The Bill Simmons Podcast - Part 2: Tom Hanks on ‘Cast Away’ Theories, ‘Forrest Gump’ Haters, and 40 Years of Memorable Movies

Episode Date: November 5, 2021

In Part 2 of a two-part podcast, The Ringer’s Bill Simmons is joined by actor and filmmaker Tom Hanks to discuss his long career, his three favorite films, his new movie, ‘Finch,’ baseball stories, and much more. Host: Bill Simmons Guest: Tom Hanks Producer: Kyle Crichton Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, if you missed it, we announced the dates for the rest of the films in our Music Box series on HBO. It's a Ringer Films special. You might have seen the Woodstock 99 doc that we did, a little sneak preview of the series back this summer. The other five are coming, starting on November 18th on HBO and HBO Max. Jagged, it's about Alanis Morissette. After that, DMX, Kenny G, Saturday Night Fever,

the guy who made it, Robert Stigwood. And last but not least, Juice WRLD. Five weeks in a row. I put the posters on my Instagram, if you didn't see that. Really excited for this series. November 18th, mark it down in your calendar. HBO, HBO Max, Music Box, coming back.

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and talked to Rember Brown about the Braves winning the World Series. This is part two. The one, the only, Tom Hanks. First, Pearl Chip! All right, Tom Hanks is here. He's been in my life for a long time. I went way back in the Blizzard Buddies days. I had season tickets for everything you've done for the last 40 plus years. I don't even know where to start.

By the way, we give those away, season tickets. It's not like you paid money for them. They're free. That's true. They're available here at the radio station and at Happy Donuts down on Lancashire. When I was writing for ESPN, I got a mailbag question like 10 years ago from a reader who said,

if you ask a thousand people to list their top three favorite Tom Hanks movies, and you took Gump off the table, you're like, you can't vote for Gump, but you give your next three, that all the responses would be different for all the people. And I actually did a test with 30 people I knew, and 26 of them had completely different lists. Hey, I win. I win. So what are your three? You have to pick three. What are your three?

No, you got to do it. No, I would. No, I do it. But I would not do it according to the way the movies came out. I would do it by way of the personal experience that I had when I was doing it. Okay, do that. Let's hear it. Which is very different. All right.

You got three. I can have three, you say? Three. So you can do degree of difficulty. You can do what it meant the most to you as you were filming it, whatever category you want. Number one, I would probably say number one would be League of Their Own because all I did all summer was play baseball. I shagged flies. I ate turkey dogs. I took infield with Robin Knight and a ton of other people. I played baseball all summer long in Evansville, Indiana and in Wrigley Field. You know, there was a day of doing that.

And I had all my kids with me. I had all my family with me. It was a big-ass, uh, in the Midwest. We lived in a house in the middle of cornfields. We went to, um, a Burger King at, at, at night and Dairy Queen in the afternoon. We got our, our food at, at Hook's and our drugs at Schnook's. And, uh, it was a great summer and my entire family still speaks about it uh then i would say uh probably i would say cast away because it was just uh we had just bold adventures when we were making that movie i mean we're around the middle of the ocean just you know

uh trying to grab shots and we were off uh uh in fiji on two different occasions and i had again had the whole family with me. There was nothing but adventures every single day, every single night. Understand on Castaway. And these are the creature comforts. Every movie has them. But these were extraordinary. Because let me tell you, Bill, I don't know how you would get to that.

Oh, that hideous little box of a studio in Camden, Connecticut. Where were those ESPN studios? Where were they? Bristol. Yeah, Bristol, Connecticut. I don't know how you got to work every morning to that. But here's how I got to work every day on Castaway. The sun was not yet up in the east,

and I would get up wearing nothing but a Speedo and a T-shirt. I'd make myself a cup of coffee. The would be quiet everybody would be in bed stars were out moon was out the sky wasn't even yet to turn blue in the east and i would make a cup of coffee then i would stroll down um the road the gravel road to where the pier was. And then I would swim out to the special fishing boat, a marlin boat that had these two huge, massive outboard motors on the back of it and a massive fly bridge. And I would swim out to the boat, get on with the pilot and the mate and one of the guys from the crew. And we would head out. And for 50 minutes, the sun would be rising behind us on the open sea.

And we would be heading towards the island of Monariki, which is where we shot. And by the time we got to the island, the sun was up. The support boats were there with the rest of the crew. Some of them are already on land and the boat would stop. And I would come down from the fly bridge because you couldn't sit in the boat itself because the seas were so heavy. So you really had to stand the entire way. And I would swim ashore. And then we'd get dressed and do the movie and, you know, Wilson and, you know, all that stuff that was going on. And then at the end of the day, we had to stop about an hour before sunset because there was no power on the island.

So we shot during daylight hours and with an hour left, kind of said, all right, that's it. And the crew had to get back on their boats and I would swim out to my Marlin boat. And this time, the sun is setting behind me and the sky to the east is getting darker and darker and darker. And we would just head for the horizon stars for 50 minutes, me standing on the fly bridge, pondering all that we had shot and what we still had to do. Then we get to the island where we were staying, me and the family, and I would swim ashore, pull myself up by the pier, walk down the gravel driveway to our house to a lovely dinner outside. And my, I had, I had two of my, my boys were young and they had

nothing but adventures and my wife and my in-laws, they were all there. And that's how we made the movie for the, for not the entire film, but for, I'm going to put together, say, two and a half months of what that shooting was. That was a vacation. And the last film I would say that was magical for me was a movie called Cloud Atlas that I made with the Wachowskis and Tom Titper. We shot it on a hope and a dream and nothing but a circle of love in Berlin and Mallorca and Dresden. And I want to say, do we go to Dusseldorf? Did we go to Frankfurt? Somewhere. So we were bombing all over Germany. And that was the first time I had ever shot extensively in Germany. And I was surrounded by history. But the work itself was we were part of this big, massive ensemble of fantastic people who were just trying to do the hardest, best work on this, I mean, deep throw. I mean, I always say,

as Kenny Stable said, throw deep, baby. That whole movie was such a deep throw that making it was magical. And again, I had a lot of my family come over and we all saw Berlin and former East Germany, made a lot of cool friends on the German crew over there. And that would be my big three. That's a good one. That was a great list. See, I wouldn't have expected that three. I want to talk about Castaway, my favorite Tom Hanks movie. We do this Rewatchables movie podcast. I hosted that one by myself because I felt like I had to, because Chuck was on the Island for over an hour. So I had no co-host. I just did it by myself. All right. That's good. It seemed like an intensely personal movie for

you. And you know, you had to put on weight, which you gained like 50 pounds and then you had to take six months off and then lose a bunch of weight and then start we took we took a whole year off we worked on that uh bill broils and myself worked on that movie for four years just trying to figure out the three acts yeah we really we really only had an act and a half it came about because i read an article about fedEx. And I did not realize the common sense business model that FedEx had. And when I read that planes, huge planes, not 747s, but like DC-10s, you know, filled with nothing but packages, left Los Angeles to fly to Australia every single night at two o'clock in the morning, every single night. So that's a crew of probably six, because you've got to switch pilots on the way over. And so six people and nothing but packages flew across the Pacific every single day,

every single night, one going and one coming. So actually there's two planes. And I thought, what happens if one of those goes down? And from that came the movie. Bill Broyles and I were working on a couple. I knew Bill because he had written Apollo 13 and we'd lived close to each other. And I was a big fan because he had, you know, he had started Texas Monthly and he'd been the Newsweek editor for a while. And he was one of the forces behind China Beach, the TV show. So we were trying to work out something else, and one day he said to me,

what else do you have? I mean, what else are you thinking about? And I told him this story about FedEx guys, and I just thought, I think it would be amazing to make a movie about a guy who truly is stranded for four years. So that's the act you have. You have one and a half acts,

but you know you have at least that. We worked on how he got there. And Bill said, well, you know, the fact is, just finding food, shelter, water, and fire, well, that would be dramatic structure unto itself. I mean, there'd be real drama in all those things. And I said, yeah, exactly. So we worked on it for four years.

And then we talked to Bob Zemeckis briefly. And he said, ah, that's an interesting idea. Yeah, well, I don't know, man. You got to, how do you, you know, alone on an island, that's going to be tough. And then how does he get off? And we said, well, we had ideas like the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition shows up with models, you know, and an abandoned, you know, desert island. We thought that would be it. We thought maybe we never came to pirates or anything like that. We never had bad guys, but we thought maybe, you know, some sort of like lifestyles of the Richard family. You get on your own magical island. You know, we thought maybe those guys

would show up. Bob never bought any of that. And he went away for two years. Then he came back. He came back and what did he say? Yeah. Hey, you're still working on that. We called it Chuck of the Jungle for the time. You're still working on that thing, Chuck of the Jungle? And I said, well, yeah, we are. And we still don't. And he said, well, you know what? You need that. And then he mapped out the theme of the rest of Act 2 and all of Act 3. And once that happened, then it was just we had to figure out a way in order to make it. Because with that four-year gap in the middle, there's

no way you could do a special effects version of that. And I was dead set against the idea of putting on a fake beard in the South Pacific and swimming in the ocean because they're impossible to keep on and they're very uncomfortable. And it would take hours every day to put it on and take it off. So there was no way to shoot it. Let's be honest though, you have a ton of juice at this point.

You're probably one of the few actors who has the ability to convince a studio to make a movie that you're going to shut down production for a year and then go back. You'd think so, wouldn't you? Yeah, I would say yes. You'd think so. That would be the assumption, wouldn't it?

Yeah. You'd think, oh yeah, you get to do it. No, no, it's still just it's still it's still just money yeah and it's still just you know hey not all your movies are hits you know there's that and there's like well we don't we don't we don't have it in our you know we have a slate of films we don't have room for anything like this and they said well you know bob bob bob zemeckis bob hey gump hey you know we got a track record they go yeah yeah I don't know this is an expensive movie and Bob floated to them the the idea of he says well you know if we had

any you know he had any guts here's how we'd make this movie I said what well we'd make the fat part and then take a year off and you lose all the weight. And we'd come back and shoot the second half, the skinny part with a year in between. And that's never been done at this. Never. No, no. I mean,

no, there's, there's movies that are like, you know, there's a number of films, uh, like the link later stuff where they come back. But not like this.

No, not in, not in, uh, not 12 years later. The, because here's not 12 years later. Because here's what had to happen. You know, a production office has to stay open.

Cash flow has to be maintained. The crew has to be held. The only advantage it had was only one, well, really only one actor, I guess. Although, you know, there was Helen Hunt and Nick Searcy and a few others. But Bob struck a deal with 20th Century Fox. He said, we'll make the first half of this movie. And in the year between, I'll make another movie for you guys. Oh, so one for them, one for you.

Yeah. There was, he made, with Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer, he made What Lies Beneath in the year off that I had where I was off trying to lose the weight and grow the beard and all that stuff. So while he was doing that, I was also working on putting together Band of Brothers. This was like 1999 going into 2000. And when I was off doing a research trip, starving and getting skinny with big hair and all that kind of stuff, I fell in a hole in Berchtesgaden and separated my shoulder, dislocated my shoulder,

and had to recover from that for six weeks. And that made me lose some of my physical regimen. But I was still able to show up very hairy and very skinny. And we went right back to the same island where we had left a year before and started shooting. And we did, you know, we were figuring out. And in the meantime, in the year between, Bob put together the first half of the movie and we watched it in real time. And then he said, OK, now that's what we have. What are we going to do? And we the permutations that the screenplay had gone through in that first half, for example, you know, Chuck, Chuck Nolan talked to himself a lot. He was explaining, you know, because you want everybody who reads the script to understand what he's thinking.

And and Bob was always saying, well, I ain't cinema. That's, you know know that's dialogue and i said once we got to the island and we were we literally shot came to the i swear to god the first shot of chuck on the island when he was fat i said bob i don't know why i'm talking here why who am i he said i don't think i should talk unless i think somebody is here yeah or there's a you know there's there's one moment where i sort of say to the to the pilot who died that i buried i kind of say well that's it and that's it and so bob said yeah let's do it you know so no dialogue unless who's there hey save me some or wilson you know that stuff was there um and uh it really did impact the second half of everything we did because it kind of like jump-started it and uh

we ended up dreaming bigger and getting all sorts of stuff that wasn't in the wasn't on the pages when we returned then in the uh in the was it the first half for this no in the second half when i was i can't remember i can't remember if i if i made fire in the first half of the second that was the first half i'm here i remember everything yeah it's what i'm first time when i made fire in the first half i was i had a slight cut a blister my knee. And when I was kneeling in the sand, a piece of organic material got under my skin and gave me a staph infection that put me in the hospital for three days and kept me away from work for three weeks.

So we lost three weeks, but Bob loved it because we were able to rewrite some pages and rebuild a bunch of the set and stuff like that. So that was just one huge, big, massive physiological adventure every step of the way. At the same time, we were really trying to crack a different sort of emotive plane of, well, what does all this mean? What does it mean when everybody thinks you're dead? The logic of why he's gone, was that's the only thing i cared about i said what once we can understand why he's on this island and that's where bob came in with how graphic the crash was and the death of the pilot and uh

the the desperate uh need for a fire water shelter uh, and then last of all things, company, somebody to talk to. Bob, Bob, Bob came and was like, you know, because we eventually just said, oh, I just absentmindedly drew a face on a volleyball and called it Wilson. And Bob said, no, you can't, no, you can't just decide that. It's got to like be a surprise i i think i think i think he should be i think he should be uh an offspring of chuck's own blood and i said well let how could we well let's figure out a way for me to get cut yeah i get so mad i pick up the volleyball and throw it and then inadvertently is this mark that looks like a face that anyway so the rest you know what the rest of the movie is so uh that's you know i can talk till the cows come home

about and then we came up with this amazing moment you know the first scene with helen hunt and we had a luma cray we i can go on and on there's interesting lessons about that though it took so many years to innovate and add to stuff. I think that's one of the reasons it's a special movie. I remember I saw it in the theater. I really liked it. I didn't totally understand the ending, and it didn't work for me.

And the reason I didn't understand it was I literally didn't understand it. And then when I saw it again, when it made the cable rounds, it was one of those, oh, I'm an idiot. He turns around, and Bettina, he's turning back., I'm an idiot. He turns around and Bettina, he's turning back.

Because I'm just, he's on the road, he's looking around, but you realize the way it's shot, he turns, he turns, he turns, and then he turns to the place and he's turning back to where his car had just come from. It's a lot when you're in the theater, especially if you've had

some popcorn and some M&M's and some soda Maybe you're not following it entirely This is the thing that comes around Because you can sort, I mean, that might have been one of the Early films where you could actually see it anytime You wanted to because You didn't have to Wait for it to play on HBO or something

Like that, I think you could actually pull it up Or certainly have the DVD, you could rent it From Blockbuster anytime you wanted to. But Bob was that that was that was not the first movie, but that was the one where all three of us, everybody who was working on Bob, myself and Bill, that was when we said there's no there's no hurrying this process. Yeah. We just have to figure out what we want to say and then take the time in order to say it. As opposed to, hey, guys, come on, sun's go down. You got to shoot something. Say something funny here and get us out of the sea. Look, we'll cut here. We'll cut here. We'll go boom, boom, boom.

Bob doesn't shoot that way. Bob says, well, I don't know. What do you think we should do here? And this is when we're on an island. I weigh 140 pounds and I have lice crawling around. Is that how much you weighed? No, no. I got down to- Had to be like 160, right? No, no. I wanted to. I'm six feet tall and I wanted to get down to 159. I got down to about 171, I think, because I'd lost those six weeks. I'd lost those six weeks. I couldn't do my workout for six weeks. But by that time, CGI came in and they were able to do a little bit of body sculpting.

But I was very skinny. I was very skinny and very hungry. I think one of the reasons that movie's always on, and my theory with this stuff is these movies are always on because the channels they know and the streamers, they're basically, they're going for clicks, right? They're going for eyeballs. And if somebody is repeatedly watching the same movie, and Castaway is one of those, it's had this 21-year shelf life.

I think one of the reasons is it's a weirdly relaxing movie. Like there's a vibe, you're on an island. It's quiet. There's no musical score for over an hour. And you can just kind of have it on as you're doing other things. Meanwhile, there's this horrible plane crash in it. Oh, Castaway's on. Great. It's kind of like a cross between this old house and Bob.

Who's the guy that painted the pictures? You know, the sound of the guy that painted the pictures. Guy with the big hair. Right. They just made a documentary about him. Yeah, let's add a little tree here. But it has that kind of like tactile feel.

Bob Ross. Bob Ross, a golf in the background kind of sound. Oh, that's a lovely layup there on 17. That's going to be fun. It's kind of crazy now when you look back. Like, it didn't do as well as the Oscars as I think it's kind of crazy now when you look back, like it did, I didn't do as well as the Oscars as I think people thought. And I,

and some of that was back. It was, you were in that weird, Michael Jordan was in that mode too. When he lost to Carl Malone, he lost the MVP that year. Cause everyone was kind of his excellence. It's been established.

People get bored after a while. You would just made all of these great movies in a row. And at some point it starts bouncing off people. It doesn't seem real anymore. The whole thing is a sweepstakes. Every year there's this big-ass playoff that goes on. A lot of times the first seed is eliminated. The team that only won 88 games for the year actually starts playing for the World Series.

There's no reason to get worked up about it because at the end of the day, you get invited to the pancake breakfast. You get a little free stuff and you get to hobnob with all the other famous people in the famous people's club. It's not bad. It's always fun. And then I got to tell you, most people, I am constantly congratulated for winning best actor for Castaway. Really? So people can't even keep track of it anymore. They don't know. They just know you won too.

No, yeah. Oh, yeah. I just love the Philadelphia in Castaway. I just love how you won. It's like, okay, well, thank you very much. And move on from there. This episode is brought to you by Movember. The mustache is back with a vengeance.

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and prostate and testicular cancer research. And if you don't want to grow a mustache, you can still walk or run 60 kilometers, host an event, or set your own goal and mow your own way. Do great things this November. Sign up now. Just search Movember. So your career, and again, I was there from the beginning, Uncle Ned. How old are you? How old are you? I just turned 52. Oh, okay. All right.

So yeah. I literally, I watched Bosom Buddies. And then when you crossed over as Uncle Ned on Family Ties, it was kind of a big moment. But TV, there was way more people watching TV back. I mean, 30 million people would watch some of those shows. Well, that's true. I mean, we were dead last in Bosom Buddies in our time slot. And number one was Tom Selleck on CBS in Magnum P.I.

And the difference between them was like 28 million people watched Magnum P.I. and 14 million people watched Bosom Buddies. Well, if there was a TV show that got 14 million people now. You'd be number one. Oh, it'd be huge. Yeah. And Michael Keaton was on here a few weeks ago and we were talking about that era of that early mid 80s era where all of you guys are coming up at the same time. And Seinfeld's coming up and Leno. Letterman is establishing himself. Keaton's doing Working Stiffs. He's doing Murphy. Report to Murphy.

He ends up doing stuff with Ron and Brian. He's on... Night Shift. Night Shift. Yeah. He started... Yeah. He and I were...

For a while, we were like... We almost ran into each other on every audition you know we were we were the two we were you know there was a number of us that were just like oh here's the here's a relatively funny goofy guys that are you know I've got some stuff under their belt and let's let's think about them for these next things yeah like you easily could have been in Night Shift he probably could have been in Bachelor Party like You could have swapped 10 of those movies. Oh, yeah. We could have gone back and forth a couple of times.

Every time I'd go and see Keaton in a movie, I'd say, man, hey, I couldn't have done that. It's good. I wanted it, but I wouldn't have been as good as Keaton. Well, then you had 1984. You have Splash and Bachelor Party in the same year. It was incredible vindication for all the Tom Hanks fans. as good as he was. Well, then you had, in 1984, you have Splash and Bachelor parted in the same year and it's like, it was incredible vindication

for all the Tom Hanks fans. Because they were like, Tom Hanks is a movie star now. I'm like, yeah, I told you. I was telling you guys about this Tom Hanks guy for years.

It finally happened. I'll tell you, I'll tell you something. The very first review I read of, you know, this is a big deal, man. I've gone from,

you know, worrying about, you know, how I'm going to keep the Pontiac 2000 paid for, you know, this is a big deal, man. I've gone from, you know, worrying about, you know, how I'm going to keep the Pontiac 2000 paid for, you know. Well, your show got canceled, right? You didn't, yeah, I was gone in 83. I was gone. I was, I was, I was, I was, I was waiting for the phone to ring. And then this, this movie comes along and Opie Cunningham is directing it. Nobody wants to make it. And it's for old Disney, you know, Disney doesn't really have any money. And we sort of cobbled together this thing.

I went, when I went to read, I had never met Ron. I only knew of him, you know, he wasn't on, he wasn't at Paramount Studios when we did Boys and Buddies. He had already left Happy Days and was already directing movies. And so, but he and Brian Grazer were sort of, we were peers. They were older than me, but it was like, you know, everybody grew up with Ron, but he was a cool cat. He would just say, yeah, hey man, it's a wacky business. Wowie zowie.

And I thought I was rooting for the funny brother. And then I got a call from him and he said, listen, we want you for the movie, but we want you for the movie but we want you for the the guy i said oh oh oh landy oh wow and he says so you got that part but i want you to come in because i need you to read with this actress that i really want and the studio's giving me some flack uh daryl hannah so i want you to come in and do a screen test and i didn't even know what a screen test was really i didn't even know what a screen test was really. I mean, I'd done some video stuff and it was going to be a big deal. And I said, oh, great, fine. Yes. Can I ask one question? He says, yeah. Is there a way I can, I'm going to

lose this job because of this screen test? I said, no, no, no, we're not, we're only going to see the back of your head. So yeah, that, that came along and so we made the movie and it was i gotta say it was damn good now understand this is really still old old show business the type that has gone with the wind now uh home video was crappy vhs's that were just beginning to show up vhs machine still cost a family 1500 bucks you You know, there weren't, there weren't a lot of, if you were able to rent a home video, you had to go like to Doug's, uh, tape, tape, you know, shoppy, uh, OPP. So, um, so it was an old fashioned movie that had to make the money at the box office or wasn't going to do anything and ended up doing it ended up being good enough but the first i came home really late one night from helping friends uh uh build sets or

something like that and lo and behold los angeles magazine was there came out once a month and i knew that it had a review of splash and it's it's 11 or 13 later than I got, two of my kids are sleeping. And I think, should I read this? Should I read this harbinger of the future? Should I read this omen that if it's good, it'll fill me with way too much overconfidence? And if it's bad, it will send me into a hopper of despair. Should I bother doing this right now? I said, yeah, I think I will. So this is like a real fork in the road moment for you. Oh, yeah. I actually thought I should probably just let this go until the morning or not read it all and find out about it after the fact.

But I said, I don't think I'll be able to sleep wondering what's in it. So I opened it up to the, uh, to the, uh, uh, review pages. And from, from the first paragraph, you, you can tell this is a good review for this movie. Surprising, you know, Ron Howard, you know, uh, pulling up his, his good references American Graffiti and some of the TV movies he had did. So this is a guy who was really dedicated. Daryl Hannah, righteously luminous in every way, a woman of mystery. She had already done a couple of things. She had been in Blade Runner. So they were pulling out the really, really, really great references for them. John Candy, the genius of Second City TV. At last, he has found something that translates to this, and this must bode well for great comedy character actors like him, hearkening back to the days of entertainers like Jackie Gleason.

And on top of that, Eugene Levy. If there's an underappreciated genius in comedy from Second City, it is Gene Levy. Eugene Levy comes in, he doesn't do a lot, but what he does in that movie is just absolutely priceless. And I read the rest of the review, and it mentioned the DP, and it mentioned a couple of things. It it was coming at this from disney for touchdown it didn't mention my name oh my god it said nothing about me my name did not appear in the review so it's now you know it's one o'clock in the review. So it's now, you know, it's one o'clock in the morning. And all I could remember

is thinking of like, well, there's the yin to the yang of thinking the movie was pretty good. So is there a lesson to be learned here? What have you learned? Well, I think the lesson is that, you know, this too shall pass, man. You got to let, you got to let, just as you got to let the bad stuff roll off, you got to let the good stuff roll off and go away as well. But then you eventually got good reviews and then you're, and then you're off. Yeah. The movie was very popular and people liked it. Yeah.

Yeah, they did. And it was, it was a lovely movie and about a million girls were named Madison, you know, after that. Because Madison, that's who Daryl, the mermaid's name was Madison. And yeah. And then after that, people said, hey, you're in a movie. So we want you to be in a bunch of other movies too. And I just kept doing them. Started cranking them out.

Plus. Well, yeah. Hey, they offered me a job, man. No, you didn't. You don't say no to a job. A lot of them have held up. Um, at the same time, now you're, you're popping on Letterman. You have chemistry with him. That's like the best late night show. And you start doing the SNL hosting and you become one of the best, you know,

recurring hosts that they've ever had. So you have, you have this weird relationship with two of the most important three late night properties, I would say, the last 40 years. You're just kind of in the middle of it. But especially the SNL stuff. I think those guys would have had you on twice a year if you would have done it. Do you feel like you were the unofficial cast member? I'm glad I got on by that just because I was, you know, some guy promoting some movie.

Because if I had tried to audition for it, I would have choked. I never would have been able to have been in the company. I was able to come in at their invitation as opposed to trying to get it. I could not quite fathom that that was part of it. Because when we were doing Bosom Buddies, you know, Peter Scolari i would would examine david letterman at night that's sctv as well and of course snl was still a uh it had just come off that you know those other kind of the years of the dick ebersole years so i didn't do it until it was kind of lauren was back and um i had uh i and I had I had enough of I had enough P&A money, prints and advertising money

to warrant an invitation you remember very well the first time you're on a show like SNL or the first time you come up out on David Letterman and you do a pretty good spot look I'm not a stand up comedian I didn't have an act

I was just trying to get by on, you know, charm and joy, joy, joy, joy, joy. I was just trying to be as funny as the rest of the show.

That's it. And if that meant being louder than anybody else, well, then you'd hear my voice instead of anybody else. And then you get big in like 1988. And at that point you're in this, I think you're an A-list comic actor at that point. But big, you say A-minus?

No, I would actually say, I'd say, you know, the best guy on the B team. I think I was still junior varsity. You know, at that time, you know, I would say everybody, the studios were all trying to come out with some less shinier version or less hip version of what Bill Murray was doing. Bill and Danny Aykroyd and the Ghostbusters. Actually, anything that Bill Murray did. Chevy was the other one. Yeah, they were such a level of commercial. Not only were they incredibly popular, but there was also some magic elixir that was being done by the likes of those guys. So if you were kind of goofy looking and had any sort of degree of charm,

there was this whole kind of lesser market for that stuff. I mean, if you go back, there's a ton of movies that are set in an arena that is about a young guy trying to fall in love, have sex, and give it to the man at the same time, you know, go against the rules. He's unpredictable. There was an awful lot of guys like that and uh i was able to ride that for quite some time just because it was coin of the realm they were they were churning that stuff out yeah bachelor party is a funny one because it's like what is this guy rebelling against yeah there's one guy at the bachelor party who was fighting to not get laid. He's like, no, everybody else do it. I'm not going to.

His wife's rich family. He's like, he just can't quite fit in with the rich family because he doesn't play tennis as much. Yeah. It was good. The 80s were hilarious. Yeah, they were, they were, they were, in a lot of ways that was the hipper stuff that was being offered on TV. You know, you had, you did have the, towards the mid eighties or with the resurgence of SNL. And I'm, look, you have to give David Letterman, not just, not just props, but he, he, he brought a, I still miss him. I always think somehow, Oh, I'm going to stay up late at night.

I can watch Letterman. He's not there. He brought that kind of like but he was just, I mean, everything from the top 10 list to the home office, you know, in Omaha to his mom in Piazza, Larry Bud Melman, and also the combination of him with Paul. It was like, oh, here's an hour for us, the folks that have not been able to break into the mainstream yet they gave us an hour at 12 30 at night uh along with snl that by that time was a uh you know that was that was the institution because that was the granddaddy of them all but it still only came on once a week the fact that dave dave was on every night you know right at the time when you could you could set your recorders you know by and have it the next morning. That was a godsend.

That was a comedic godsend. Because there was also a theme that he was examining, and that was, can you believe they're getting away with this? It was that, you know, it was that kind of thing. And, you know, in all honesty, ESPN came along more or less at the same time. Let's just go right to the highlights and come up with the, you know, funny, funny callbacks to everything. I mean, I still say something that Stuart,

he passed away from Stuart Scott. He did this, he did this thing where, where he would show like an error of a guy under a pop fly and he would blow it. And it was definitely worth a highlight reel, but he always did this thing. And it's hit deep in the center, deep in the short left. And so I still do that every now and then. I still do it. Well, there was a lot less group think

back then, too, where if you like something, unless your friends also agreed that they liked it, you didn't really know who else liked it. So you would gravitate toward these things. ESPN's a good example. You'd be like, I love that SportsCenter anchor, but you had no idea if a million

other people loved them. As a matter of fact, when you went to the movies, you didn't really know if they were good or not till, till Monday. Cause the people on Friday went to the movies and when they came to work on Monday or they came to school on Monday, they said it was either great and hilarious or not. And movies for a lot longer in theaters. So you, you know, you actually did sort of like discover them. That began to, that began to change by the time what year you could tell me what what year was big was that 86 87 big was 88 yeah yeah so it was still pre-phones but it was by that time it was huge uh home video was already uh going off and all the budgets were

there um anytime a movie came out everybody who was in it went off on a kind of like a i i was called the celebrity meal train. It was a month-long dog and pony show where you went all over America first and then all over Europe later on. And everybody wanted to talk to you and everybody wanted to cover it and everybody wanted to. It was coin of the realm. I mean, it was like as much of a commodity to the economy as was crude oil or, you know, uh, a new, uh, the new model car that was suddenly selling a lot or not selling a lot. Well, there was also, it's funny, Keaton and I just talked about this cause he had Batman

in 89. Yeah. There was that whole infrastructure that was moving in place, right? Where we had blockbuster, we could rewatch the movies, but then you had that premier magazine kind of culture where for the first time I knew what movies were coming and the casting decisions. I remember Bonfire of the Vanities, which was

Oh, that was huge. Yeah, that was a movie. There was so much anticipation for who the three were going to be and you were one of the stars. Me and Bruce and Melanie, yeah. And then kind of people were ready to get mad if it wasn't good. And then with that one, that took,

that movie took a lot of shit. Oh, you know, oh, my God did it. But we, you know, when we were doing it,

Brian De Palma directed it. No, I always, I always said, look, Brian, this movie is either going to be gone with the wind that everybody loved or the fountainhead that everybody hated. It's by,

this is going to be binary, man. Cause the book itself, you know, Tom, by the way, it came out just like, I want to say 50 years ago today or 40 years ago today or something. The book, the book itself, it's such a, it's the story of the interior thoughts of everybody. And visually, it's about like styrofoam peanutsull around in the back of a car. And that stuff's hard to capture cinematically. And, you know, the book was so huge, it had so many anticipations. I had people, before we even started making it, I had people stopping me on the street saying,

you are not Sherman McCoy. They felt an attachment to him yeah i said duly noted thank you very much uh but that that's secondary to just the fact of how hard that is to do in the first place you know i there is a there is a great great clip of clark gable at the premiere of gone with the wind in Atlanta in 1939, in which they said, well, you know, it's all that old-fashioned, well, Mr. Gabler, I'm sure that everybody here is greatly looking forward to your role as Rhett Butler. Do you have any expectations of how you're feeling right now?

Clark Gabler. Well, as everyone knows, those who have read the book have a very specific sense of who Rhett Butler is. My hope only is that, well, I live up to what that sense is. And if I do not, well, that's just tough luck. He says something like that. And that is the case with any movie that you're making from a much beloved novel. The lesson there is this too shall pass.

Just because it's a great novel doesn't mean that you have anything built into what's going to be coming along with a motion picture. It's got to click on all cylinders. Otherwise, it just don't. Well, you think like that movie is a big swing. Big is a big swing. Big is a movie that probably shouldn't work fundamentally.

And yet it is one of the most beloved movies of its kind of the last 35 years. It lives on. People pass it to their kids. I remember the first time my kids were old enough to watch that, immediately put that on. And it's just going to go on for the next 200 years. There's also a world in which

that movie's a disaster and it goes away and nobody ever thinks of it again in a month. Right? The way things are so cyclicalical we were the last of four movies that were essentially dealing with the same gimmick the body switch gimmick yeah body the body switch gimmick of an old guy into a young guy's body or vice versa i could i think i think that was the name of one of the movies vice versa um and we were judge you're right oh was that right okay yeah and then and we came out last you know we were the last of the four to come out and um uh it was just inexplicably fabulous but look i gotta give like this was all penny i mean yeah penny it was jim

brooks and penny marshall here's here's, this is my understanding of the backstory was, Whoopi Goldberg was making a movie called Jumpin' Jack Flash. And for two, and for two weeks, it wasn't going well. And Jim Brooks said, called up Penny Marshall, said, you are going to, you are a director of motion pictures, and you are going to come in and direct this movie on Monday. Dump and Jack Flash. So they fired one day.

And if you do that, I will give you, you will direct your next movie. And we'll figure out what that is later on. So it was all her. And she directed and cast. Everything that she did was slow to the point of maddening, methodical. Why is this taking so long? And I'll tell you, I'll tell you this one story. Both Penny and Bob Greenhut, who was the was the producer, the line producer. So we were in New York and we were shooting the movie.

And look, on some ways, I have an instinct of what I wanted to do, but in other times, I'm desperate for anybody to help. You know, the costume, Penny, how do you want this? What should we do? I think I'd do this, but is that going to be enough? And Penny shot a lot of takes and I'm trying this and try that and la la la so we had shot a version of uh the zoltar machine at rye playland we shot a version of it where i wish i was big or no actually the final thing uh where i go back to him and try to get turned back into a kid we shot one version of it and it didn't work so we we ended up putting in the schedule to shoot another version of it which we did and then penny decided they actually needed even more of what it was and that didn't quite work so they came back bob gruden we're actually shooting the

scene in a bank in manhattan where i cash my check for the first time and get cash with a young Billy Rushton. And Bob Greenhut came up and said, hey, did you hear we're going to go back and shoot some more in Rye at the Zoltar machine? And I said, why? I mean, geez, we've had three passes at it. Penny, Penny, are we actually going back and shooting some more at the Zoltar thing? Yeah, yeah, we need to try something.

Look, guys, guys, we're wasting time. I got to, I got to, we got to do all the whole, Misha Goss and I'm going to have to get back in the emotive state and we're going to have to do it again. Can't we just, can't we just, you know, table it? Let's, let's, let's cut them. Let's finish the movie, cut it together, and then figure out what the scene should be after that. He said, well, I mean, Penny has him.

I want to try this. Well, we're going to keep trying stuff, and it's never going to work. We're never going to find out. I mean, why in the world are we going back to shoot this a fourth time? And Bob Greenhut said, because they're letting us. I said, oh, okay. Actually, I understand that. Okay. All right. We did that. And that's one of those lessons that you learn. It's like, never turn down a chance to do it again. Never, never not take another swing at that thing. Always come back and say, oh, we're going to go back and do some more.

Great. Let's try this. Or you want another take, Tom? Sure. Let's do it. Shoot until we lose the light. I'll go on as many times as you want. That's what I do now. Didn't wasn't quite aware of the richness and the luxury of that opportunity then. Because, you know, you're full yourself and you think that nothing's more important than making the day i think you undersold your performance in that movie well i think that was an incredibly incredibly hard movie to pull off you're playing somebody who's 13 year old internally but is built like a 30 year old then you have to have kind of that kind of clumsiness that somebody has when they're 12 13 like there's some real thought put into that. There would, no, there was, I don't, I, but it's hard to know. I don't know how to explain what the process is. Cause I mean, how'd you come up with that moment?

I don't know, man. You just throw yourself into a maelstrom of, of, of self-doubt, self-loathing and some degree of instinct that takes you where you're going to go when you try it. The thing is I, I, this was a while back and I had done Punchline with Sally Field and David Seltzer before we made Big and then we made Big after it, but they were released in the opposite way. So I had just gone through this grown up, bitter, really screwed up comedian that just needed more of everything for his own ego and salvation and existence. And we, you know, kind of like got beaten up in the whole process of

trying to come up with an act and all of, and working with Sally as well, who was a gem and at the same time was doing this ephemeral thing that I didn't quite recognize as, uh, performing in it, performing an emotion picture. Um, and I was like, Oh man, I, this, I can't even see what she's doing here. And I'm as loud as loud could be. So going from that and then working with Penny, I, it was, it ended up being kind of like, I learned how to be more interior, I guess, in that and keep a hell of a lot more stuff in my pocket as opposed to screen edit at the top of my lungs. It's such an innocent movie for a way more innocent time. I always think like if Big came out in 2021, there would be think pieces about, is it okay that Elizabeth Perkins' character still liked him once she found out she was 13?

You'd head down all these rabbit holes. I'm like, no, no. Can I just enjoy this movie? Can I just enjoy the concept of a 13-year-old falling in love as an adult with somebody for a little while? Well, it's like you take all of these movies and ponder, what is anybody going to start texting in the first 15 minutes of any one of these movies? Oh, yeah.

What are they going to be sending their friends? What are their comments going to be on? Which is an unfair, I think, comparison to make between now and then. Because it wasn't in our imaginations of being able to do so. You're not thinking of worst case scenarios in 1988. You're just trying to make a movie. You're actually willing to sit there. You have nothing else to do except get your just trying to make a movie. You're actually willing to sit there.

You have nothing else to do except get your money's worth from a movie like that. And now I think, my Lord, I wouldn't be surprised if movies come back and have to take into account the TikTok effect, which would be when you go sit in a movie and it's two thirds full. How soon do you see out of the corner of your eye some patron pull out their phone and start looking at TikTok videos? Cause they don't five minutes in. Exactly. And then how many of them are, and how many, how many do you really see and how long do they go in the course of what the movie is?

Because you know, that's where our attention span is. Well, then you peaked as an actor the following year, but doing entire scenes with the St. Bernard and pulling it off. Some of the best work of your career. Turner Hooch. And entire scenes with the St. Bernard and pulling it off. Some of the best work of your career. And then they killed the dog. You killed the dog at the end of it.

The hardest work I have ever... I mean, I was glad I was a young man because I couldn't work that hard now. They were actually called dog de Bordeaux. There were these huge French versions of Mastiffs, but the dogs were just sweethearts. But the problem is, unless you have a real tactile connection to that dog, there is going to be nothing on that screen. It's going to just be a dog looking at their trainer off camera, waiting for their one quarter of a hot dog to be given to them. Both of those dogs, Barry and Beasley, were their names. I wrestled with them. I exchanged spit with them. I scratched them all over the place. I would grab their skin and their heads. There's a couple of shots in there in the movie in which truly it's me and a dog playing. And the dog, I think, was actually thinking, hey, this guy's okay.

You run him over. Yeah. I just worked with a dog in the other movie that's coming out. And it was the same exact thing. You have to get into that place where you can see it in their eyes their big brown eyes where they look at you and they say hey you're all right i'm gonna actually look at you it's that much different than if you're doing a rom-com and you have to click with like meg riot at some point you have to be no you have to be present in the moment with

who your star is, dog or female. There is a connection that goes on between really good, solid professional actors. It is, I think, where you just pick up every day, right, where you left off. Yeah. Taking away the concept of flirting, you know, that workplace or any kind of unresolved sexual tension and stuff and just being pals and laughing and getting through all that kind of stuff, that ends up being one of the better joys. Because the women actors that I've worked with,

actresses is not really the starlets, it's not the word used. The women actors, you know, definitely Meg, definitely Julia Roberts, Helen Hunt. When you get to that place where you're sort of always talking about the acting, but you're actually just trying to recreate the kind of behavior and being in the scenes.

That really is a high country. Meryl, I'll drop that bomb. Working with Meryl Streep in The Post, that was a thing where I was like, oh, this is so luxurious because we're just behaving. We're not performing. We're not posing. We're not trying to put curly cues on all of our lines. We're not being. We're not, you know, we're not posing. We're not trying to

put curly cues on all of our lines. We're not being sandbagged back and forth. We're actually engaged like when you're playing a great card game and all you're doing is laughing. And at the same time, you're trying to win. So, look, I made three movies with Meg and every one of them was completely different from the other. And they were all, it was kind of tough because all you do is laugh, you know? You get to the point where every day is just that kind of like this kook fest and you kind of like turn and say, do we have it?

Did we say the words the way you wanted them to be said or were we just goofing around for that whole thing? What does possible sound like for your business? It's having the spend to powers your scale with no preset spending limit, more cash on hand to grow your business with up to 55 interest-free days, and the ability to reach further with access to over 1,400 airport lounges worldwide. Redefine possible with Business Platinum. That's the powerful backing of American Express.

Terms and conditions apply. Visit amex.ca slash business platinum. Can you tell when younger actors have it? Like, you worked with Damon at a really young point in his career, you worked with Leo when he wasn't fully formed Leo yet.

I'd say he was on his way. I'd say he was Leo. Yeah. You get it from absolutely everybody. You know, it's you can tell someone the sensibility. Well, I will say this. I didn't know for the longest time. I did not know.

I don't know what movie it was that I did where I figured out there was something more important than showing up on time and knowing the lines. At some point, you have to show up on time and know the lines and have an idea that is unique to yourself that you either talk about or demonstrate. And it has to be inclusive. It has to be additive to the process, meaning that you can't show up and say, you know, I think I'll jump out the window in this scene. You can't jump out the window in this scene because you're not in the rest of the scene and they can't replace the window fast enough. So when you're all those, I don't think I've ever worked with someone that didn't come in and bring something new that was that you were able to to play of, sometime in an intimidating fashion in which it's like, oh, wait, this is a pitcher's duel. I mean, when I did Philadelphia with Denzel,

you can't ask for an actor who is farther atop his game than Denzel was and still is. And what comes along with that is like, hey, dude, I'm throwing heat. I'm not telling you I'm throwing heat dude i'm throwing heat i'm not telling you i'm throwing heat i'm throwing heat all right right so you're gonna catch it and then what are you gonna come back at me with oh you're throwing heat too all right well i'm gonna go off speed on you now bad boy what do you think of that oh you got a piece of that. Okay. Hey, hey, hey, that was a chin view. It's like that.

And that is the additive process of sometimes it's mano a mano. And sometimes it's laying down the red dot that the scene is all about. And when you're working with someone who doesn't take into account either one of those things, you know, it's a problem. And I couldn't come up with a name of someone who did that that didn't last. But when you, at the end of the day, if you just, you know, think of, you know, that wasn't that good a game, man, you know. I'm not sure I'd pick him for the top five anymore.

And there's just no denying it. You can't get away from it. Did you know your career was going to pivot the way it did in the nineties? Or did it was one of those things like a film by film? It's like, Oh, you're offering me that.

Oh, I get to do that. I have done that. I'll tell you, Bill Simmons, I had done that for the first, uh, 10 years of being in the movies.

If they asked me, I looked at it and said, I can make this work. Oh, watch me go. And then it wasn't until... I can't... Well, you had League of Their Own, you had Philadelphia, Sleepless in Seattle,

kind of in all the same area. That's right. Whatever I had done before League of Their Own, I had had a meeting. You got Bonfire of the Vanities? Okay, there was that in there. That was there. And I don't want it to sound like, oh, I made a movie that nobody liked, and so therefore it was actually a zeitgeist.

Oh, Joe versus the Volcano? Okay, I made Joe versus the Volcano, and there was some really great stuff in that. But at the end of the day, I had to at what my part of of all those movies were what i brought to them you know other than showing up on time and knowing my lines but what what an additive quality that i bring to them and uh i came away understanding that i was now 35 i was in my my mid thirties. I had, um, I had three kids, um, had been through enough, uh, getting my ass kicked when I thought everything was going to be groovy and finding out everything was groovy when in fact I thought I had failed miserable. And I said, okay, I sat down with my, my crack team of show business experts and said, now, my kids hate it when I use this word because I don't mean it in the way,

in a pejorative fashion. I mean it in a way of what I'm looking for. I mean it in a way of a level of maturity and a level of life experience and a level of expectation. I told my agent, I don't want to play pussies anymore. And by that, I mean guys who whine, guys who say boo-hoo-hoo, I need something more in my life. Who am I going to be? What am I going to do with my life? Oh, I'm in a circumstance that i need to extricate myself so i'll only use that word once because it's got different sort of connotations now that i'd rather be able to define myself but so i said i'm not i am now it's now time to play adults who go through bitter

compromise the first movie that came out of that was League of Their Own, which had actually had been around and then disappeared and then came back around. And when I met with Penny about it, it was our second movie together. Penny said, you've got to get fat. So what? So, look, you're too young. You know, you got to. This is for an old, broken down guy. You can't be good looking. You can't be charming around. These ladies can't fall in love with you. And those are the movies that you make. So you can't. And I said, well, if I, let's, let's, let me, let me put on some weight. And then let me also play this bitter moment of compromise i blew my knee out in a stupid way i would have been jimmy foxx i would have been luke garrity would have been stan musial

but in i was jumping out of some girl's hotel room i landed on my knee and just like mickey mantle hitting that uh water sprinkler out in uh out in uh right field in yankee stadium i didn't take care of myself and so here i am and he said and he said all right that could work well you're gonna walk with a limp yeah walk with a limp okay maybe it came you know and so that that that got us that was it yeah so you went, the characters became complicated and that unlocked you. Oh, yeah. Well, you know, because you can't play a young guy.

Look, I'm 65 now. Everybody knows. You know how long you've been watching me, you know. Yeah. The character you haven't done yet, and you've done just about everybody, but I know you love the movie Boogie Nights. Oh, my Lord. Yeah.

You haven't had the Jack Horner kind of supporting role where you just go off the path for a role, but it still feels like you, but part of the thrill is, oh wow, he's playing this guy. Well, I don't, I don't know how, how big the advances on talking about movies in the future, but with the great Austin Butler as Elvis Presley, written and directed by Baz Luhrmann, I play Colonel Tom Parker. What? When is that? That'll be out hopefully June of 2022.

Oh, so there you go. That could be your Jack Hor hopefully June of 2022. Oh, so there you go. That could be your Jack Horner movie. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. That was a wild ride. Yeah. And if anybody, Colonel Tom Parker was Elvis's promoter, not his manager, not his manager.

Don't call him a manager. He was Elvis Presley's promoter. And I would put him into the realm of a guy of great charm, but questionable morals. And sometimes not great charm either. Sometimes quite a lot of boorishness. That's perfect. I like that one. All right, quick questions before we go.

Because I already kept it too long. Sleepless in Seattle. How long do they actually stay together after they get off the Empire State Building do you think they're together for life or is that like six months and it falls apart no I think that's for the long haul because they ain't kids

they've been around this weird lady that meets him at the tower he's like this is the stepmother for my child. I'm, this is the one. And I'll tell you why, because that guy knows how to be married. He knows, you know, he knows how the bumps on the road, he needs to, he knows how to, I'm not going to sweat that detail. He knows how to say whatever you want, or said, no, I'm not going, but you have a good time. He knows how to do that now. So no, that's the, that's the long haul.

Forrest Gump. The running scene. Which one? It's like eight minutes. He's running back and forth across the country for three years. Oh my gosh. It goes on forever. We flew to all those places. My brother Jim went the

farthest to get dressed up like me. He was your running stunt double, right? In a couple of shots. And we still have arguments. He said, that was me. I know, that was me. Nobody. That's me.

I remember doing that shot. He's just going back and forth. Like, who's paying the bills? Where's he going? To the bathroom? Is he staying in hotels? What's going on there? That was one of those things where I think I actually

raised my voice to Bob because I couldn't fathom the logic of it. And we ended up adding a line to the voiceover that said, you know, when I was tired, I slept. And when I was hungry, I ate. And when I had to, you know, well, then I went, you know, because I couldn't take this idea of just a guy running across the country doing nothing and just never taking off a piece of clothes so if you look joanna johnson had done this thing where i never took off anything i put on and bob thought it was i just think it's funny i think it's hilarious you know he put something i said bob that's contrary to human behavior i can see him getting something and wearing it out and then getting something new but he's not gonna he's not gonna show up at the end of this thing.

But yeah, we, uh, I tell you, there was one time we were shooting the movie and I worked because we would fly off to one of those locations. First thing, Saturday morning,

shoot Saturday and Sunday, and then fly back and then be back on the set in South Carolina on Monday morning. There was one period of time where we, we, I shot 27 days straight. Because we were either shooting the movie or we were shooting in Maine or North Carolina

or Vermont, New Hampshire. We just, what was it? Monument Valley. We ended up, and that was Bob. That was Bob. Now we got to get these shots, man. That movie's done a nice, it comes out, it makes an incredible amount of money. It does really

well with the awards. Then people get mad because it was the Pulp Fiction Shawshank Year. No, maybe this shouldn't. And now it's circled back around where it's like, you know, it's a really good movie for us. It's landed in the right spot all these years later. We were diabolical geniuses because it was too successful.

Yeah. people got mad they're like fuck this if we had done half the business so then you know split it up you know between uh you know pulp and shawshank that's true those were those were kind of like three granddaddy big swing mega mega perfect films yeah uh but they were all so friggin different one from the next if you had to pick one that was the vanilla and because it played all year long for crying out loud. Oh my God. What a year that was. And beat the living daylights out of me. Cast away. So he goes to Helen Hunt's house.

She's married. Marries the dentist. A little fast, in my opinion. I don't know if there was enough grieving on the Helen Hunt side. I just immediately, next thing I asked her out, they get married, they have a kid. Dude, no, we talked about it. We talked about this whole thing. Helen's no pushover, you know? So we're thinking like, okay, he goes away. The word comes in the next day that the plane has gone down. And so there's a two-week search and rescue.

They don't find him because they have no idea where it is. She's already going on dates at that point. She's like, I'm probably not finding him. Now the dentist asked me out. No, give her a year. Give her a full year. She had a two-year-old kid. She was just moving on.

I'll tell you. I'll tell you. I'll tell you. There's a moment in that we were trying to figure out a line. A line. We did not have it. We had to figure out a line that I said or she said, and we both realized that that is the measure of how much time had passed and how angry Chuck was that she married somebody else

yeah he should have been and the line the line was this after i've seen pictures of her family on the refrigerator and we see all this stuff and i like i we we wrote on the set and bob was there and i said we came up with a line let me get this straight and it's like bump bump bah right next line could be you you shack up with your orthodontist and the next thing you know you're you're married to him hey thanks babe yeah that could have been the next line but instead the line ended up being it It was the football team, right? We have a football team now because the Houston Oilers had moved to Nashville.

And they almost won the Super Bowl. Yeah, that was it. And ended up, that was just being one of those kind of like locks that got opened. And poof, on the day we came up with that.

So Chuck's saved. He comes home. Yeah. Big hullabaloo. I'm sure it's like Cover People magazine. Lazarus Lab. The husband, the dentist

who stole away Helen Hunt who's grieving. Now he's home. Chuck's been there 24 hours. Drives to the house in the middle of the night and the husband sleeps through all of it. I don't think he's sleeping. Chuck's not on 24 hours, drives to the house in the middle of the night, and the husband sleeps through all of it. No, I don't think he's sleeping. Chuck's not on the radar at all.

You think he's lying in bed going like, I hope my wife handles this moment correctly? I believe he's, I believe, that was by Chris Noth, and I believe he's up there in bed wondering how long it's going to be until he hears his wife come up the stairs and slide into the sheets. She runs out of the rain at one point, screams, Chuck! Yeah, yeah. Runs out, big makeout session in the driveway, and then Chuck sends her packing.

She just goes back to bed? Well, she goes back to bed and has a very long discussion, you know, and I think there's probably going to be a little frostiness in the house for the next couple of days. They're getting divorced two months later. No, you're a cynic.

You're a cynic. They work it out, man. Because even the husband knows, I got to say, I was not expecting that guy to come back. Yeah, I was second choice. Honey, you're going to have to go through something. And by the way, in three months, you and I will be in couples therapy. We'll be getting some counseling in order to work this out. That's Castaway, too.

They're in couple therapy. And Chuck is still bringing a volleyball around. And people are wondering what's going on with it. No, everybody says, where's Wilson? Where's Wilson? He floated away. Did you not see the movie? Yeah, it's done.

It's like, you know, that rosebud sled got burned in the bonfire at the end of Citizen Kane. He's gone, baby, gone. I think Chuck has a lot of issues over the next couple of years, but eventually he's fine. Maybe Bettina helps him. Maybe living in the ranch, maybe that helps him. Well, you know, that started off because when we were very early in the first years that we were working on it, Bill said, you know, look, how do you think this movie really begins? And I said, I'll tell you how it begins. It begins with me and I'm in a tree somewhere in this beautiful farm somewhere.

And I got little kids playing at my feet. I got a big glass of iced tea and I have a beautiful wife that is coming out saying, it's almost time for lunch, honey. And I look around, I say, you know, the greatest thing that ever happened to me was being in a plane crash and being stuck on an island for four years because otherwise I wouldn't be here.

That's the theme with which we started writing on. And you just continue on. And I think there's no- You kept it more of a mystery with the final product, with the packages. Yeah. Cinema, man. Cinema. Cinema. You did it. Tell me about Finch. This came about because a while back ago, I mean, this is, we made it in 2000, I want to say 18? Yeah.

The fall, the fall of 18, going into 19. I'll have to check my notes. This look, I am, I am, I am a competitive son of a bitch who wants to have the best role in the movie of anything that I read. And I read this thing about the last man on earth who is not just trying to survive, not just trying to survive,

not just trying to eat, not just trying to escape the bad guys and take a shower. His whole reason for living is to build a companion that will take care of his dog. I told people about this. What is this movie you're doing? It's just dystopian thing. Well, yeah,

it's that, you know, and there's a robot and blah, blah, blah. But it's really about a guy who wants to make sure his dog is safe and go lives, lives,

goes on beyond him. And everybody goes, Oh, Oh, I love dogs. Yeah. And, uh,

you killed who? So you had to do something. Well, yeah, we learned that lesson. Yeah.- Plus you killed Hooch, so you had to do something to make up for dogs. We learned that lesson. Do not kill, even if you have a puppy later on, do not kill the hero dog. My wife is still furious a million years later. Just can't believe Hooch didn't make it.

Maybe he just had a cast. No, he's dead. I remember fighting for the fight for the death of Hooch, saying, in the grand Disney tradition of Old Yeller, Hooch must die. Not the smartest word. Miguel Sapochnik directed Finch, and Miguel is the granddaddy of Game of Thrones. He directed the meat and potatoes of Game of Thrones,

which actually, when I actually saw some of them, the last three were airing at the time we were working. We had all gathered at Miguel's house in Albuquerque, watched them. And then as soon as they were done, I'd find him and say, Miguel, how did you make these things? These are the most complex, multi-layered, and he would describe a brutal shooting schedule and all this other stuff that goes on. So in the relative scheme of things, me, Caleb Landry Jones as the, as the Jeff, the robot and, and our, the dog whose name I'll scream out here in a second. I'm having a cranial, cranial plate shift. I'm remembering hooch, not the...

I screwed you up. I kept bringing up hooch. That's all right. That's all right. The three of us were a relative stroll in the park. But it's one of those movies that, for me, is like, this is all about procedure and behavior, man. There are things that have to be,

and we cannot shortchange the minute. And it was also co-written by one of the former art directors who worked on 2001 A Space Odyssey with Stanley Kubrick. So I was all over him about all of that. And it was a movie that beat the living daylights out of us all. Well, it comes out. It was a hard movie, a hard movie to make. Comes out this week on an Apple. Streaming only on Apple.

And we'll see what that means to the zeitgeist. Well, I intentionally left a lot of Tom Hanks movies left that we didn't discuss for when whenever you come back because you're always invited back whenever you want oh we have to go through the 90s well you know the 2000s doesn't always doesn't have to always be this is your life man you know but I had a lot of movie questions so you've been in my life for 40 plus years I had I had to get some questions answered you know I have I have to, I have to admit, I, I, I kind of get that. I really like that. Um, there's, there's, there's people like, you know,

like Paul McCartney and Ringo and these guys that have been around for an awfully long time. It's like, I love hearing, I love it when they go back and just say, Oh, you know, we, uh, I read this thing that Paul McCartney said, he was asked, did you guys in, did you guys know you were getting better when you were in Hamburg, you know, playing on the Reaper? Did you know? And it's like,

but that's actually a pretty interesting question. Did they know they were getting better? They said, well, we were always trying, you know, we never played the same songs. You know, there were other bands who would come in and just bang out the set and that was it we were always throwing new stuff in never doing in the same order and there was a there was a club down the reaper bond that had a jukebox and when we would close up we'd run down you know to the jukebox and hear what was the latest and you know we'd hear we'd hear uh singing, It's now or never, come hold me tight. And we'd play it four times and write down the lyrics

and figure out the chords, and then we'd play that the next night, you know, at the club. And you hear that, and it's like, wow. That kind of, like, tells the story of everything they've done since, you know. I love hearing that stuff. So it's good in order to go back and and ponder it although at um sometimes it's like ah geez i i might remember a little too much of that stuff and still have problems remembering where what my kid where my kids

are now i'm like that with sports i can remember everything that's happened to any Boston team, and yet I'll get my kids' birthdays. I'm originally from Boston, yeah. All right. Okay, let me tell you my one. This is the baseball story that I tell. Okay, let's hear it. All right.

I'm doing Nothing in Common in Chicago with Jackie Gleason, Eva Marie Saint, Bess Armstrong, CeeLo Wood. I've never been to Chicago before. So this is kind of a great thing. I get tickets to Wrigley Field. Still no lights. Day games only at Wrigley Field. They actually had the campaign, no lights.

You know, everybody had signs, no lights, don't destroy Wrigley Field, no lights. Sunday game against the Cincinnati Reds, as Pete Rose is coming closer and closer and closer to Ty Cobb's record. Right. Right? All right. Long game. Guess what?

With another hit, he will tie Ty Cobb's record. With just one more hit, we will be there for the historical moment though the ghost of Ty Cobb is saying, no, not today. Not today. It rained, Bill, it rained for close to two hours. The tarp was out. Most of the people left, but those that didn't, I had nothing to do on a Sunday. So I wasn't about to go back to the hotel. I was with a buddy of mine. So we stayed and drank beer and talked to people and blah, blah, blah. All right. Two hours go by. Looks like the rain has stopped. Lo and behold, it has.

Oh, it looks like they're coming out to take the tarp off the infield. Holy cow, they are. They're going to keep playing. Roll it up, roll it up, roll it up. It's getting dark. There are no lights. Oh, holy cow. Who is on deck?

Pete Rose. Pete Rose is on deck. And in the top of whatever inning it was. Cubs play out their bottom. And here it comes. First batter goes up, and as he's taking swings, the umpire calls the game on account of darkness. And Pete Rose is there with the donut, you know, the weighted donut on his back, and I could read his lips, and he was saying, I can see, I can see. Wow. And then whenever the next game was back in Cincinnati

is when he tied the record at Grove to Ray. How about that? That's baseball, man. That's a good baseball. And you had to sit through the whole rain delay. Man. What better thing to do? I guess I'm really perfect.

All right. Tom Hanks, good luck with the movie. Thanks for coming on. It was great to meet you and do this. Hope to do it again at some point. Good to talk to you. Let's do it again. All right. Thanks Hanks, good luck with the movie. Thanks for coming on. It was great to meet you and do this. Hope to do it again at some point. Good to talk to you. Let's do it again. All right.

Thanks. Peace and love. All right. Thanks to Tom Hanks. This podcast was produced by Kyle Creighton. Good luck to Willow's Football 8th Grade tomorrow. And I will see you on Sunday night. I don't have I don't have

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