“There’s nothing worse than hearing an actor say he’s an actor.” This was his first reaction Tom Hanks when the American publisher Peter Gaithers invited him to write novel for the profession that made him a superstar.

Then, of course, the famous actor (and producer) thought maybe he would like to tell a story that came from the film industry. And that’s because, as he said in a recent interview with The Atlantic magazine, “I find that everyone assumes they know how movies are made, when none of them really do.”

Thus was created “Creating another major film masterpiece” (Creating Another Cinematic Masterpiece), a satirical anatomy of filmmaking in which Hanks seems quite capable of looking at the world through a distorting lens and scathingly criticizing any weaknesses. “The truth is our industry is full of idiots,” he says.

This is Hanks’ first attempt at writing a book about the art, focusing on making a feature film to explore the main themes and issues involved in making it. Naturally, this highlights the importance of having a strong team of writers, directors, producers and actors working towards the same goal. Having himself worked with some of the biggest names in Hollywood, he draws on his experience to provide insight into how a successful film is made. The result is an anthem for cinema and those who shoot it.

New Jimmy Stewart

Hanks’ transition to this new creative quest follows a very successful career as an actor (and, secondarily, a producer) that has established him in the public mind as the good guy next door, the friend we all want to have in life. He is also known by the nickname “America’s Dad”. For many, he was identified with the kind and innocent Forrest Gump, with the cowboy Woody from Toy Story, or with the popular host of one of the longest-running children’s shows, Fred Rogers. Most of us have come to know and love him through Nora Ephron’s romantic comedies Wake Up in Seattle and You’ve Got a Message on Your Computer, as well as dramatic adventures like The Green Mile, Castaway, Terminal, “Philadelphia”, “Sally”, “Post”.

Over the past two years, he has been seen in Finch, where he played a post-apocalyptic survivor who builds a robot for a company; a suicidal misanthrope who finds himself in the modern-day suburbs of Pittsburgh; in “A Man Called Otto”. We also saw him as the grieving Geppetto in Pinocchio and Elvis Presley’s two-faced manager in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis. This June, she will appear in Wes Anderson’s new film Asteroid City. And of course, we can’t forget playing six different characters in the epic sci-fi film Cloud Atlas, where we also admired him as the “bad guy” (a rarity for Hanks…).

Tom Hanks is described to older people as the new Jimmy Stewart, classic, beloved actor of It’s a Wonderful Life and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington: an ordinary, small but powerful man and a healthy fellow citizen. . Like Stewart, Hanks was a “full-fledged” actor from a very early age, lacking the then standards of beauty in cinema. He, too, was simple and “clean” of scandals.

The actor, who has been married to Greek-American actress, producer and singer Rita Wilson for over 30 years, is considered a great family man. The naturalized Greek artist does not miss the opportunity to show his love for our country, which he visits very often, having a house on Antiparos.

Childhood

Hanks’ public image is so established that it can easily overshadow his real self and his very difficult path to date.

In retrospect, it can be assumed that the current image of Hanks was created gradually, shaped over the years as he gained status and dignity. But it didn’t quite happen that way. Already in the 1980s, he was described as “a funny and vulnerable simple man”, “a sympathetic soul without a shadow of vanity”, “the image of an unfailingly good person.” In fact, on Saturday Night Live, he made fun of how “terminally” good he was.

Tom Hanks believes there is something special about his past that could provide an important explanation for who he is today. It goes to show that before all of this—before everything he would do and present to the world, even before he began to explore his potential talents and how best to use them—he was already on his way to become what is.

What, in his opinion, is his talent? “In order not to weaken the interest of the people. Does it make sense; To guarantee the time they spend listening to me.”

When he was a child, Hanks traveled to the small northern California town of Red Bluff several times a year to visit and stay with his mother, as his parents divorced when he was 5, according to The Atlantic. . He made this trip on Greyhound buses between the ages of 8 and 17. This four-hour journey in every direction released something inside him. Sometimes he read a little, maybe a comic book or a book, but mostly watched the world go by. What was behind the barn, who lived in the lighted house, where did the plane fly in the sky?

Little Tom’s home life was not normal. He found some consolation in the stories that “filled” his head on those distant journeys. “I was the third child, like a leaf carried by the wind. I didn’t control anything. Someone always told us what to do,” he emphasizes. Choice and ambition came gradually. In high school, he discovered the theater class, and with it a possible future life.

Somehow he found himself. “I’ve never had a real job other than acting,” he explained to The Atlantic. “I worked in hotels, washed dishes for a while on the weekends.” And, as he mentioned, he was always interested in what else he could do besides cinema: “What are my skills? What services can I offer? I would like to be the funniest, coolest taxi driver on the planet. I want to be a tour guide.” He remembered the words of his late girlfriend Nora Ephron. “He said something really true: I would make a better park ranger. I would coordinate conversations around the fire, would know a lot and could “weave” the perfect story.

Whatever interests him

In 2017, Hanks released a collection of his short stories entitled Unusual Elements (published in Greek by Pataki Publications). In his new book, Making Another Major Movie Masterpiece, Hanks also approaches important aspects of his life in ways that may not be so obvious. Much of the story takes place in and around the fictional town of Lone Butte. At the beginning of the story, Robbie is growing up in this town, a boy who eventually writes a script that became the source of a comic book for a feature film called Nightshade. It is later the location of a superhero movie where most of the book’s narrative takes place. Hanks confirms suspicions that Lone Butte is a stand-in for Red Bluff, the destination of all those teenage bus rides where he spent some time with his mother.

And here we see the desire of the author not to get hung up on a specific type of story, such as a protagonist and an antagonist. “I have always been drawn to topics where there are no competitors.” In the stories that interest him, humanity is not so easily divided. What sets the characters apart is that “some people have opinions that just don’t win the day.”

After writing, producing, and acting, what does an actor think about his talent in the end? “In order not to weaken the interest of the people. Does it make sense; To guarantee the time they spend listening to me.”