The New Yorker Radio Hour - Behind the Scenes with Tom Hanks

Episode Date: May 19, 2023

Tom Hanks has been a constant presence on the American movie screen for forty years. He has played a mermaid’s boyfriend, an astronaut, a soldier on D Day, an F.B.I. agent, an AIDS patient, a castaway, and a strange, innocent character running across America—among dozens of other roles. Hanks won the Academy Award for Best Actor two years in a row. Now in his sixties, Hanks has added another line to his résumé: novelist. “The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece”—an overstuffed, often funny, work of fiction—captures what he’s learned from forty years in the business. Hanks describes the process of moviemaking as equal parts chaos and monotony. “If anybody who we call a noncombatant, or a civilian, wants to visit the making of a motion picture, they will be bored out of their skull,” he tells David Remnick, insisting that it’s impossible to know on set whether a production will be a masterpiece or a flop. “You do not know if it is going to work out. You can only have faith.”   Hanks spoke with Remnick onstage at Symphony Space as part of The New Yorker Live to kick off his book tour. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Tom Hanks has been a constant presence on the American movie screen for 40 years. He's played a mermaid's boyfriend, an astronaut, a soldier on D-Day, an FBI agent, a young man dying of AIDS, a castaway, and a dim wit of innocent who runs clear across America. He hasn't just won an Oscar for Best Actor. In the mid-90s, he won it two years running. And in his 60s, he still sells a lot of tickets. Now, Hanks has just added another line to the resume, novelist.

His new book is called The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece, and he's put everything he's learned in the business into an overstuffed, often funny, work of fiction. The story, which seems real enough, involves an old comic book that's being made into a big-budget superhero movie. I joined Hanks on stage the other night at the symphony space in Manhattan. Now, one note, it's kind of interesting.

Because of the persona that comes with Tom Hanks, and we'll get to that later for sure, I was expecting a certain kind of laconic, modest presence, Jimmy Stewart in modern dress. But the Tom Hanks I met was more excitable, more performative, edgier. And though the movies have made him very rich and very famous, he was a lot more conflicted about what it is to be a star. Tom, I want to start with your novel, the making of another major motion picture masterpiece,

which comes out today. I have a question, and of course it comes in the form of a complaint. It's what we call a Jewish question. In 1952, the New Yorker sent a writer named Lillian Ross who got access from start to finish to the making of the red badge of courage. a film by John Houston. Starring Adi Murphy.

Yeah. And it wasn't until 1990, almost 40 years later, that another journalist, Julie Salomon, got access to the making of another film, which you were in, Bonfire of the Vanities. The Devil's Candy. There you go. Why is, does the makers of movies make it so mysterious

to the rest of us how movies get made, which I suspect is something that's behind this novel? Well, it's not a conspiracy. no one is hiding anything. If anybody who is what we call a non-combatant or a civilian wants to visit the making of a motion picture, they will be bored out of their skull. Everybody is just kind of like waiting for something to happen.

There might be, nowadays you'll go on to a soundstage and there'll be a blue screen and there'll be guys up on a cherry picker moving some cables around, and you'll think, is that it? And the answer is, yeah, because they have to move those cables around because somewhere somebody is being put into a harness and they're going to be dangled above an air mattress

and they're going to have to make out with somebody else in a thing. And you'll wonder what is going on in this movie? And then when you see that moment from the movie, you'll turn out, important beat in the film that you have seen. And you were there. Oh, you were there when you shot that? Yeah. What was it like? I had coffee

and these two guys were just up on a thing. And they were doing. I'll tell you, I will tell you this other brief aspect. I was working with a bold face name. Let me put it that way, because I don't want to tell stories out of it. But you know who this

lady is. She's magically sincere. And if you take MS. those are our initials. She is magically sincere. And we were doing a very, very, very, very, very long scene together. And in a movie, a very, very, very long scene could be like eight pages of dialogue. That was loaded with ups and downs and twists and turns and both very long history between our two characters

and also brand new stuff that we had to wrestle to the ground in that scene. So this is Meryl Streep in The Post. You guys can discern whoever you want it to be. So I was bored and was running, what's going on? What's taking so long? And so I walked on to the set. There were two guys over there that were doing something and everybody else was pacing around.

And I saw the magic sincerity. Person. Was in the room that was not being used, which means all the furniture has been stacked up in it and all the sea stands and all the equipment is over there. And I said, I came over, hey, what's going on? Oh, no, I'm just, I said, do you want to run the dialogue for the scene? I would love to run the dialogue for the scene.

And so while we're sitting there, we just banged it back and forth, you know, da-da, different timing, up and down, up and down. But what we were doing was beginning to feel each other out for the intricate game of kickball that we were about to do. You know, the only couple I knew that both Kennedy and LBJ, wanted to socialize with was you and your husband, and you own the damn paper. Since the way things worked, politicians in the press, they trusted each other so they could go to the same dinner party

and drink cocktails and tell jokes while there was a war raging in Vietnam. I don't know what we're talking about. I'm not protecting Linda. No, you got his former Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara. The man who commissioned this study, he's one of about a dozen party guests out on your head. I'm not protecting any of them. I'm protecting the paper.

If you were a non-combatant, and you had come to watch us shoot the film that day, you would have seen a bunch of excitement over here as people pushing gear and lighting lights and moving stuff around and it looks like that's where the pocket, but where the real performances were being mapped out, where were these two odd people

who were just sitting in the side of a room surrounded by a bunch of anvil boxes and sea stands. You have this great passage early in the novel, page 7. I really like this. Please make it past page seven, please. Oh, not to worry. Making movies is complicated, maddening, highly technical at times, ephemeral and gossameral at others,

slow as molasses on a Wednesday, but with a gun to the head deadline on a Friday, imagine a jet plane. I love this. Imagine a jet plane, the funds for which were held up by Congress, designed by poets, riveted together by musicians, supervised by executives,

fresh out of business school to be piloted by wannabes with attention deficiencies. What are the chances that such an aeroplane is going to soar? So do you feel in the midst of this kind of weird combination of boredom and chaos and people chattering like you and that person that a movie is going to come out of this? You wouldn't believe it to see it. there's no logic to it whatsoever. All you can do is go into with face somehow that it will work out, that everybody else knows their job. You know that airplane scenario that you're talking about that?

The director, you know who the director is in that scenario? The people who load the luggage into the bottom of the plane. If they don't lay that out perfectly, the center of gravity of the plane will not work and will not fly. That's literally the director and the artistic people that do it. everybody else is just kind of like, hey man, I hope I've done my job enough well so this plane don't go down. I think when we go to the theater, we see this thing play out in real time. You've memorized an entire play. Us civilians have no idea how you do that, just the sheer memorization of it. You've rehearsed it. You've done it any number of times, blocked out, directed, and then it happens in real time. Two hours later, it's over.

film acting seems like something entirely different, and the way you describe that rehearsal scene with that actress, she's very good, by the way. She's magic. She's magic, and sincere. Do you know when you're doing it well in those little snippets of, you know, 30 seconds? I will tell you this, you don't. You don't.

All you can do is have some kind of faith that your instincts have, have joined you. Our job is to provide the raw materials. All we can do is open a vein, bleed it out, dig around in the river bed long enough, say, here's the gold dust, here's a nugget, please do well with this. Mr. Director, Editor, Scorer, Foley Artist,

sound mixer, dialogue mixer, all the stuff that goes along with it. Oftentimes when you go to work as an actor, they can almost ask you this question. What mood are you in today? You say, you know, I feel pretty good. Had a great night last night, got slept. The Knicks won? I feel awfully, I'm feeling pretty snazzy. What are we doing today? Oh, that's right.

I were doing the scene where I have to have a nervous breakdown and weep copious tears and go to such a deep and dark place emotionally that it's going to take me a day and a half to recover from what my job requires of me today. Now, I will tell you, here's a famous story from the famous movie. Are you ready for it? You're ready for the famous anecdotal story? Here we go. Forrest Gump, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Terrible. We were shooting in Cherokee Square in Savannah, Georgia. We're on the world famous park bench. We've got various props. There was so much dialogue, and I was so exhausted because we had shot, at one thing, we had shot 27 days straight, 27 days straight whether the day off,

because we would be flying off to places to shoot. Remember Forest ran across the country? Well, there's only one way to get those in those days. You had to fly to the goddamn place, put on the costume, and run for an hour and a half, then go back, get on the plane, and then fly to New Hampshire and do it all over again. We would do that, and so we then, we finally are done. I'm exhausted. I don't know what's going on.

And if you remember the movie, Forest Gump, thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. The scenes on the park bench have oceans of dialogue, and we shot them in a day, and a half, all right? So that's an ocean of dialogue, and we were there to point and I said to Bob, Bob, my head is fragile, frazzled, I cannot.

We're doing all these scenarios with different people, and every one of them have a page and have a dialogue. I will never be able to keep this in my head. I don't worry, Tom, we'll shoot it like I love Lucy. We'll have four cameras and put the words up on cards if you need it. You can just read them. I said, oh, great, thank you. Let's make this an even more artificial atmosphere.

Hello. My name's Forrest, Forrest Gump. Do you want a chocolate? I could eat about a million and a half of these. My mom always said, life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're going to get. Now, the good news is, we got it all down pretty fast, and the dialogue all made itself. But at one point, I was sitting there saying, okay, we're going on to the other one?

Okay, the lady's coming along and say, hey, Bob, I got a question for you. What time? Is anybody going to care about this movie? This guy sitting on a thing and these goofy shoes and this cuckoo suit with a suitcase full of, you know, curious George books and stuff like that? Are we doing anything here that is going to make any sense to anybody? True story. And Bob said, it's a minefield, Tom.

It's a goddamn minefield. We may be sowing the seeds of our own destruction. Any footstep we take could be a bouncing betty that will blow our nuts. right off. And Bob Zemeckis, God bless him, I've worked with him more than once and said, landed on the absolute truth of anybody who has gone forward and say, we are going to commit something to film today and eventually we'll cut this into something. You do not know if it is going to work out. You can only have faith. So when you're filming a scene that is eventually becomes, as in the opening sequence of Private Ryan,

do you know that you're in the midst of something that's special, something great? Do you have any sense of it all? Because you're describing movie making as some weird combination of chaos, boredom, anxiety, prolonged days. No, we knew we were... Let me tell you a story about that. We are in the assault boats, right?

We were in the Higgins boats off the coast of Ireland. and we're now going to, Steven Spielberg. We invaded Ireland? We shot it in, we shot it in Ireland as a double for the... History could have been different, yeah. You know, it was, what, it was a gray day, the weather was miserable, the weather was miserable, looked like the Inge's channel to us. And Stephen does not rehearse a thing.

You do not rehearse with Stephen. So I am meeting a guy who is just out of drama school, and this is his first motion picture and it's with Stephen and I'm in front of him and Stephen says okay and we know what the script is all right when the time comes you guys

go over the side and we'll pick you up in the water afterwards so the special effects go down which we have not seen when they squib up these guys they can only really do it once so we come up and we're in the back the camera's with us

and the front of the Higgins boat goes down and the stunt men that have have been wired with squibs in front of us, all disappear in a haze of simulated flesh, blood, and sinew. Then me and my co-star jump over the side into water that is too deep for us to touch bottom. And then the camera is in the water with us. We kind of try it on, we try to mind, la-la-la-la-la, we kind of pull up. And before we shot that scene, I said, how are you in the water? This is a little bit of hangs like can't swim.

Well, it's a good thing we didn't rehearse this then, isn't it? And then, when we finally get up there, the special effects guy comes up and rigs him with an exploding squib on his chest. You know, they're all English. And all right, mate, don't worry about any of these. He's all going to be fine. Listen, but before this goes up, don't look down. Don't look down. Because it is an explosive, and there is going to be projectiles coming out of your chest.

And it'd be good if you're not looking down with your eyes open. So, don't do that. now all of this is happening at a time when total tactile chaos is going off on because there's 600 extras there's people in the water there's machine guns going off air mortars are blowing off and it's outside of the fact that we know we're making a movie it's a perilous dangerous thing and look I've been preparing for this moment for about eight months by looking at all sorts of research that goes into it and we had all met each other. We had done a, we had done boot camp, we had prepared. But I'm, we're there in the water.

It's freezing cold, freezing cold. And I look, I got up and I, and I looked, I was trying to grab myself, gather myself together as Captain John Miller. And I looked down this way, and a man without an arm is on fire. You know, you don't fake that. You don't, you don't think, well, Tom, what were you thinking when you saw the man without an arm on fire? You thought, my God, He has no harmonies on fire. That's what you think. Now, that all goes into an unrehearsed moment that Mr. Steven Spielberg. It says, okay, great, we got that.

Let's move up to the Belgian gate and get that sequence there. We knew, I knew. Oh, you know, this isn't me falling in love with a dog on this movie. This is actually something that's going to be quite, quite, quite palpable. But the reaction that we had to that was about literally the tactile stuff that we were shooting at that individual moment. Clear those murder holes. I want to see plenty of beat between men. Five men to shoot the opportunity.

One man's a waste of ammo. Stand out of your weapons. Keep those actions clear. I'll see you on the beach. That's Tom Hanks in Saving Private Ryan from 1998. We'll continue our conversation in just a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

I'm David Remnick. We'll continue now with my conversation with the actor Tom Hanks. He's just released a debut novel, The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece. The book comes out as Hanks approaches his 40th year as a leading man. His first big movie was 1984's Splash, a mermaid comedy with Daryl Hannah and John Candy, and eventually he made a string of rom-coms,

including You've Got a Game. Got Mail and Sleepless in Seattle, which were directed by his friend, the late Nora Ephron. How is it different to work with the director like Nora Ephron, for example, as opposed to Steven Spielberg? It seems the rehearsal process is different. Steven Spielberg has been thinking in cinematic terms since he was eight years old, and you can look at his films, but he was a kid, and they literally are. You can see his DNA all over them to this day. No matter what the film is, no matter what the theme is that is being involved. Nora Ethron was a journalist.

She wrote her screenplays from a journalistic point of view with her sister as well. What does that mean, right? A screenplay from a journalistic point of view? There was a type of authenticity and a crispness to the dialogue that is very, very, very particular, meaning that it scans in a different way.

It's not necessarily human behavior. It's actually a give and take between the characters that continue propel along the story. Is there anything you do? Hello. Hello. Hi.

Do you need some money? No, I do not need any money. Thank you very much. Get in another line. Hi. Rose. That is a great name. Rose.

This is Kathleen. I'm Joe. And I'm Henry. Henry, how are you? Happy holidays. This is a credit card machine. Happy Thanksgiving. She also rehearses.

rehearses her movies as specifically as she writes them so that we had rehearsals with taped out set and props. And a lot of her scenes go on for 11, 15, 17 pages sometimes. And we rehearse them in real time so that by the time we got to the set, we knew that would be broken up into eight different sort of setups throughout the geography of an apartment or a restaurant or what have you. and you land on the same specificity then when you're shooting them as you did when you rehearsed it. And Nora, she's tough.

She was tough. She would say, I know what you want to do with that moment, but I hate it. And so therefore, let's not do it that way. Look, I was very cranky, particularly when I first met her to do Sleepless in Seattle. Thank you. Works every time.

Yeah. Works every time. Fantastic. Because I was really big, and, you know, I had some hits on my belt, you know. And I won some trophies for participating. And when we were working on their rehearsals for it, I realized that one of the things that was driving me nuts about, the problem. is that Dela Delia Ephron and Nora Ephron are,

their sisters are, but they also are what? They are mothers. It was a movie about a father. And I said, you guys are the wrong gender to understand what's going in this scene between me and my son. A remark like that always goes well. Oh, she loved it. Why wouldn't she?

Oh, Tom, tell me more. And the argument I had was, you have written a scene in which a father is unlawed. father is undone by the fact that his son is upset about him going out with a woman. Oh no. I said, there is not a father on the planet Earth who is going to give a rat's ass what his son thinks. Because you know what that father wants to do? He wants to get laid. And that's what's missing from your little gender-ish scene that you wrote. And she said, well, then why don't you say that. And that was a very empowering moment because she's as a journalist, she said, she often

say this, well, you're right. When you're right, you're right. So she let me go off and do that kind of stuff in the movie. And then later on, I said, you know, it was great that, you know, it was great that you let that happen in the, in the cumulative collaborative process of making a movie. And she said, well, you wrote that. I said, no, no, no, nor I did not write that. I completely at you in rehearsal, and you decided to put it into the movie. Complaining is writing. But she said, that's what writing is. It's like, are you, I mean, writing is sitting down and complaining on paper, and that's

what writing is? She says, hmm, no, yeah. But you've had an even stronger role in conceiving the idea for a film Castaway as something. Yes. How did, how did... I didn't even have to say thank you. Here's how castaway started.

One, this quick side trip. In the book, there is a character that is essentially a biker, an outlaw biker, who got out of the Marines right after World War II. And I had read many years ago that the origin of a lot of the outlaw biker gangs came from the Marines that returned from battle in the Pacific, had a lot of combat pay, and were not about to go back to their lives as John Law obeying citizens, because they had killed and massacred a few too many people. in order to do that. All right. So I had read that and that always stuck in my mind as a great place on which to hang both a character and a character that examined a theme. I read a million years ago and I did not realize this that planes, huge jumbo jets filled with nothing but envelopes and packages flew across the Pacific Ocean twice a day, going to Australia and back. And I said, well, nothing but packages and envelopes.

Who's flying the pole? Okay, a crew of what? Four people fly this plane? That's either the greatest gig in the world or the worst gig you could possibly have. It turns out it's a really good gig because they don't have to put up with jerks like us back as passengers. And I thought, what happens if one of those planes goes down? And three of the crew die and there's only one left where you don't know where that is. What's that story? And from that came Castaway. I was looking for the story in which a guy would be reduced down.

And I had that idea. Bill Broils had a lot of the structure. He was a screenwriter. And nothing happened until we got Bob Zemeckis on in order to give us the third act, which is sort of like the redemption and the point of the whole movie. I wanted to reduce a guy down to a guy who was not going to survive unless he had the five elements necessary for human life. food, water, fire, shelter, and company. And it was, we never could land on what the company really was until Bob said, I think Wilson's got to be come out of your own blood.

I think he's got to be a creation of your own flesh and blood. And I said, well, how do we do? The Bob said, the bill said, well, how would we, how would we do that? And I said, I know, what if he cuts his hand and in frustration picks up? the ball and throws it and then turns out into a little face. Bob said, well, there you go. We worked on castaway for eight years before we ended up making the movie. That's how long it takes. We had a screenplay that was loaded with dialogue in which I, as Chuck Nolan, would have lines like this. Well, I am all alone on this island. Look at me all by myself. Holy cow. There is no.

one on this island to talk to except me I better I better find a source of food and water shelter would be nice too and how in the world am I going to make fire I am we had all this dialogue on it and when we got down there we shot one scene with I had something like I said like hmm what am I going to do now I said something like that to myself and I turned to Bob and said Bob, I don't think there should be a word of dialogue out of Chuck. And I said, I don't think so either. I said, the only time I should talk is when I think somebody is there, who's there?

That's the one line of dialogue that I know, because I've coconuts drop in the back, you know. Who's there? And the other one is if I think someone is out there, help, help. Those are the only pieces of dialogue that we have until I make fire and celebrate. We may actually have Wilson by that point, so I ended up talking to Wilson. Now, we'll tell you this. When you're a selfish actor in a movie and the question you really do want to ask, but you don't dare because it shows you to be a Bush League guy who doesn't care about the artistic integrity of the movie,

but every actor wants to know, how many shots before lunch? And the other question is, is this all on me? ever going to turn around and get yes we are going to turn around but when you're the only guy on the on there's nobody to turn around on except for wilson there wilson is on a little stump and he's loose and then he's a little tighter and that took seven minutes to shoot and that's how much time i had off on cadd making you i had seven minutes i went back to my little hut and you know had a sip of water and that was it so there's a motif in the book and i and i think you all I also believe it in life, in that you take enormous offense at the notion of anybody hating a movie.

Oh, yeah. Why is that? Okay. Let's admit this. We all have seen movies that we hate. I have been in some movies that I hate. You have seen some of my movies and you hate them. That's...

What of your movies that you hate? That's okay. Oh, stop! Here are the five points of a Rubicon that are crossed by any of the five points of a Rubicon that are crossed by any who makes movies. The first Rubicon you cross is saying yes to the film. Your fate is sealed. You are going to be in that movie. The second Rubicon is when you actually see the movie that you made. It's either a double zero or it's a zero one. It's binary. It either works and is the movie you wanted to make or it does not work and it's not the movie you wanted to make. That has nothing

to do with Rubicon number three, which is going to be the critical reaction to it, which is a version of the Vox Populi, how people weigh in. Someone is going to say, I hate it. Other people can say, I think it's brilliant. Somewhere in between the two is what the movie actually is. The fourth Rubicon is the commercial performance of the film, because if it does not make money, your career will be toast sooner than you want it to be. That's just the fact.

That's a business. The fifth Rubicon is time. Where that movie lands 20 years after the fact. what happens when people look at it, perhaps by accident? A great example of this is it's a wonderful life, which was made about 1949, and disappeared for the better part of, I'm going to say 20 years, locked up in a rights issue, and essentially when it came out, it was reviewed as Capricorn.

It did not make its money back. It was not viewed as being a classic. It wasn't even viewed as being a commercial hit. Well, when we all saw it's a wonderful life sometime of the 1970s, we actually thought, where has this treasure been? That happens all the time, and personally for me, it happened on a movie that I wrote and directed, thank you, that thing you do, thank you, thank you. There you go.

That gets applause now. And I'm trying to be very, very pragmatic because, look, I loved making that movie. I loved writing it. I love being with it. I love all the people in it. One of my kids was born in between the Merseahurst College talent show and the performances at Villapiano. I was a father of three, and I figured this was the movie being a father of four. That's how important the movie was for me.

When it came out, it was completely dismissed by the first wave of Vox Populi. It didn't do great business. It hung around for a while, was viewed as being some sort of odd little, kind of like quasi-rip-off of nine other different movies, and a nice little stroll-down memory lane. Now, the same exact publications that dismissed it in its initial review called it Tom Hanks's cult classic, that thing you do. So now it's a cult classic.

What was the difference between those two things? The answer is time. And you could take any number of film from any number of great filmmakers. And the opposite happens too. A movie that came out was on like this version of a cutting edge of this is who we are right now. And 20 years later, you think, what was the big deal about this movie? in Keith Richards' autobiography, which he may or may not have read, he says, it's a good book, though. It's a great, no, that guy's lived a life and a half, hasn't it?

He says at a certain point, as a public person, you're schlepping, dragging, I'm sure, he's, dragging around your own persona like a ball and chain. And every time there's a kind of fairly lazy feature story about your profile, inevitably Jimmy Stewart is raised as comparing your persona Keith Richards those are the guys I like

The same Those are guys Unbelievable Those are in my Countenance those were in my wheelhouse I do I How does a persona

Work for an actor Is there one Are you aware of it Are there There's nothing you can do About it at all Except never Ever ever

Ever ever talk to the press Honestly I think about it There are some artists out there, some filmmakers, some actors. You don't know anything about them because they do not go off and promote their movies at a certain way or open themselves up in a matter. And maybe it affects their ability to work. Maybe it doesn't.

But the truth is, no matter who you are, you carry your countenance with you into every single job you do. So much so that now, the first. The first two paragraphs of any review of any of my movies are actually about all the other movies I've ever made. You know, if, you know, if it was, like, the last movie I did was, like, a man called Otto. I'm going to say, nine, nine reviews out of ten, you know, said, well, giving up his Forrest Gump, nice guy persona, not unlike Jim Lovell and Apollo 13, but a little bit more like Sully. In Sully, Tom Hanks says, Otto, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

You know, it's all like, how did this current persona match up to whatever it is? It's ignored by the audience, I think, because it's part of the contract the audience has with the purchase of going to a movie. Which is what? That you understand that this is just the latest incarnation of somebody that you are familiar with,

and you buy that they've seen you in all these other movies. They buy that you're not as young as you were. They buy that you are in these other movies that you're in, but they're willing to suspend the knowledge of that long enough to either be swept up in what you're doing or not. That's what we decide to do. And I don't do it with any other actor or filmmaker. I don't sit there and say, well, this is not exactly the age of innocence, but it certainly is as good as Goodfellas. You know, I don't think about that when I watch a Marty Scorsese movie or any filmmaker or any actor. It's like, well, you start from Square One.

You start all over. It's naked at the beginning of that. And do you buy it or not? And I think that reality is not part of the reportage, if I'm using a word, that comes about in what I call the entertainment industrial complex. People write about the all-encompassing sweep of all knowledge about all movies ever made. But going to the movies is actually an individual relationship that each of us has, with what is playing up on the screen.

Tom Hanks, this has been so much fun. This has been fun, guys. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. The actor Tom Hanks, his new novel is the making of another major motion picture masterpiece. And our conversation was recorded as part of The New Yorker Live at Symphony Space in Manhattan. I'm David Remnick. Thanks so much for joining us today. And see you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-produce

of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbes of Tune Arts with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Walton, Brita Green, Adam Howard, Calalilla, Avery Keatley, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, and Gauphin in Putabwele, with guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Harrison Keithline,

Michael May, David Gable, and Alejandro Deccan. Special thanks this week to end. Ed Haber, Chase Culpin, Amanda Miller, and Krista Boyd. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherino Endowment Fund.