The director who makes movies exactly the way Tom Hanks likes them: “It was a definite”
Tom Hanks has the kind of warm, reassuring presence that puts you at ease even through the mediation of a screen. It has made him the perfect choice for playing thoughtful lawyers, Meg Ryan’s romantic interest and upstanding citizens just doing their best to lead an honest, wholesome life. When he finally did take a turn for the villainous in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, they had to bury him under makeup and prosthetics to make his dastardliness even vaguely convincing.
Not all of his movies are a walk in the park with a golden retriever, though. Over the years, Hanks has appeared in plenty of pulse-pounding dramas that provide their own kind of darkness. In Cast Away, for example, he had to play a man trapped on an island who must go to extreme lengths to stay sane and alive. In Sully, he had to play the titular captain of a passenger plane who landed in the Hudson River when the engines failed.
Given the range of genres his filmography covers, it’s tough to know what type of movie Hanks personally enjoys watching. You could look to his producing credits, but they are almost more wide-ranging than his acting credits. My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Band of Brothers, and a Christmas TV special featuring country star Carrie Underwood are just a few of the projects he’s believed in enough to finance, so there are few clues as to which movies he’d take with him if he were ever to get cast away on an island again and somehow have access to a TV.
For those tortured by this mystery, however, it will come as a relief to know that, in 2014, the actor stated clearly that one director in particular makes the kind of movies he likes to watch.
During the press tour for the 2013 grabbed-from-the-headlines thriller Captain Phillips, he spoke to Screen Daily about how he leapt at the chance to work with its director, Paul Greengrass. “He makes movies the way I like to see them,” Hanks said. “So it was a definite. We had met each other a couple of times and discussed the possibility of working together once or twice, of which nothing ever came up… All it required was a howdy-do.”
Greengrass is one of those filmmakers who you may not hear namechecked as often as Christopher Nolan or Quentin Tarantino, but you’ve probably seen one of his movies. The Jason Bourne franchise, Green Zone, and United 93 are just some of his films, and he’s known for his masterful creation of suspense and the stark, handheld visual style that he brings to thrillers.
He’s also shown a preference for bringing real-life suspense and tragedy to the screen. 2002’s Bloody Sunday is centred around the 1972 shootings in Derry, Northern Ireland; United 93 charts one of the hijacked planes that went down during the 9/11 attacks; and 22 July chronicles the 2011 attack that took place at a summer camp in Norway. Repackaging recent tragedy for the cinema-going masses is tricky territory, but as Hanks would likely attest, Greengrass manages to do it in a way that is as understated and unsensational as it’s possible to achieve with big-budget feature films.
Captain Phillips is one of his least harrowing movies, though it too follows a real-life story of terror. Starring Hanks as Captain Richard Phillips, a merchant mariner who was taken hostage with his crew by Somali pirates in 2009, it was a box office smash, earning $218million off a $55m budget and receiving six Academy Award nominations, including ‘Best Picture’. Hanks must have enjoyed working with Greengrass as much as he enjoys watching the director’s films because the two teamed up seven years later for the Civil War-era western News of the World.
