Tom Hanks: “Mobile phones have ruined our lives”

2023-11-09 08:40:55

LUCA MASTRANTONIO

Corriere della Sera

Updated Thursday, November 9, 2023 – 07:40

In the novel ‘Another Great Masterpiece’, the actor has captured the memory of his father, his childhood memories and his chance discovery of cinematographic language.

Tom Hanks, author of the novel ‘Another great masterpiece of cinema.A.MAHMOUD

Tom Hanks’ novel Another great masterpiece of cinema (published this year in Spain by Roca Editorial) is a journey to the world of cinema, to the life of its author and that of anyone who lives among the ghosts of the past. In a town in the United States, in 1947, a boy named Robby discovers his passion for comics thanks to his Uncle Bob, a war veteran and motorcyclist. In 1971, Robby transforms his uncle into the protagonist of a comic, The Legend of the Pirman, starring a mysterious marine who saves his men with a flamethrower. In 2020, a Marvel-style film brings together the Pirmano and a superheroine, the Sleepless Warrior. Will they love each other? Will he stop being an exterminating angel? Will she be able to sleep?

Where did the idea for this novel come from? There are films that tell the creative process from within. I think of Truffaut, Fellini… But I have never read a novel that tells the story of that process from the initial idea to the theatrical release. How do you explain that process? What it boils down to is that no one should become a problem, because during the filming of In a film you have to solve all kinds of problems.

Almost every great story, from Citizen Kane to Batman, has its roots in childhood. Every great writer and director I know has a mysterious event, encounter, or image that takes years to germinate. In my case, I will talk about some trips. He was seven years old. My parents were separated. My brother lived with her, in a town like the one in the novel, and I was with my father in another city. Sometimes, to go from one house to another, they put me on a bus with my brother and sometimes I went alone. They were five-hour trips in which I read the comics that I bought at the station for one dollar. The Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, the entire Justice League, Batman, The Incredible Hulk, Thor, Captain America… Not only did he read them, he studied them like textbooks. Do you know why? Why? You only need 20 minutes to read a comic and I had hours available, so I studied them. Comics are made in blocks, they have a narrative rhythm, they are like scripts. They are very visual, with a lot of action, fast dialogue and speech bubbles that show thoughts. On the bus, my mind wandered out the window, the world flashed by in scenes and my mind was always making up stories about what I saw. Then he projected them on a glass rectangle, in the bus window. Like a screen Exactly. Comics on the bus were my first film school. The landscapes were a very distant plane; The driver of a truck that we were passing could appear nearby, in the foreground. See if he sang, smoked, drank coffee, you got an idea from the way he dressed, you imagined his life, you related him to a teacher, to your stepfather… I ended up wondering where he came from? What is he thinking? Where are you going? What is his life like? One of the driving forces of the novel are the letters written home by Uncle Bob, who is fighting the Japanese in the Pacific. Are there letters like that in his family? When my father died, my older brother received a box with his objects. I and my father were very close. We also received the letters she sent to his mother when she was in the war, in the Navy, somewhere in the South Pacific. My father’s handwriting was as bad as mine. Some letters said absolutely nothing and others told absolutely everything about his experience, except where he was. It was forbidden. Pona: “I’m in a place full of people. Some kids are talking about rockets, spaceships and going to Mars.” For his enemies he used the word “japo”. In a letter there was also my father’s relationship with his mother, which was problematic, and with the Navy. It was the unhappiest period of his life, he was 19 years old, his whole life ahead of him, but he didn’t know how long he would have to stay there. Well, that letter I’m quoting is framed in my office, I keep it for my grandchildren, and it reminds me of the power with which a few words can express the character of a relationship. It is an extraordinary document. Is the book also a response to that letter? In a way, yes. Tell me about flamethrowers. A flamethrower burns buildings and incinerates humans. It is an uncontrollable weapon, powered by flammable gelatin under pressure. That is, napalm. Fires bursts of 10 seconds each. And it rarely causes instant death, rather it causes slow and painful deaths. There are no fair or unfair wars for the flamethrower. It was one of the main weapons in the Pacific War against the Japanese. It was used by 19-year-olds who had gone to high school a year earlier. What did it feel like when you pulled the trigger? I don’t know. I imagine the screams, the smoke, the smell of the enemy’s burning flesh. I don’t know how anyone can come back from that horror and live with it for the rest of their life. Prometheus stole the fire of the gods and was punished…The fire of the flamethrower is not the fire that is used for cooking, to warm ourselves, to enlighten us, to tell us stories in a cave or by the fireplace… I can’t imagine a more perverse weapon. I remember his character in ‘Nufrago’ (2000), who lit a saving fire. In that movie there was a package that the shipwrecked man did not open, even though he was on a desert island. I was waiting to deliver it to its owner. What was inside? The director, Robert Zemeckis, likes to say that there was a satellite phone with solar panels that he did not use. That’s the end of the story. For me there is the same thing inside as in the Malt Falcon or in the monolith from 2001, A Space Odyssey. It’s a McGuffin made of the stuff of dreams and it’s more inspiring than anything concrete. More than cell phones, which have ruined our lives. In what sense? The telephone has destroyed the mere possibility of sharing a meal with others. The telephone is made to distract us. In You’ve Got Email he talked about love in the age of emails. Do you remember the first email you wrote? You sent it to John Turteltaub, a director friend: “Hey, I’m sending you my first email.” What a disappointment, huh? I prefer it to the telephone, it is instant communication but it is written. In return, it does not remain, it does not give a tactile experience. It eliminates the distance of space, not time, which is what physical objects, books and manuscripts do. There is a friend who I wrote to when he was young and playing Shakespeare. He wrote to me: “You know, I don’t know why people complain so much about the United States Post Office. Look, it doesn’t take that long for a letter to get from Sacramento to Cleveland, because I’m writing this letter right now, as I write, and you’re reading it right now, while you’re reading. So, what’s the problem?” Days ago you reported that they used your face and his voice, altered by artificial intelligence, to advertise a dental clinic. In reality, there wasn’t even a dentist. They were using a fake version of me to steal personal information from anyone who believed the ad… I knew something like this would happen sooner or later. I am a layman and I am a historian, I know that we have already experienced these shocks… Let’s think about the anecdote of the first film screenings, when the spectators left the theater because they thought that the train was going to run over them. With AI we are in a similar moment.
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