Tom Hanks on the rewards and reality of making movies
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
The whole enterprise of filmmaking is so fraught with peril. Movies get canned at the last moment. Movies get made but never distributed because they ran out of funding. Brilliant scripts find many lovers but no takers. The weather will mess you up exactly when you only have one shot at a scene. Your multiple national awards guarantee nothing... you will still spend many years struggling to get your own film produced. And then the weather will screw you over, your producers will bail just before distribution because the political climate changed, and suddenly you will find yourself friendless and alone. Etc. etc.
But then there are these flashes of brilliance... Those epic stories. Those immortal dialogues. Moments that shape a generation. Songs that move you to greatness, or get you through the hard times.
And I suppose my friends and their ilk live and die for those moments. They are all mad, I tell you. Stark raving mad.
Avatar, for example, is estimated to have consumed about ~500 MM USD in production, distribution, and promotion. If you spend that much, you are going to elbow out all the competition from theaters and OTT and what have you come launch time.
I think "Bridge of Spies" which co-stars Mark Rylance as Colonel Abel is a very interesting little drama. They both occupy quite quirky corners of the problem space. Hanks has to be respectful of his client to perform his legal role but also is somewhat appalled by the systems disregard for the minor US student character caught up in the east-west barriers as he negotiates the release of Gary Powers.
Rylance is fantastic in that movie. his "would it help" comment about panic under duress is just awesome deadpan.
Hanks being robbed for his thick winter coat in East Berlin is also a good little vignette. I think this is what Hanks excels at: small vignettes of the human experience, which make a story believable.
Her "Place of greater safety" on the french revolution and Danton is fantastic.
Adam's roughly hour-long interviews tend to follow the 'friendly, rambling chat' format, and he is well liked and respected by both his listeners and those he speaks with. Anybody interested in Tom Hanks' person and opinions could do a lot worse than check it out.
A source: https://www.podbean.com/podcast-detail/hqwed-393e3/THE-ADAM-...
[Also, screw it, I am shoe-horning this joke into my post:
** Now Showing: THE MAKING OF "THE BLOB" - THE VISCOUS REALITY OF FILMMAKING ** ]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghan_mujahideen#Relationship...
All that being said, obviously the US has failed repeatedly in Afghanistan, but the initial intervention against the Soviets was not the main factor. The Taliban's persistence is due to multiple US geopolitical blunders that happened in the decades after the Soviet-Afghan War.
Trying to split hairs saying there was infighting and not all of them joined the Taliban does not change that.
Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda also came out of all that.
Now I'll go back to reading the mainstream media's encomiums to the Azov batallion in the Ukraine.
This movie is a prime example of Hollywood's "machine" doing its thing.
I've read the book and watched the original movie adaptation and if you've done that you won't help but see right through the movie's producers' attempt to "commercialize" it.
In the original movie/book the woman is Indian, in the American version she's Mexican.. There's absolutely nothing wrong with an Indian woman spicing up the life of a grumpy old white man.
In the original movie/book the outcast boy is gay, in the American version they're trans.. This one was absolutely tacky. Gay people are still far from accepted universally even in the US..
All in all, this just proves the fact that movie making is primarily a business trying to cater to the audience (nothing wrong with that) but any talk about "the human" or artistic aspect is pure bullshit in my book.
The second seems more plausible as a marketing tactic.
Re: book to script, I found I go less insane, if I just think of it this way. Two people were involved in events, one wrote a book, one a script.
In as those two people would have seen different things, talked to different people, been more/less involved in events, and just interpret the world differenty, as we all do, it makes sense their output would differ.
Thusly, I remain sane. Or perhaps less insane.
I go further than that - I explicitly prefer seeing the movie/show adaptation before going through the original books. I'm aphantasic - reading a book, I just can't picture anything in my mind. Every character and every scenery is mostly this cloud of facts, like an unresolved promise (the async programming kind), that I carry in my head 'till the last page. Seeing a movie/show, however, gives characters specific appearance, specific voice, specific cadence. Primed with those images and sounds, I find reading source material much easier and more enjoyable.
And yes, as much as adaptations differ from the original, I don't mind. I can fix the inconsistencies on the fly, or separate the book reality from movie/show reality entirely. It's not a big deal. Meanwhile, having some specific images and sounds to anchor my barely-existing imagination to, is very helpful to me.
Hanks: 'Rubicon No. 3, the critical reaction to it—which is a version of the vox populi. Someone is going to say, “I hated it.” Other people can say, “I think it’s brilliant.” Somewhere in between the two is what the movie actually is.'
JVtV is extremely polarizing: people either love it, or hate it. But there's no 'in-between' here - a lot of people just don't 'get it'. John Patrick Shanley made a very personal, quirky movie, full of metaphor and wisdom - and it's great!
For starters, he quit his job before the volcano opportunity came up. He choice was never "keep working or jump into a volcano."
He quit his job because he'd just been told he had just a few months to live, and didn't want to spend them like that.
Finally, he didn't have much money. He could either scrape by in his apartment for a few months, or go on a grand adventure and die just a little earlier than he would have anyway.
Hank's naif fully embraces that the world may seem to be entirely absurd, new, even explicable as he breaks from his his soul/sole-killing rut into his new role. ("I'm not arguing that. I'm not arguing that. I'm not arguing that with you. He can get the job ... but can he do the job? I'm not arguing that ...") Even if he is The Fool, on a fool's quest, he can still learn and grow from what he experiences along the way.
I've always found the film a slightly cautionary tale about the wonder (tinged with a little sympathetic horror) about taking a long look around you with fresh eyes: what you see can loom as large as the Moon on a landless Pacific horizon.
I thought the address was weird because it had no apartment number, it was just like 144 E 13th Street or something. So I asked if it was a business because we got a lower rate for shipping to commercial addresses and he says something like, “Uh no, it’s my home.” So I kinda knew he had to be somebody to have that address.
Then a lightbulb went off in my head and I go, “Didn’t you write Joe vs. the Volcano?” And it definitely caught him by surprise and he was very gracious as he accepted both my praise and offer of free overnight shipping.
Another time, a co-worker there got a “don’t you know who I am?” from Seth Godin when they refused to bend over backward to fix an order he placed.
Why on Earth would a real-life meatspace person have any idea who he is? This is what happens when people don’t touch grass often enough.
To be fair our customer service was terrible. When a customer asked for our manager, I had a fake email address that I’d give them that I was in charge of. I probably fired myself about a half-dozen times.
Might be all that HN exposure turning me cynical, but I kind of assumed this is what everyone does.
I couldn't find anything on Hanks distancing himself, what's the story there? I did find that Roger Ebert liked it: https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/joe-versus-the-volcano-19...
The Devil's Candy mentioned at the beginning of the interview is an amazing book. The journalist had complete unimpeded access to the entire production from start to finish. Highly recommended.
Oh, maybe that some movies aren’t appreciated immediately, but that seems rather obvious. Maybe I’m getting old, haha.