The Oscar-nominated movie Tom Hanks refused to make: “Proved to have my little head up my little butt”
It’s probably a bit unfair to Tom Hanks, not that he cares, given his illustrious award-winning career in Hollywood, but if I think of him, and his voice, and then wonder what the first film that springs to mind is, it is Pixar’s Toy Story, a film in which he had precisely zero minutes on screen.
The caveats to that are, of course, that 1) Toy Story is an absolutely amazing film, so he might be fine with it, and 2) he does, of course, provide the voice of Woody the cowboy, who is the star, so it probably counts. After that, the two films of his that register first are Forrest Gump, which is also an unbelievable movie, and then 2000’s Cast Away, which… is less so.
In fact, the more I think about Cast Away, in which Hanks gets marooned on an island and falls in love with a volleyball the more ludicrous it seems, so instead let’s focus on the numerous films in which Hanks has been excellent over a 40 year career, namely the brilliantly 1980s coming of age fantasy Big, Steven Spielberg’s stylish and slick comedy Catch Me If You Can in which Hanks mercilessly tracks down Leonardo DiCaprio’s pretend pilot teen, and then what I believe is his best performance, in the same director’s epic Saving Private Ryan.
That film was an absolute ‘leave it all on the field’ piece of work from Hanks, who was probably at his peak when it was released in 1998; he and Spielberg combining to produce one of the best war films in cinematic history, a jaw-dropping movie that pushed creative and technical boundaries and which featured an opening half hour that WW2 veterans who landed on the beaches at Normandy described as hauntingly realistic.
Hanks had already won two ‘Best Actor’ Oscars by the time Saving Private Ryan was released, for Philadelphia and Forrest Gump, and he was duly nominated for a third, although he lost out to Italian Roberto Benigni for Life is Beautiful. But the movie itself picked up five Academy Awards including ‘Best Directing’ for Spielberg.
Hanks dominated the Oscars and Hollywood acting throughout the late 1980s and ‘90s, but he still found time to turn down some roles that perhaps would have elevated him to even more impressive heights, notably one that went to Kevin Costner in a sports film that was nominated for three Oscars.
Back in 1996 he said: “I’ve turned down some really great movies that have gone off and been very, very successful, but I don’t regret turning them down. I actually told (director) Phil Alden Robinson on the phone that the book Shoeless Joe would never be able to be turned into a film, because there’s no way a movie could capture the magic of the short story”.
Adding, “The movie was filmed as Shoeless Joe and released under the title Field of Dreams, so I guess proved at that moment to have my little head up my little butt. I think that was when I was still riding the wave of megalomaniacal madness after having made Big.”
Co-starring Burt Lancaster in his last film, Ray Liotta and James Earl Jones, the ghostly baseball movie was indeed a hit, albeit mostly only in the United States where people like baseball despite it being astonishingly repetitive and basically entirely uneventful.
After a few up and down years due to a contract with Apple TV and an underwhelming showing in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis biopic, Hanks will be heard if not seen again as Woody in this year’s needless Toy Story 5 and is also filming a sequel to 2020’s naval period drama Greyhound.
