Arabian sights
A hologram for the king | Tom Hanks finds himself in the desert for the impossible Dave Eggers adap that wouldn’t have happened without him…
“I called Dave Eggers the day the book was published, literally as soon as I turned the last page,” says director Tom Tykwer, bowled over by the writer’s 2012 novel about a washedup American businessman who becomes a new man in Saudi Arabia.
“I knew exactly what the film could be – not just as an adaptation but as a film with its own unique voice. But there was only one name in my vision – stamped on every page of the book when I read it – and that name was Tom Hanks.”
Approaching Hanks after their previous collaboration on Cloud Atlas, Tykwer didn’t have too much convincing to do. “Tom’s a big reader and he’d already read the book. I told him that I wanted to turn it into a comedy, and I told him that it would only work if he did it... I didn’t really give him much choice actually!”
The story of a lonely salesman hauled out of his rut, A Hologram For The King sees Hanks clashing cultures in Saudi Arabia as he tries to sell IT in the middle of the desert. As absurd as it is melancholy, the film opens with Hanks dreaming of singing in a Talking Heads video and ends up with him shooting an M16, screaming at absentee sheikhs and taking a knife to a mysterious lump on his back that might be a sack of spiders.
Shooting in Morocco to avoid the Saudi authorities, Tykwer did a bit of Method directing as research, spending a month living in the same Jeddah hotel that inspired the book. “I lived the book and I became the character,” muses Tykwer. “I met a local guide that took me to his father’s place in the middle of nowhere, and we ran into the exact same situations that happen in the film… We even accidentally entered the forbidden city of Mecca because we missed our exit on the motorway!” PB ETA | 20 MaY A Hologram For The King opens next month.
‘I lived the book and I became the character’
tom tykwer