How Tom Hanks dodged “the most mundane” two weeks of his career: “Movie-making by attrition”
The way Hollywood works is that the bigger the star, the more leeway they’re afforded. And yet, Tom Hanks hadn’t quite reached the pinnacle when he decided to fuck off from set for two weeks.
It was a bold decision, and an entirely justified one. Not many actors would be bold enough to tell a director that, since they couldn’t be arsed hanging around for a fortnight of interminable shooting, they weren’t going to, but off he went, and it sounds like Hanks had a whale of a time.
When the 1980s gave way to the 1990s, he was riding the crest of a wave. He’d won a Golden Globe for his career-making performance in Big, which also landed him on the Academy Awards shortlist for the first time, but he hadn’t yet solidified himself as a top-level draw.
That would come soon after, when he won back-to-back ‘Best Actor’ gongs for Philadelphia and Forrest Gump, but he knew what he didn’t want to do. After the embarrassment of The Bonfire of the Vanities, Hanks took a step back, pondered his next movie, and realised something important.
What he didn’t want to do was play any more characters who were, as he put it, pussies. He’d had enough, and so for his next port of call, he agreed to play a booze-soaked and short-fused baseball coach in Penny Marshall’s A League of Their Own, not that he was required to hang around on set every day.
Since he’d already worked with her on Big, he knew her methods, and it didn’t sound like he was overly enthused. “I tell her this is movie-making by attrition,” he recalled. “You’re just trying to wear us down. ‘Well, I don’t know what I’m going to want, so I need…'” Fortunately, he knew how to combat it.
For a sequence featuring the Rockford Peaches, Hanks’ Jimmy Dugan has the first and last lines. “I was supposed to be in that entire scene,” he explained. “On paper, it was seven pages long. I thought, seven pages long in a Penny Marshall film, that will be 14 and a half days of shooting, the same scene over and over again. I had a line at the beginning, and a line at the end.”
Hatching an ingenious scheme, he delivered his first line, and off he popped. As it turned out, he was right about how the scene would take twice as many days as its page count. “I got out of two weeks of the most mundane film shooting,” he beamed, with the actor finding other ways to occupy himself.
What did he do? He “played ball, I read books, I learned how to knit, I sent faxes back and forth, I wrote a computer programme,” all while his castmates were still filming the same thing. After 14 days, he swanned back in, delivered his character’s closing line once and once only, and his work was done.
