Tom Hanks on Stanley Kubrick: “I would have been too afraid to meet him. You don’t want to meet your idols”
Tom Hanks has checked off pretty much every entry on any actor’s wishlist. He’s won an Oscar (two of them, actually), starred in several major box office successes, including movies that have grossed more than a billion dollars, and attained that intangible yet unmistakable quality of being adored by an untold number of faceless strangers.
He’s also been fortunate enough to work with some of the greatest artists in the business, including Steven Spielberg (many times), Wes Anderson, Denzel Washington, and Meryl Streep. He’s shown a continued willingness to try new things as an actor, even going so far as to do the unthinkable – play a villain – in Baz Luhrmann’s movie Elvis in 2022.
Despite his seeming ability to get along with anyone, however, Hanks has admitted that there was one director who he idolised so much that he would have been too afraid to meet him. During a 2009 interview with NPR, the actor was asked if there were any living or dead filmmakers he’d want to meet. His answer was Stanley Kubrick, but with a caveat.
“I’d like to talk to him,” Hanks said but added, “I would have been too afraid to meet him. You don’t want to meet your idols.”
The actor’s appreciation for Kubrick runs deep. He described the filmmaker as “uncompromising” in his approach to his craft and highlighted just how unusual his style of working was in an industry that values speed above all else.
“He would build the set; he would wait till it was right,” Hanks said. “He’d rewrite things, and the crews were small, it wasn’t expensive… And out of that, he created probably, you know… five or six of the greatest motion pictures of all time.”
Few fans of cinema would disagree. Kubrick’s legacy in the industry is almost unparalleled, especially given his longevity. The films Hanks mentioned as some of the director’s best spanned four decades, from 1957’s Paths of Glory – a black and white war movie starring Kirk Douglas – to 1999’s Eyes Wide Shut – a kinky psychological thriller starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman.
As both these films demonstrate, Kubrick was able to turn generational movie stars back into actors, but he also showed, almost better than any other filmmaker, that he didn’t need famous faces in order to produce masterpieces. His most respected opus, 2001: A Space Odyssey, features minimal dialogue and actors who were not particularly well-known in the 1960s, let alone today. For Hanks, that was one of the things that made the film so revelatory when he first saw it as a teenager.
“I thought movies were like James Bond movies and John Wayne movies,” he said. “Then I saw this thing that almost had no dialogue in it for the first 40 minutes, and it really altered my artistic horizon.”
While it’s understandable that even an actor of Hanks’ stature would feel intimidated by the prospect of meeting one of the greatest artists in cinema history, there are no doubt millions of fans who would have loved to have seen them work together at some point.
