INTERVIEW
Tom Hanks returns to the sea in “Greyhound.”
Tom Hanks is living proof that superstardom is no insulation from the coronavirus pandemic’s impact.
The Oscar-winning actor and his wife, actress-singer Rita Wilson, were among the first celebrities to contract COVID-19, while in Australia as he was preparing to play Col. Tom Parker in an Elvis Presley biopic.
The couple recovered sufficiently to return to Los Angeles, where Hanks cheered a lockeddown nation by remotely hosting “Saturday Night Live’s” first “Live at Home” edition in April.
Now “Greyhound,” a movie dear to the “Saving Private Ryan” star’s World War II-loving heart, will be hitting Apple TV+ on July 10, rather than appearing in theaters as originally planned.
Hanks wrote the screenplay adaptation of a book by nautical novelist C.S. Forester (the Horatio Hornblower series, “The African Queen”). He’s also in nearly every scene as Cmdr. Ernest Krause, skipper of a U.S. Navy destroyer escorting a convoy across the Nazi U-boat-infested Atlantic.
Wearing a green, zip-up pullover and clear-framed glasses during a virtual news conference from his Playtone production company’s office in Santa Monica, Calif., Hanks (who turned 64 July 9) looked strong and healthy as he spoke about his latest film and the new “normal.”
Q: First of all, how are you and Rita feeling?
A: As the canaries in the coal mine for the COVID-19 experience, we are fine. We had about 10 days of very uncomfortable symptoms, not life-threatening, I’m happy to say. We were isolated, one, in order to keep an eye on ourselves. If our temperatures had spiked, if our lungs had filled, if any number of things had gone wrong with us, we would have needed expert medical care. We didn’t. I guess we are model recoverers from COVID-19.
But we were also isolated so that we would not give it to anybody else that we came in contact with, and since then have been doing the same isolating and social distancing that is being asked of the world.
Q: You’ve been involved in a number of both World War II and seagoing projects (“Captain Phillips,” “Cast Away”). What made you want to adapt this book?
A: At about page 3, I realized that this was an entire story told through the mental perspective of its protagonist. Ernie Krause is not the captain that you would anticipate being in charge of the safety of all these ships. Not long after that, I had a very, very strong mental image of the DNA of the story, and how it could possibly be a screenplay. As a selfish actor, I want to play great roles.
Q: Any other reasons?
I think one of the reasons that I took to C.S. Forester’s book “The Good Shepherd” is because I had a familiarity with all things Navy based on growing up so close to the Naval Air Station in Alameda (California).
When I lived in Alameda, when I was a young kid and the Vietnam War was going on, I’m gonna say more than half of my classmates had their fathers in the Navy. They were all serving on the Coral Sea and the Enterprise and the Hornet — they all served on a lot of aircraft carriers.
San Francisco, in a lot of ways, was a Navy town.
Q: Back to “Greyhound,” director Aaron Schneider told us it was filmed at just two actual locations.
A: Three if you count the hotel lobby where Elisabeth Shue and I exchange Christmas gifts, for one day.
We shot on a set in Baton Rouge, and we shot onboard the USS Kidd that is usually sitting on the Mississippi River there. This movie was made on a rocking gimbal of a set that was the bridge and the deck of the ship codenamed Greyhound and on the actual iron steel decks of the USS Kidd, which is an actual Fletcher-class destroyer that might be the only authentically preserved destroyer in America.
All of the (other) ships that appear were taken from reference photographs that were then repurposed and rebuilt by the expertise of our technicians inside computers and whatnot. The (ocean) here was water that was taken from reference footage, which sounds something like it’s unique. It’s not. It’s how all movies are made now.
Q: But now, due to pandemic theater closures, all that work will only be seen on Apple TV+.
A: We are all heartbroken that this movie is not playing in cinemas. It broke our hearts when we realized that we were going to have to either wait for X number of months before we would have to fight in order to get screens in the midst of this huge glut of movies. So Apple TV+ comes along as a savior and a gem and offers us the opportunity to have the movie out. The great advantage is, the entire world can see the movie at the same time. The heartbreak is that 800 people don’t get to go into a theater as strangers, watch “Greyhound” and come out 88 minutes later with something in common.
Q: And you believe that this movie set in 1942 has something to say about our current situation.
A: When we shot it, no one anticipated we’d be releasing it at the time of a worldwide conflagration that has as mysterious a solution as World War II did. COVID-19, no one knows how long it’s going to go on, no one knows who’s going to die because of it. Everybody has something that they can do, and you don’t have to go very far to see the correlations and similarities to the war years.