Tom Hanks talks 'Captain Phillips'

IN THE beginning of his career, Tom Hanks was known for wearing a dress (TV's "Bosom Buddies"). Then he got a starring role in a movie, and he was known for falling in love with a mermaid ("Splash").

He made some other good movies during his first decade in Hollywood (most notably "Big"), but it all changed for Hanks in the 1990s, when he went from lovable goofball to the male actor of the decade. Just three years removed from starring opposite a dog in "Turner & Hooch," Hanks went on a six-year run with "A League of Their Own," "Sleepless in Seattle," "Philadelphia," "Forrest Gump," "Apollo 13," "Toy Story," "That Thing You Do!" (his debut as a director) and "Saving Private Ryan." It's an unprecedented run of modern-era movie greatness, encompassing a war movie, an animated film, a rom-com, an AIDS drama and more.

He won two Oscars and was nominated for a third.

No one, including Hanks, could have imagined back when he was wearing the dress that he would become one of the world's top movie stars and prestige producers (through his company, Playtone), a filmmaker with such a grasp of all aspects of a project - financing, locations, production, distribution, publicity - that sitting with him to discuss his new movie, "Captain Phillips," is like taking a master course in movies.

"Phillips" is the true story of a Maersk cargo ship captain, Richard Phillips, whose boat was hijacked by Somali pirates in 2009. Hanks, of course, plays Phillips, a no-nonsense New Englander who tries to protect his boat, and later himself, as the tense situation spirals out of control.

In explaining what drew him to the project, Hanks discussed what appeals to him about some "true" stories and why he shies away from others.

"A long time ago, I saw some great documentaries that altered my concept of being entertained," Hanks said last week at the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington, D.C. "[Director Paul Greengrass] said an interesting thing, so I'm stealing his line: 'Movies are not histories, and they're not journalism, but they still can land at a truth that might be more ephemeral than it is empirical, but it's still a truth.'

"I come across a ton of nonfiction stories that run into a couple of problems," Hanks said. "One is, it's not worth the effort to recreate it all, because the theme itself isn't worth examining. It's interesting, but it's not compelling. And if you're going to go through all the effort and all the motions and all the financial risk of making a movie that people are going to pay money to go see, it has to be compelling. There has to be some sort of enlightenment. So those go away.

"And then there are others that come along that are just so dense and complex that standard moviemaking narrative can never capture them. . . . So those go away. And what you have left are the nonfiction things that are perhaps most compelling in the way they show the human reactions in the midst of what went on. That's what this movie is."

Hanks was involved with "Captain Phillips" from very early on in the development process, so he was able to work closely with Greengrass (known for his realistic, docu-style of filming on movies like "Flight 93" and "The Bourne Supremacy").

"I have another movie coming out in which I play Walt Disney, and all I did was find out about Walt Disney. I just plugged myself into that. . . . That's Emma Thompson's movie," he said of the upcoming "Saving Mr. Banks."

"But with this, I read Richard's book first before I read the screenplay. I read the screenplay a bunch before Paul was involved. Then Paul and I had that 'So what do you want to do here?' meeting of the minds. Not that I had a specific editorial slant other than what I always say: 'Can we make up as little as possible for this? Let's find out what really happened and really go for it.' That was my take," Hanks said, "and that was certainly his.

"But he was also so cognizant of how he wanted to examine the theme of the movie. . . . As an actor, I want to know what the behavior is. And as a director, he wants to know what the procedure is. But his procedure affects my behavior, and then he as a filmmaker has to capture that behavior."

So, in typical Greengrass style, "Phillips" is shot with multiple cameras and long takes, with camera operators trailing Hanks as he moves up and down and around his ship.

To keep the film as real as possible, the production crew went to Malta, when Maersk made a cargo ship available similar to Phillips' original. During filming, the ship was run by its real crew.

When the U. S. Navy offered up use of ships similar to those used in the original rescue, including one of the actual ships, the production moved halfway around the world to Norfolk, Va. There were real Navy personnel on those ships also, including a medic who has an amazing scene with Hanks that was totally improvised.

With all this work at sea, Hanks said that what he learned most from meeting with Phillips - and this may have appealed to the producer side of his brain - was all the detail that a ship's captain has to be able to remember and call upon.

"It's a constant, working algorithm that goes on in his head," Hanks said of Phillips' captaincy, "where he has to keep track of all these tangents farther on down the line. And most of them are people skills. There's three unions. It's fuel, it's physics, it's weather and it's geopolitics."

Up until the pirate takeover of the Maersk Alabama, Hanks said, a cargo ship of that size had never been hijacked.

"They're too high," Hanks said. "And these guys are in skiffs"

But the Somalis in the Maersk attack solved the problem with an invention thousands of years old.

A ladder.

"When you read the book," Hanks said, "It was the ladder that was the new thing. Rich Phillips thought, 'Where'd they get that ladder?' It's like they ripped it out of some suburban swimming pool built in the 1950s."

Now, Hanks said, ships in those dangerous waters are wrapped in razor wire.

Another change since the hijacking of the Maersk cargo ship? Snipers.

"International law didn't allow you to bring firearms into a port," Hanks said, explaining why the ship had no armed protection.

"It's illegal - unless you're a gunrunner," he joked. "And it's probably not a good idea having guns among the crew . . .

"Now," Hanks said, "there are trained security personnel whose only job is to be sharpshooters. The first thing they'll do is fire some high-powered round across the skiff. The next thing is they'll take out the engine on the skiff, and after that they'll start taking out the people on the skiff."