The script that floored Tom Hanks: “It was perfect”
Tom Hanks gets the cream of the crop when it comes to scripts. As one of Hollywood’s most respected and well-liked actors for more than three decades, he’s worked on some of the best movies of the period, from Saving Private Ryan and Apollo 13 to Toy Story and Saving Mr Banks. In that time, he’s earned six Oscar nominations and won two, one in 1994 for Philadelphia and the other a year later for Forrest Gump.
Hanks clearly knows a good script when he sees one—and he gets sent plenty. The actor has worked with legendary screenwriters like Nora Ephron and the Coen brothers and has even tried his hand at writing himself. So, when he says he was blown away by a script, it’s worth paying attention. After decades in the industry, he undoubtedly knows what he’s talking about.
In the late 1990s, Hanks received a screenplay from the writer and director behind The Shawshank Redemption, Frank Darabont. Like the Oscar-nominated drama with Morgan Freeman, the new script was based on a Stephen King story and set in a prison.
Speaking to author Robert J Emery in his book The Directors–Take Four, Hanks remembered, “Reading the script of The Green Mile was surprisingly like reading the novel. It was perfect, as close to perfect as a screen adaptation is going to be.”
Based on the novel of the same name, the film stars Hanks as a death row prison guard in the 1930s who starts to experience supernatural events after a new inmate, played by Michael Clarke Duncan, arrives. As the film progresses, he begins to question whether the prisoner committed the brutal crime for which he was convicted. As with many of King’s books, the fantastical plot of the movie is just the backdrop for a moving, decidedly human story about its central characters.
According to Hanks, the script was not only flawless in its own right but the perfect distillation of its source material. “It had an economy to it that was equal to Stephen King’s original novel,” he explained. This is high praise given the near-impossible task of adapting a beloved novel into a movie. In most cases, the screenwriter has to remove large plot points in order to fit the story into a feature-length film, enraging literary fans. At over three hours, the movie certainly took its time with the story, but it was a box office hit, taking more than $286million off of a $60m budget and earning four Oscar nominations, including for ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Adapted Screenplay’.
Even more meaningful is King’s praise for the picture. Although The Green Mile isn’t his favourite adaptation of his own work (that distinction goes to Rob Reiner’s Stand By Me and Darabont’s The Shawshank Redemption), the author was impressed. In the book, Hollywood’s Stephen King, he remarked: “I would have to say that I was delighted with The Green Mile.”
He acknowledged that the adaptation was “a little ‘soft’ in some ways,” specifically in its feel-good approach to humanity despite its context, but he couldn’t fault it on that front, confessing “I am a sentimentalist at heart”.
