The movie that changed everything for Tom Hanks: “It really altered my life”
It’s not an obligation for everyone with a passing interest in cinema to experience a single movie that fundamentally alters their consciousness to such an extent that their life is irrevocably altered forever, even if it did happen to Tom Hanks.
Before his life-changing trip to his local theatre, the future acting superstar and two-time Academy Award winner was a kid who enjoyed motion pictures. There’s nothing wrong with that, but when he was operating under the assumption that Fantastic Voyage was the benchmark, it’s clear he needed to broaden his filmic horizons.
Fortunately, salvation was lurking just around the corner and even unfolded in the same genre. Whereas the aforementioned 1966 favourite was a pulpy, kitschy adventure designed with entertaining audiences in mind, the next major sci-fi that captured Hanks’ imagination had a completely different – and much more important – effect on the impressionable youngster.
“2001: A Space Odyssey is – I saw that when I was in eighth grade or ninth grade – and it really altered my life because I thought movies were like James Bond movies and John Wayne movies,” he told NPR. “Then I saw this thing that almost had no dialogue in it for the first 40 minutes, and it really altered my artistic horizon.”
Hanks was obviously a huge fan of sci-fi as a nipper, and while he’s hardly the first big name in Hollywood to worship at the altar of Stanley Kubrick’s seminal parable on humanity, there is a shred of irony to be found in the fact that Fantastic Voyage won more Oscars than 2001. Combined, though, it fostered a lifelong love of the genre and the possibilities of cinema, which would serve him very well in the years and decades to come.
Children aren’t raised on a steady diet of Kubrick, outside of the most devoted cinephile households probably, but Hanks recognised greatness when he saw it. 2001 is one of the most influential movies in the history of the business and one that’s cast a shadow over many more performers and auteurs than him, but it’s not a requirement to immediately fall in love with the meticulous maestro’s masterwork.
Take Denzel Washington, for instance, a fair comparison because he’s as big a star as Hanks, has the exact same number of Oscars, co-starred with him in Philadelphia, and is less than 19 months older. They’re peers in more ways than one, but Washington wasn’t brought up with a deep-seated love of celluloid. In fact, he admitted he’d rather rob somebody coming out of the latest Kubrick feature than pay for a ticket, and it didn’t stop him from becoming one of the all-time greats.
Kubrick left a lot of people cold, and he enraptured just as many. Hanks fell firmly into the latter camp, and witnessing 2001 for the first time changed everything.
