The director Tom Hanks was petrified to meet: “I couldn’t believe it”
It’s probably been a long time since Tom Hanks was even remotely starstruck, which comes with the territory when he’s been one of the biggest and most beloved stars in the industry for almost 40 years at this point.
He’s now in a position where people are overawed meeting him, but it’s an experience he can identify with. Even though he already had two Academy Award wins for ‘Best Actor’ under his belt and was firmly entrenched at the top of the A-list, Hanks was mesmerised when he encountered Paul Newman.
The two shared the screen in Sam Mendes’ graphic novel adaptation Road to Perdition, with Hanks cognisant of the fact he might mess up the first take on the first day because he could barely believe he was standing opposite someone he’d grown up idolising.
It wasn’t the first time he’d been in that position, though, having been wracked with nerves a quarter of a century beforehand. In the late 1980s, Hanks was still awaiting the role that would propel his career to new heights, which he found when he secured his first Oscar nomination for classic coming-of-age comedy Big.
The Oscar-nominated screenplay was co-written by Anne Spielberg, but Hanks had yet to meet her illustrious brother. When he did, it was Robert Zemeckis who served as the facilitator, with an innocuous dinner turning into a pinch-me moment for a star who’d never crossed paths with the filmmaker who’d eventually become the most famous creative collaborator of his professional life.
“I believe we sat and had a bite to eat,” he recalled to Flavour of his initial meeting with Spielberg. “I could count on one hand the amount of times I got to drive onto any studio lot in town. I drove on and ran into Bob Zemeckis who had just been talking to Steven about Back to the Future. Then I went in to see Steven. I was petrified. I couldn’t believe it. I remember having, for me, a very stilted dinner because I was meeting – you know – Steven Spielberg.”
If Back to the Future had yet to be released, then their first tête-à-tête would have been at the beginning of 1985 at the very earliest. They clearly hit it off from the jump, however, seeing as their first time working on a feature together would come the following year when Spielberg executive produced Hanks’ Richard Benjamin-directed comedy The Money Pit.
He’d serve much the same function on Joe Versus the Volcano in 1990, but it wouldn’t be until eight years after that – and more than a decade after Hanks’ petrified dinner – that they at last put their heads together as director and star on World War II classic Saving Private Ryan.
