Tom Hanks Picks His Three Favorite Tom Hanks Movies
When it comes to America's Dad, aka Tom Hanks, there are many levels of fandom. There are those that prefer mainstream Hanks ("Big," "Forrest Gump," "You've Got Mail") while others appreciate Hanks' more oddball choices ("The 'burbs," "Joe vs the Volcano.") You may gravitate towards dramatic Hanks ("Apollo 13," "Philadelphia," "Saving Private Ryan") or even animated Hanks (the "Toy Story" movies, "Polar Express," "The Simpsons Movie"). One thing is for sure, though: No matter what flavor of Hanks is your jam, you gotta love the guy. There's a Tom Hanks movie for everyone.
And now, apparently, there's a favorite Tom Hanks movie for Tom Hanks. Three of them, actually. While appearing on The Ringer's "Bill Simmons Podcast" (via IndieWire) to promote his new sci-fi movie "Finch," Hanks revealed his three personal faves of the over 60 movies he has appeared in over the last four decades. And it turns out these three films fall into three distinct categories of Hanksology: Dramatic Caliber, Mainstream Commercial, and Quirky Experiment.
"That whole movie was such a deep throw..."
The odd one out in Hanks' Personal Top Three has to be "Cloud Atlas," which he made with The Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer in 2012. Shot on an enormous budget cobbled together partly by the Wachowski siblings mortgaging their homes, the $100 million-plus production spanned centuries, shifting between six different stories ranging from the 1800's to the 2300's. Its ambition was immense, although it did receive some criticism for its equal-opportunity race-bending makeup and didn't quite recoup its costs at the box office. Nonetheless, Hanks remembers the daring filmmaking experience fondly:
"We shot 'Cloud Atlas' on a hope and a dream and nothing but a circle of love. That was the first time I'd ever shot extensively in Germany and I was surrounded by history. But the work itself, we were part of this big, massive ensemble of fantastic people who were just trying to do the hardest, best work on a deep throw... that whole movie was such a deep throw that making it was magical."
His more mainstream pick is Penny Marshall's 1992 women's baseball dramedy "A League of Their Own," which actually helped to defibrillate Hanks' career after several high profile bombs like "Bonfire of the Vanities." The actor mainly enjoyed working on that movie because it afforded him the chance to play baseball all summer while he was shooting it. What a charming, Tom Hanks-esque thing to say!
The final film in his trio of picks is a more dramatic one, 2000's "Cast Away." The second of several collaborations with director Robert Zemeckis (the two of them just wrapped "Pinocchio" for Disney), the film cast him as a Fed-Ex management dude whose plane crash lands on a remote island where he spends four years surviving in isolation. The part required Hanks gain a lot of weight for the before scenes, and then dramatically lose it for the four years later scenes while Zemeckis kept the crew together by filming "What Lies Beneath." As Hanks recounted:
"We just had bold adventures when making that movie. We were out in the middle of the ocean trying to grab shots. We were out in Fiji and my whole family was with me. Nothing but adventures every single day."