The filmmaker Tom Hanks “did not want to cross”
There are a couple of movie directors with whom Tom Hanks is invariably and eternally associated. We simply cannot think of Hanks without thinking of the many movies he has made with Robert Zemeckis and Steven Spielberg, the likes of which pretty much define his career.
In terms of Spielberg, we’ve seen Hanks appear in a number of his most acclaimed and iconic roles, including those in Saving Private Ryan, Catch Me If You Can and The Terminal. At the same time, his equally admired Zemeckis-directed efforts are comprised of the likes of Forrest Gump, Cast Away, and The Polar Express.
While the likes of Spielberg and Zemeckis certainly occupy the slots of the directors with whom Hanks is most associated, there is another filmmaker who played an important role in the actor’s career. Hanks played in two movies for the writer, journalist and director Nora Ephron, a film industry figure that he claimed had a hardened attitude.
Ephron was best known for writing a number of romantic comedy movies, including Heartburn and When Harry Met Sally. Speaking with The Guardian, Hanks once noted, “Nora was not a soft woman. You did not want to cross her. Nora said, ‘Never turn down a front-row seat for human folly.’ And I have turned down a lot of those front-row seats, but human behaviour is constantly entertaining.”
Hanks had first worked with Ephron on her 1993 romantic comedy movie Sleepless in Seattle alongside Meg Ryan, who plays a journalist who falls in love with a widowed architect when his son calls into a radio talk show asking the women of Seattle to contact him in the hopes of finding a new romantic partner.
Five years later, Hanks again turned up for Ephron for her 1998 rom-com-drama You’ve Got Mail, which again also starred Ryan. It focuses on two people who are engaging in an online romance whilst being blissfully unaware of the fact that they are also business rivals, marking the third collaboration between the two actors.
Discussing further the kind of advice that Ephron had given him, Hanks noted, “Watching humans behave in one way results in a comedy, and in another way a tragedy, but it ends up being a constant fascination. Why in the world do we do what we do, and how does someone get to that place where they think that’s important?”
In the Guardian interview, Hanks had been speaking of the “dicks” of the film industry, like Harvey Weinstein, who was the complete opposite of the way that Ephron handled herself from a personal and professional basis, which explains why the actor had such a high opinion of her and was happy to act in a number of her movies.
“The people that are dicks in showbiz, I always say to them: ‘Why are you in this?’ I’m in it because there’s nothing more fun than doing this,” Hanks explained. “This is like going to high school and finding out you can take a drama class instead of calculus. Sign me up!”
Indeed, there’s a passion in Hanks in the way that he approaches his career, and it’s clear that he cherishes every opportunity to star in a movie, even if it was with a director that he admired but wouldn’t want to cross the path of.
