It shouldn’t hap en to a film journalist
Jamie muses on the stars that can turn professional hacks into giddy fans.
‘They broke rank to mob Spielberg like a rock star’
Last week I was sitting with Tom Hanks having a good ol’ chinwag (well, he was – I was fighting to get a question in, such was his volume and verbosity) and thinking just how marvellous it was to be operating without strictures.
Normally, before interviewing a movie star, a flustered PR person reads out the riot act: no personal questions, no photographs or autographs, no slipping them your prized screenplay, etc. In this age of social media, ‘image control’ (read: attempts to control the press) have become more, well, controlling.
Not so with Tom Hanks, a fiercely intelligent man who’s big enough (6ft, a combined US box-office of $4,438,979,778 – the third highest in history) and commanding enough to take care of himself. The same, it should be said, applies to Tom Cruise – for all the crap that’s written about him, he enters interviews without conditions, just abundant warmth and enthusiasm.
It’s hard, of course, to know just how much comes from the stars themselves and how much is their agents, whose job, after all, is to look after their client. In Cannes, awaiting an interview with Angelina Jolie, I was warned three times not to ask anything about Brad and/or the children, only for Angie to plonk herself down and say, “Sorry I’m late, I was with Brad and Maddox...” and then proceed to gabble at length about her family before I could break in. Again in Cannes, at a press conference, the crowd of journos was ordered to sit down and be quiet as Gwyneth Paltrow prepared to enter the room. It was some entrance: “They’re not children,” she witheringly pointed out to the frowning fusspot. The silent cheer lifted the roof off the room.
But despite many journalists, myself among them, liking few things more than a good grouch about the condescension that is poured upon us, it should be pointed out that (grits teeth) it’s kind of understandable. I can’t sit here and honestly say that I’ve never, in my career, finished an interview and not then fished out an item of movie memorabilia and a Sharpie. I’ve only done it a handful of times in 20 years, but I’ve done it, and my study is thus adorned by original posters of The Godfather, Taxi Driver and, er, Firestarter, signed to me by Francis Ford Coppola, ‘Bob’ De Niro and Drew Barrymore (who added a couple of big fat hearts for good measure).
Still, my once-in-a-blue-moon descents into fanboy-ism are nowt compared to the behaviour I once witnessed (again, weirdly, in Cannes) as journalists were arranged into small groups around the edge of a room to meet and greet the good folk of Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull. Ray Winstone, Jim Broadbent and Cate Blanchett were steered group to group to say awkward hellos, while Shia LaBeouf and Harrison Ford bypassed everyone to glower out on the balcony. Then entered Steven Spielberg. Boom – 80 per cent of the journos broke rank to mob him like a rock star, while those of us who maintained stations and professionalism had to settle for the odd glimpse of a baseball cap.
Gywneth Paltrow, I feel, would have been horrified. Jamie will return next issue... For more misadventures follow: @jamie_graham9 on Twitter.