Not even Tom Hanks loves every Tom Hanks movie. And he knows you don’t either. The two-time Oscar winner recently participated in a lengthy discussion with The New Yorker (via IndieWire) and got honest about the different factors that are at play when it comes to his experiences with his own movies.
“Ok, let’s admit this:We all have seen movies that we hate,” Hanks said. “I have been in some movies that I hate. You have seen some of my movies and you hate them.”
Hanks continued, “Here are the five points of the Rubicon that are crossed by anybody who makes movies: The first Rubicon you cross is saying yes to the film. Your fate is sealed. You are going to be in that movie. The second Rubicon is when you actually see the movie that you made. It either works and is the movie you wanted to make, or it does not work and it’s not the movie you wanted to make.”
The “Asteroid City” star said there is “no way to tell” if a movie is going to be great or bad during the filmmaking process because it’s “so slow and specific.”
“You have to trust the entire process to collaborators who you hope are working at the absolute top of their game farther down the line,” Hanks said. “You can only have faith and hope — and what’s bigger than faith and hope?”
The third Rubicon, as Hanks puts it, is “the critical reaction” to a movie.
“Someone is going to say, ‘I hated it.’ Other people can say, ‘I think it’s brilliant.’ Somewhere in between the two is what the movie actually is,” Hanks explained. “The fourth Rubicon is the commercial performance of the film. Because, if it does not make money, your career will be toast sooner than you want it to be. That’s just the fact. That’s the business. The fifth Rubicon is time.”
More often than not, it’s time that ends up being the most important Rubicon. Hanks cited films such as “It’s a Wonderful Life” and his own “That Thing You Do!” as two examples of films that were not widely beloved when they opened but years later emerged as classics. He’s seen the same publications who panned “That Thing You Do!” now refer to it as “Tom Hanks’ cult classic.”
Hanks next appears in Wes Anderson’s “Asteroid City,” in theaters June 16 from Focus Features.
