Tom Hanks has starred in dozens of movies. Now he's written a novel too

Transcript

A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:

For Tom Hanks, movies have always been transformative. He remembers going to the theater when he was 7 years old and signature moments staying with him to this day. Now, after acting in dozens of movies, he's written a novel based on everything he's experienced on movie sets. In it, he pays tribute to not just the stars, but to the behind-the-scenes folks who make the movie magic happen.

TOM HANKS: If someone's going to ask me, what is the surefire way that I can get to Hollywood? I would have two answers. One, as Bette Davis said, take Fountain, you know? That's - I'll let everybody figure out what that story means. Take Fountain Boulevard.

MARTÍNEZ: Go to Google Maps.

HANKS: Yeah. Go to Google Maps and take Fountain. But the other one is solve problems.

MARTÍNEZ: Tom Hanks' novel is called "The Making Of Another Motion Picture Masterpiece." The story spans seven decades, starting in 1947, when a U.S. Marine who served as a flamethrower returns from the Second World War and makes a big impression on his 5-year-old nephew. By the 1970s, that kid grows up to become a cartoonist who creates a comic strip about his uncle. Then to present day - that comic strip gets developed into a superhero blockbuster by a famous director.

HANKS: The root of a motion picture, which is what this book is about - literally, the first idea that ended up being incorporated into the movie that you and I see that is firmly rooted in today did come from the imagination of a 5-year-old boy who was playing around one day - knew that he had an uncle somewhere. And the uncle showed up, and he appeared as a god to him...

MARTÍNEZ: So Bob Falls...

HANKS: ...Or a superhero, as the case may be.

MARTÍNEZ: The person that you're talking about - Bob Falls, the uncle - he might exist somewhere in your memory.

HANKS: Oh, Lord, yeah.

MARTÍNEZ: Yeah.

HANKS: When I was certainly growing up and being exposed to some adult that had a painful mystery behind them - an unspoken truth that they carried with them - and that, as a kid, you try to fill in the blanks yourself. You know, why is my teacher like this? Why is my dad's friend like this? Why is my uncle as terse as he is?

MARTÍNEZ: Did you wonder - like, people in your life when you were a kid - teachers, you know, an adult in your life - did you think what their backstory was, even back then?

HANKS: Oh, constantly.

MARTÍNEZ: Yeah?

HANKS: And you would get hints of it. And, look, I get an awful lot of questions of - (imitating older adult) what is it about World War II that - you know, a generation that fought - what is it?

MARTÍNEZ: Are you talking to 95-year-olds all the time?

HANKS: Is it the good or the bad? Is it "The Good War," as Studs Terkel wrote about, or is it your own individual, you know, namby-pambyness that you, yourself, never served in the military?

MARTÍNEZ: You're talking like three different people right there all at once.

HANKS: Well, it's kind of - it's an amalgam...

MARTÍNEZ: Oh, OK.

HANKS: ...A very cheap shot at anybody who's ever interviewed me.

But what I ended up getting from - and also is the root of both Bob Falls, the artist who ended up drawing the first incarnation of this - of the superhero that appears in the movie you said - does come from a generation that spoke about the war as the defining period of their lives - before, during and after. But this is a guy that just came back, got off the boat, took off his uniform and said, there is no way I'm going to go back home and take up a job in my dad's printing office. I am going to wander, and I am going to let whatever happens happens based on what I saw and what I did and what I did to others on these small little specks of coral in the Pacific Ocean for the better part of four years of their lives.

MARTÍNEZ: It seems like we need something to be a touchstone in our lives that changes things or maybe redefines how we feel about things.

HANKS: And I think, collectively, as you take it in - as you take in this record of what you yourself went through, it devolves into tropes. It devolves into a very simple protagonist-antagonist dynamic - good guys and bad guys. This happened, and that caused that. And our own individual recollection of all those things is far from tropes. It is a bunch of small, tiny moments that we, ourselves, had to fill. And to make - for a guy like me to make a - write a book about the making of a movie, well, on one hand, that's an absolute bunt, you know? Yeah, I did that, and I did that. And everything that happened in the book I witnessed or caused to happen myself. But the desire is to bust up the collective understanding of what, like, making a movie is from the tropes of, you know, lights, camera, action. That's a print. Let's wrap. You know, it is so far removed from simple, predictive moments like that, and you get down into the great story that all life seems to be, which is our own individual battle against one damn thing after another.

MARTÍNEZ: So then why would you say it's a bunt for you to write a book about movies?

HANKS: 'Cause I got anecdotes galore, man. I got stories that can go on.

MARTÍNEZ: But it's not - I mean, that's what we want to hear, right?

HANKS: Well, this is the thing that has landed upon me, I think, more importantly now, at the age of 66, then it has - but making a movie is a blast. It is more fun than fun, almost no matter what is expected of you. Making a movie is confounding. It is at times physically miserable. It enrages you to the point that you could get into near fistfights over whether or not you're going to be allowed to do something or not. And yet it is nothing but a huge collection of - I'll give it a number. Any movie is a collection of 627 million moments that are captured somehow on the frame. And it's the input of, certainly, the actors and the writers and storytellers. It's also the input of the people who drive the trucks and park them first thing in the morning. It's the input of the guy who has to make sure the generator is running. It's also the input of somebody who says, hey, I got to get - I got to make 52 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and slice them up into triangles and get them to the set. Otherwise, everybody's sugar levels are going to collapse about 3:30 in the afternoon.

MARTÍNEZ: Because I read that you said that you think that people seem to think they know everything there is to know about movies.

HANKS: Everybody thinks they know how movies are made.

MARTÍNEZ: Why? Why do they think so? I mean, I'll admit it. There's a bunch of the making of blank movie...

HANKS: Right.

MARTÍNEZ: ...That I could see any time of the day.

HANKS: Yeah. Yeah.

MARTÍNEZ: So is that why people think...

HANKS: Yeah, they do.

MARTÍNEZ: ...Because they think they've seen this or that?

HANKS: They said, oh, they shot that. And they planned that, and they happened to this. Everybody thinks that it happens according to some grand design. And it's actually just amalgam of serendipity, good luck and bad luck. And...

MARTÍNEZ: There's design too, though. There's - I mean...

HANKS: Well, without a doubt. But most people think that a movie reels out like a Broadway play does. Everybody knows exactly what they are, where they need to be, how they need to do it. But movies are a long series of accidents that you don't expect as well as, often, occasional, something that goes off exactly as you planned. It's all things, all at the same time.

MARTÍNEZ: That's Tom Hanks. His novel is "The Making Of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece." Tom, thank you.

HANKS: Thank you.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

MARTÍNEZ: I spoke to Tom Hanks before the Hollywood writers' strike. After, he told us, I am a member of every guild there is, and there is no doubt that the economics of our business has changed in the last few years. These changes affect everybody in the making of a motion picture masterpiece, and something needs to be worked out now.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.