(Credits: Far Out / Raph PH / Martin Kraft)
They might not be the most famous director-actor pairing in Hollywood history, but Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks made quite a duo across their brief run of collaborations. The pair’s first film together, Saving Private Ryan, proved to be perhaps the most visceral and enduring war film of all time. While their follow-ups like The Terminal and The Post didn’t quite rise to that level, it’s hard to argue that Spielberg and Hanks didn’t make a great pair.
A year after the was epic made the two men the foreword in battle-based drama, they worked with each other again as the main producers of a TV miniseries they’d conceived of called Band of Brothers. Like their first joint cinematic venture, the series follows a group of soldiers through France and Germany in World War Two. They’ve subsequently produced two more series along the same lines: 2010’s The Pacific, which follows a company of seafaring US Marines, and 2024’s Masters of the Air, about a US Air Force squadron.
If you’ve ever wondered why Spielberg and Hanks didn’t pair up sooner, the answer is that they almost did. In a joint interview with Spielberg and Hanks that appeared in Time magazine around the release of Bridge of Spies, Spielberg asks if there are any directorial opportunities that he let slip through his hands. The director pointed to a case that would have paired him up with Hanks nearly a decade before Saving Private Ryan.
“I have to say Philadelphia,” he admitted. “Because I knew Tom really well when he was making Philadelphia. Really well. And I was making Schindler’s List at the same time. So before we all took off for our movies, Tom cut all his hair off, so he brought his family over on the weekends to our beach house. And I’ve got videos of Tom with no hair with a baseball cap on. I knew the story but hadn’t read the script.”
The opportunity may not have always been directly open for Spielberg to produce the movie, he was enticed about what was about to unfold. “I knew what audiences were about to see,” Spielberg added. “For me, the proof in knowing someone very, very well, and not knowing someone at all but knowing his character very well, is when I went to see Philadelphia and forgot that I even knew this man.”
For Spielberg, the result was arguably Hanks’ finest-ever performance: “One of the most noble statements I had seen in film. It was a ground-breaking achievement in the social context, and the context of tolerance. And opening people’s minds to something they were very closed to in those days; an issue that was a clear and present danger to everyone.”
“And it was really–that was one of the most shattering experiences I’ve had seeing a movie when I knew the actor and then discovered that I didn’t know the character,” Spielberg beamed. Considering the wide range of Hanks projects that the director could point to as truly mesmeric, it’s an impressive accolade to bestow Philadelphia. “The knowing of the actor didn’t knock down the fourth wall.”
Despite being friendly with Hanks, the job of directing Philadelphia eventually went to The Silence of the Lambs director Jonathan Demme. Hanks then paired up with Spielberg’s close friend, Robert Zemeckis, for his next film, Forrest Gump. Hanks and Spielberg eventually found the right project, but getting them together took a little longer than expected.
Related Topics
Subscribe To The Far Out Newsletter
This post was originally published on here
