to the Future, but I also think of like George Bailey and it's a wonderful life. Like it goes back, like this is just an eternal question for all of us, like family versus career, aspiration versus, you know, making compromises. I'm curious for you just applying to your own journey, like how ambitious. were you as a young actor? And was it, did you have to kind of find that balance in your life of personal versus professional ambition? Oh, I didn't think about anything other than I'm being offered a job. You know, when I first started off, the whole thing was how many weeks of employment can you get? Right. In order to pay your rent, pay for you, you know, I, you know, my son was born

when I was 21 years old, so I always had that aspect of it of making the nut. This, the, the, I, I was oblivious to the speed with which it was happening for me because I just went from job to job to job to job because I thought show, show business works that way. Is your phone ringing? Do they want you to go to work? Absolutely. It took me, I'm going to say, uh, 12 years. Uh, no, actually more like 14 years to realize that, um, you are, you define your, you define your career actually by when you say no that when you start being the curator of your of your own output you have you become the what I call it you run quality assurance on what the final product is and I did not land upon that honestly until um my my I call

and the instigator, at that time, kind of junior agent, Richard Lovett, at the world's most omnipotent talent agency, I guess. That's how they fancy themselves anyway. It said to me, well, what do you want to do? You know, literally, we're just sitting around my house. We had, I think we, we had just done, believe it or not, we, I'd just done league of their own. Yeah. That come to me by this, you know, odd kind of like the way, the way movies were. And I couldn't necessarily answer what I wanted to do, but I could say, well, here's what I don't want to do. And that, if you could go back now and shoot a movie about that, lightning would have flashed.

Right. That's the moment. The wall would have shook, and it would sort of been like black bolt speaks. And, you know, look, I treat my job the same way I did when I was a junior in high school and went to school on Monday to find out if I was cast in 12th night or not. Do I get to go on stay? I still feel that way. But just because the phone rings and they want you to,

you get to a point where, you know, look, I admire plenty of other artists that came to that conclusion long in their career, earlier in their career, than I did. And now after, once you get to that point, of course, then, the real risk becomes not in what you say no to but then what you say yes to you make it clients you think you're examining a theme you think you're going to throw deep and you think everybody's going to get it and guess what just like a you know just like any major league at bat it's like if you can hit it you know if you can bat 300 that means you're missing

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I think that coincides with maybe the best decade of a leading man's career, at least in my lifetime, of the choices that you made. It's for those that want to go back and just remember what you did specifically, I mean, the entire career, but that decade, incomparable. Well, you know, a lot has to do with the age, quite frankly. Sure. Because, you know, when you're 30s and 40, you know, okay, I'll tell you a hilarious story, okay? Um, for some reason back in the mid 80s, I found myself at a dinner party thrown by the Crem, current Crembella Crem, all right?

James Bond was there. Roger Moore, James Bond. Okay, so he threw this, he threw a, he threw a dinner party. And I found myself sitting between, you ready for this? I'm ready. Linda Evans was on one side of me, and on the other side was Tony Curtis, right? And look, I wanted them to sign my napkin. You know, I was in that kind of thing.

And Tony Curtis said, you know, I had done some movies there. He said, I love your work, Tom. I really enjoy your work. I think you're doing great. How old are you, Tom? And I said, you know, I'm at that time I was in my early 30s. And he said, oh, 30s, okay, yeah, all right, yeah. You know, Lou Wasserman told me when I was in my 30s to put my head down and just take every job I could.

By the time I'm in my 40s, I'd be an international star. And he was right, all right? Which was, you know. That was it then, yeah. And that's actually how I was operating. Right. The thing is, is that what do you do then when you are in your 40s and you have this great body of work? I was, you know, I was when a crack,

smack dab leading man there are there is almost no theme outside will i get late in high school that you can that you can't examine in your 30s right your 30s in the 40s all the great bitter compromises all of the dangers all of the ordinary man in extraordinary circumstances you can put yourself into for those years but eventually you are you are coming up on 50 the world knows that they've been watching you for the last, you know, 15 or, you know, 20 years, and they are hip to the way you have examined these great questions of humanity. And you've got to start, you got to start, if you're lucky, you have to start finding other ways in order to do, in order to do things.

And boy, ain't that, ain't that a trip. It is those transition periods, isn't it? It's also like when you go from a teen to a man and for a woman too, and then it's like from an adult to like an elder or elder statesman kind of thing. It's like that gray area. Which am I? Where do I fit in? Yeah, there was a on league of their own.

You know, Penny said, you know, I want, she said, I want put on as much weight as you can because I can't have you cute because you're too young. And I don't want the girls to think, oh, Jimmy's cute. So I said, well, you know, if I'm a guy who's 36 and I'm managing a girl's baseball team, there's got to be a problem with me. Right. What happens? Well, you're a drunk.

And but then I said, well, why am I a drunk? And we came up literally said, oh, I know what happened. I blew my knee out trying to get out of a woman's hotel room. And that cost me, that cost me my career. So you begin to develop essentially how do you, how do you talk about the natural, recognizable compromises a human being has to make in order to get up the next morning. And from then on, yeah, went on a pretty good tear of a lot of opportunities to explore that type of recognizable theme. The beauty of talking to Tom Hanks is I can have 25 conversations with you and hit different movies on each one.

So I'm going to hit a few things we didn't do last time, if you'll endorse me. You know, it all becomes this is your life. I know, I know. But all we're doing is talking about movies. We're talking about movies. You know, you give me an opportunity and I could ask you just, I'm going to name a movie. You tell me the circumstances you were in when you saw it. What movie theater you saw at?

Who did you go to? And I bet you can remember them. So there's a lot's up there, yes. Let's go on with that cultural exchange. We could do that right now. So in the list of like iconic moments that maybe didn't seem iconic at the time, dancing on a piano at FEO Schwartz in big, what do you remember about that versus what it became? Was it intended to be like the big, a big moment, standout moment of the film?

And did it shock you when it did? You know what? If you go into it saying today, we are going to shoot something that will become an icon, moment. If you think that you're doomed, you have no idea that you must trust somehow in the serendipity and the timing and the, the malleability of the moment. When we made, I'll tell you this, one thing when we made big, I was, I was tired because I worked a lot. And also, we knew that we were making, there were a bunch of other movies that had the same, you know, body switching young thing. We knew that was going on. But Penny, God bless her, was in kind of like this

underground revolutionary phase of directing movies. It was, I called it movie making by attrition after a while because we would go so long and so deep into these individual moments that I said to her at some point, Penny, for God's sakes, what do you want from this scene? And she looked at me and she was mad and she said, Tom, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. No. All I know is it's six months from now. I'm going to be in an editing room wishing I had a shot that I don't have. So I'm going to get the, as soon as she said that, I said, I completely understand that. My job then is to give you as much of the canned goods for the basement as possible so you can weather the storm of editing it. And that was quite a, that was quite a, you know, a liberating moment for a relationship between, you know, the actor and the, and the, and the director, I developed it. I guess I lost a little bit of, of ego and discomfort when a director comes up to me and says, you got to help me on this, man. You got to have a better idea than what I can drive. And that was

liberating to find out. Did you and Penny, I know we had kind of the sequel conversation on some films last time, but did you and Penny ever discuss a follow-up to Big? Has that ever been a real consideration. No, no, the great thing that I was lucky in that, well, I used to be able to sign a contract to do a movie without a sequel clause attached to the contract. Impossible nowadays. Yeah, it's impossible nowadays because the whole nature of storytelling has altered. It's not necessarily a bad thing. But if you do it and you have to come up and continue the story, well, then you've lost all the organic power of what the original story was. because, I mean, they all do it.

They said, can you do another Forrest Gump? They said, can you do another? Every movie that does well, somebody says, well, hey, just do another one. And that's just like saying, come up with another version of Coca-Cola, man. I don't think they want to do that necessarily. I don't think we're getting a bonfire of the vanities too, necessarily. I don't know if it's, is it PTSD all these years later to bring it up? Because I remember.

You know what? Yeah, that, again, we had no, we thought we were just. trying to make the best movie possible. And we had all this other big-ass pressure on it. On paper, it had everything. It had De Palma, had the Tom Wolf book. You had this amazing cast. And again, nobody knows anything. It's, you'd give you your best shot.

Nobody knows anything. When we were making it, I joked with Brian. I said, we are either making Gone with the Wind from the most popular book of its era, or we're making the fountain head, the most popular book of its era. And those are two very different movies

that achieve something different. All you can do is say, hey, man, as Bob Zemeck has said to me, when we were sitting on the park bench, you know, in Forrest Gump, and I asked him, is anybody going to care about this? He said, hey, man, it's just a roll of the dice. We have no idea if we're sowing the seeds of our own destruction as we go about and do this. Absolutely, absolutely the case. You do not know. Jumping ahead a bit, we never had the conversation about Philadelphia, which I don't know if, like, young folks now realize what that film meant, especially at that time. For you, Mr. America, playing a gay man dying of AIDS,

for Denzel taking a supporting role, for Demi coming off of Silence of the Lambs at the height of his powers. Did that feel like, I mean, there was more, did that feel like more than just a movie, a weight on that production that we were representing something very important in that time? You know, I sat down to talk with, I talked with Jonathan and Ron Niswander, who was the screenwriter in Ed Saxon, who was a good friend of mine and Jonathan's producer, just to talk about the timeliness of it.

And I, sitting in that first initial go-around, they mentioned, you know, Denzel. And I said, wow, I mean, that I would like to sit next to him because I believe he would put on a clinic. but then there was a sensibility of it the bold take that they were saying was this is never mind the subject matter actually no take it take into account the subject matter what the country was going through right then and there yeah but then put it in a competitive marketplace this was not going to be a cheap movie and it was going to be asking people to buy tickets at the same time any big popular you know they they would be going to the Decaplex, you know, the multiplex saying, you know, I can see, you know, this action movie, this rom-com, this teenage getaway thing, or this story ripped right from today's headlines about a man dying of AIDS. And it competed. And inside, inside it all was what I felt was, I remember in high school, they showed us a movie called Gentleman's Agreement. Yep. From the early 19th. Right. Yeah, yeah. Gregman Tech masquerading as a Jew,

And experiencing firsthand and nakedly the discrimination against Jewish, you know, they couldn't stay in certain hotels. They couldn't, there was all sorts of things. And I remember seeing in high school, and I thought, well, what's the big deal? Yeah, is a Jew? That doesn't necessarily speak to me here in 1970s. And I thought, you guys could, you guys could have as timely a moment here talking about this, about, you know, Andy dying, of Andy Diage of AIDS, because no one else is going to touch this thing for quite some time. And I think they said, you know, that's the point. And they did it inside the confines of a courtroom

drama, right? So yeah, I think if there was ever one time to say, okay, we're going to throw deep a little bit here. And we think you can bring along the caves because, you know what, I am, I'm the next door neighbor in that thing. I'm the, I'm the guy you work with at the bank. I'm the, you know, I'm the other teacher that teaches American history, but I'm dying of AIDS because of who I love and how we got it. So, yeah, that was, on one hand, I remember the critical reaction to that was three, three, and three. Because when we came out, a third of the reaction was, thank you very much for your heartfelt consideration of the story. a third of the people said, hey, this really is big and bold and a long throw. And a third was, this movie does not represent me whatsoever, mostly from a lot of the gay community.

Larry Kramer particularly, it said. Right. I do remember that. Right. And when I read that, I said, holy cow, this means we have touched some brand of nerve of a conversation that everybody is dying to have. And it ended up being that for a while. And again, only certain movies at certain times can do that. Okay, flights on Air Canada.

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they all hit you up and be like did i make the cut am i one of the four They all know how it works. They all know how it works. The thing is, you know, I see every movie I've been, I see it once or maybe one time and a half. And then after that, it just has to become, you know, Vox populi. Because if I go back and look at a movie, I think I remember more of what other people did in the scenes than what I did because, you know, I'm working at the time.

So I'm just watching them. But I think, oh, okay, I'm going to give my, a double that number, okay? I think I've made. Or the record is on tape. I made 900 movies, and I think eight of them are pretty good. Does Turner and Hooch count? That's obviously a few of them. Absolutely.

Turner and Hooch was a huge movie for me. I'm going to tell you, one of the things we ended up doing on Turner and Hooch. We dedicated Saturday, we shot six-day weeks in L.A. Turner and Hooch were dedicated to Hooch days. We worked, we would work eight hours straight because you can't work a dog more than eight hours, I guess. And we just let Hooch be Hooch, and I was his supporting actor. And that's what we did.

I think we did that for six Saturdays in a row. And we got down to some pretty dang good dog behavior there, I think. Amazing. Well, Lucy back here is a big fan of Hoot. She wanted me to mention it. Yeah, her ears perked up there. or sleep while we mentioned. Do you have, once's the last time

you had some kind of vague imposter syndrome on a set? Like, I'm not right for this role. They're going to fire me. Does that ever still happen to you? Happens every day on day two. Day two of shooting, day two of shooting the movie. There's a joke. If you

make it past day three, you're safe. Because here's what can happen. You know, they can come to you and say, okay, first day was great. We looked at the dailies. we need to talk you know anytime they say hey if you're the first week of shoot you know one thing start shooting movie on a Wednesday because if you have to get rid of anybody you have the weekend in order to to save them and I'll tell you on the second day title to the second day

of shooting Boris Gump we were in South Carolina and I was in my trailer and I said hey Bob's going to come by and talk to you. And if Bob, the director is going to come by and talk to you on day two, that could mean anything. And it turned out that Bob came in and we had a great conversation about, I see what you're trying to do here. I know you're nervous. There's a lot of stuff that's happening. But he just said, you're pushing. You're pushing too hard. And you can't do that. And I said, I know exactly what you're saying. Then I said, am i do i get to come back tomorrow and try some more he said he laughed he said yeah because he built into it this buffer zone this one scene that might or might not end up in it and what i just had to do

was i had to relax and inhabit the clothes as opposed to sell them if that if that makes it i'm talking like yeah and um because of that he he invested in me the greatest um bit of faith is that I could that I could stand the correction that I had the ego to understand what was what was at risk and that I would trust him in order to guide me along so you're asking for the great imposter syndrome not so much the night before we start shooting but I think as soon as you got a couple of stuff in the can you realize that I am now at the mercy of something that is beyond my power and that is whether or not the casting is right Right. Bob mentioned he dropped kind of a bombshell with me. I was talking about Back to the Future. And obviously, he's never going to do the sequel. He's said that many times. He wants to make a musical movie version. Obviously, there's a musical on Broadway. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm casting you. Musical. You're Doc Brown. Can you sing and dance as Doc Brown and Back to the Future of the Musical for Bob Zemeckis?

You do not, you do not, I don't want to scare the children. You do not want to hear me sing or dance around. That's just not going to happen. There's other people that are taking. 10 times better in that role than I am. Okay, fair enough. Last time we spoke, we talked about the whole comic book saturation of the universe. You're not against it, you said, if it's the right thing. Did I manifest anything? Have you had a conversation? You know, the thing is, and it's actually kind of like beating up right exactly with the state of the art, you know, never mind the commerce, you know, state of the industry right now.

The great thing that happened was, remember there was like in the 1970s and 80s, and 80s. 80s they tried to do like TV versions of Captain America and Spider-Man and the tech and even Batman you know the Adam West Batman sure the technology did not exist to make it look like it did in the comic books and now it does you can do anything at all you can probably say you know the Christopher Reeve Superman was the first one that came close because of the cutting edge of the technology right there allowed for like wire removal and right yeah yeah remember the tagline of that film you will believe a man can fly. And you know what? We all did when we saw. It was, it was quite extraordinary. What I think we are now enjoying the luxury of riches that because you can make anything

happen on screen now, we are being brought back to the concept, okay, that's true, but what is the story? Right. If anybody has heard me say, I said, without a doubt now, I've used this analogy, so I apologize, right. You can drain Lake Michigan and fill it with cuckoo clocks that then form a three-headed dragon that breathed fire and destroys the city of Chicago. You can do that to what purpose is the end of the day? What's the story and what is going to be saying about us? I think there was a period of time, and I certainly, I felt that way, too. We would see these fantastic movies, either DC or MCU or whatever it is. In order to see kind of like these better versions of ourselves, God, I feel like an ex-man sometimes. I'm as confused. Spider-

I'm as angry as Batman is, and I love my country as much as Captain America, you know. So I would like to emulate all those guys and women as well. Well, I think we've been down that road. We've had probably like 20 years, 15 years, in order to explore that kind of thing. And now I think we're in an evolutionary place. And the story is what? And the theme is what? Right.

And the point of this movie is what? And that's a good challenge for. any filmmaker, it just might not land in the roundhouse for the industry, you know, I think the industry office says, well, if this works, it'll work again. And I think the audience is just wait, they're far ahead of it. They can, they're, they see the familiar and they say, I've seen that already. What's next? And it's not just eye-popping stuff. It's like, what's the story? Tell me about myself up here so now. We're in a new territory on that every year, it seems. Have you ever broken bread with James Gunn at D.C., Kevin Feigey and Marvel?

No, no, I think it's because, you know, I'm not in their wheelhouse. Not against it, I guess, but at the same time, it's like, and I will tell you this right now, Josh Horst. Yeah. My combo plate is quite full. I got a lot, I got a lot of stuff that I'm dreaming of and, you know, trying to make happen. directing theater, what am I going to see next? Directing a feature, it's been a minute, going back to the stage, it's been a minute. Well, we are in preparation right now for the second half of the Ernie Krauss saga from Greyhound.

We will be going back and finishing out the stasis that was of World War II. There is always a, look, I'm very lucky right now is that I have a, enough irons in the fire that are all quite tantalizing, and we have to see where stuff shakes out. I talk to everybody that I have worked with in the past and say, hey, you're working on anything that's exciting? What do you got? And sometimes they slide in my way, and I say, hey, let me in on this. Another time to say, you know what, I don't have the bandwidth for this right now, but maybe I will in the future. I want to give some love before we wrap up our time to a film that I think you do have a lot of reverence for, and those that see it, I think love it, is cloud

Atlas, which is such a gorgeous piece of work that I wish more people have seen will continue to see. And perhaps in the long run, people will catch up with it. But that must have been such an opening, freeing experience playing a half dozen roles in such a beautiful film. Yeah. It was a labor of love for all of us. It was an extraordinary, first of all, the book was magnificent and the adaptation was the book but at the same time taken to a whole different developmental level. Here's the thing that happens, Josh. Time passes and I think it's the last Rubicon for any movie that exists, right? You could go back in history and look at what happened 20 years after even say the Wizard of Oz came out. You know, it was not viewed as a classic when it

came out. Even it's a wonderful life. This was just a movie that kind of came out and it finished somewhere mid-range in the sweepstakes, but time ends up taking over. You say yes to a movie. You see it when it's done. The, you know, the critics weigh in. The life of the movie is reflected in the box populi. Who goes and sees it. And then it sits in a crock pot in the back of everybody's consciousness for a while. And then maybe. 20 years later, out it comes, and you start paying attention to it in a brand new way. I'll, you know, I'll, I'll, I'll test you. Is there, is there something, is there something like that that is going through that kind of re-reiscovered renaissance right now? You and I could

probably talk about it for a little bit and, and come away with, wow, that's an extraordinary. That's an extraordinary, you know, like a movie like Hoop Dreams, the documentary might be fresh now, you know, in a different way that it, than it was. when it come out. So I have always have faith that because no movie goes away at all anymore. You know, you can find it. All you got to do is, you know, do some combination

of a web search and, you know, either pay for all the card or subscription fee. And you can see almost any movie that's out there. And the labors of love retain their love no matter how long they have, how long ago they've been made. We're going to end with the happy second fuse profoundly random questions, Tom,

as if my questions haven't already been random. we go. Dogs or cats? Where do you fall? Dogs. Because my wife is allergic to cats. Okay. It's a medical thing. We get it. Do you call? We know what you collect. Typewriters. What do you collect? Yeah. Okay. What's the wallpaper on your phone? It is how the computer from 2001 to Space Odyssey, the red, the red eyed lens. We had that our 2001 conversation before I get it. You never, I can't imagine you get mistaken for actors after all these years. The last time you were mistaken for somebody,

does it ever happen? Oh, Keaton all the time. I get, you know, yeah, me and Michael are, you know, some form of odd doppelganger back from a long time. I'm not, they don't, they don't say Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice to me exactly. But a lot of time, hey, are you that?

Hey, were you that? You know, I get that. What's the worst note a director has ever given you? Do, I don't believe you. Actually, that's the best note that you do. Yeah, that's a good. There is one, here's a, here's a tough one, always. Hey, have fun with it.

Hey. What's up on with this one? I know you don't want to do it like this, but try to have fun with it, you know. Oh, there's another one. Hey, we'll shoot it both ways. Yeah. I'm going to do what you want because there's no such thing as shooting it both ways. Yeah, this is about choices.

Yeah. And in the spirit of happy, second fuse, who's an actor that always makes you happy. You see them on screen, you light up. Oh, oh. An actor or, you know, does gender mean? No, the actress, too. That works, yeah, yeah.

Oh, my God. I'm going to say, currently, Scojo, I don't think that lady, that lady cannot do anything, cannot do anything wrong in my book. And actor-wise, I am a huge, huge fan of, I'm sorry, Mr. Pitt. He's got a level of confidence to him that I wish I could put in my pocket. When's the collab? You've never worked together, have you? No, I've seen him in a car.

Hey, man, what's going on? That's about all we've had. So we'll find. You'll get there. I want to see you. By the way, I also want to see you and Cruz at one point. I want to see those two Titans together. Oh, there you go.

You know, the one sheet could just say, Tom, and then, you know, whatever the name of the movie is. And finally, I promise this is it, food that makes you confused. You see it on the menu, I don't get it. What's up with, why do people eat this? Kinewa. No. Kinewa. Who are you kidding?

I would have millet or sorghum or something like that. Keenwa is packing material as far as I have a bowl of styrofoam. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, give me some styrofoam peanuts, you know, or, you know, or, you know, some shredded, some shredded paper. I don't, I, Keenwa, literally, they say, like, they said, oh, tonight we have Keenwa. I'll say, I'll have the thing with Keenwa, but please remove the quinoa. I'm not going to eat that.

America's sweetheart no more. You've just alienated the quinoa lobby, Tom. I'm sorry. Anybody can have it. This is America. You need any damn thing you want to when we sit down to eat. Come on. There you go. There you go. Congratulations on the fifth collaboration with Bob Zemeckis,

reteaming with Robin. It is a treat. This movie hits all the basis for someone like me that loves emotional storytelling that also pushes the envelope in every way possible. I hope it has a great audience. And yes, and short and long run, as we know, doesn't even matter as long as people see it. That's all that any filmmaker can ask for. There you go. Thank you, Thomas, always. Thank you, Josh. Great talk. Always great to me. Excuse me. Always great talking to. I look forward to the next time. I appreciate you.

All right. Have a good one, ma'am. Thank you. Take care. Bye-bye. And so ends another edition of Happy, Sad, Confused. Remember to review, rate, and subscribe to this show on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm a big podcast person. I'm Daisy Ridley, and I definitely wasn't pressured to do this by Josh. American history is full of infamous tales that continue.

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