Tom Hanks: “Steven Spielberg has been thinking in cinematic terms since he was eight years old”
It’s not a requirement for anyone who dreams of making it as an actor or director to obsess over it from a very early age, and even though he was a theatre student at university, Tom Hanks didn’t make his screen debut until he was 24 years old.
That’s still young, but considering how many performers end up debuting in their childhood or teenage years, he was a fairly late bloomer by comparison. Not that it stopped him from becoming one of his era’s greatest, most respected, and recognised talents, though, but he wasn’t out there in his backyard as a kid shooting home movies and dreaming of his name in lights.
One of his most famous collaborators definitely was, which ended up placing them in good stead when they, too, went on to become an industry legend. For Steven Spielberg, he never considered any other career than directing, with his creativity taking shape through a number of DIY productions that belied their limitations with the type of ambition that would eventually become his signature.
When Spielberg was only 14, he directed 40-minute amateur movie Escape to Nowhere, gathering his friends and family to function as its cast and crew. When he was 17, he took the next step when he assembled a sizeable – by his standards at the time – budget of $500 to make 140-minute sci-fi Firelight, which was eventually repurposed as the basis for Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
After first encountering Hanks when he executive produced the 1986 comedy The Money Pit, the pair quickly became fast friends and sounding boards, leading them to work together on a number of different projects covering multiple genres across film and television.
Spielberg executive produced Hanks’ Joe Versus the Volcano, directed him on Saving Private Ryan, Catch Me If You Can, The Terminal, Bridge of Spies, and The Post, they co-created Band of Brothers, and produced spiritual successors The Pacific and Masters of the Air, so they know each other inside out at this stage.
In an interview with The New Yorker, Hanks outlined his amazement at the throughline that’s been prevalent in Spielberg’s work ever since he picked up his very first camera. “Steven Spielberg has been thinking in cinematic terms since he was eight years old,” he said. “And you can look at his films, and what he did when he was a kid, and you can see his DNA all over them to this day.”
Long before it became part of the cinematic lexicon and well prior to his official feature-length debut, the legendary director’s earliest films were all distinctly Spielbergian in their own way, with that youthful exuberance and supreme confidence in his own abilities having served him very well over the course of the next seven decades.
