Tom Hanks Discusses His Great Performances: "You Almost Have No Control" | Actor Roundtable - video Dailymotion

Hollywood Journal

Robert De Niro, Tom Hanks, Jamie Foxx, Adam Sandler, Shia LaBeouf and Adam Driver joined for the annual Actor Roundtable.

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00:00You just played the least cynical guy made in history, is it actually harder to play

00:11someone that nice than to play a villain?

00:15They're the same exact beast, you know, granted, Mr. Rogers is not Iago, but they have their

00:24principles and they have their mission statement.

00:29The story in the movie is really about the journalist that is very cynical about who

00:33Mr. Rogers is and finds out that he was wrong.

00:40And there's no nefarious motivation between what Fred Rogers did for a living.

00:46He viewed it as his ministry and that's kind of like looking at some combination of Mother

00:51Teresa or somebody that is hell-bent for doing just good in the sphere of which they

00:58operate.

01:00And the cynic walks into that and says, what's your racket here?

01:04What are you trying to pull here?

01:06And if it's actually just, well, we're trying to feed the homeless people some soup so they

01:10get a hot meal once a day.

01:11No, there's got to be something more to that then.

01:14There's not.

01:15And Fred Rogers was an ordained minister and his principle was such that everything that

01:21guided him through his daily behavior and his creative output was based on making people

01:28feel safe and a part of something bigger than they actually were, in his case, two and three

01:31year old kids.

01:33But he never, ever said the word God.

01:35Not in, not in hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours of, of television.

01:46We were doing Captain Phillips and we were in this lifeboat.

01:49The script had all these great moments where Rich Phillips looked through the porthole of

01:54the lifeboat and his son was going down and was thinking of his family at home and whether

01:58or not he was going to see them.

02:00So you could sit around in Malta, you know, where we were shooting is, oh, that's going

02:04to be a powerful moment because I'm going to line up in the porthole and it's just going

02:09to be like this.

02:10You know, it's going to be really great.

02:12Then you go to work and there is no porthole in the lifeboat.

02:15So you got to like take away, it's almost, oh, you cannot prepare.

02:22You can only just be there.

02:24Couldn't you ask them to put a porthole in there?

02:27Well, here's, you know what the thing was, is that I felt as though that I was relatively

02:31calm and experienced enough that I didn't do this.

02:35Is there anybody who could have told me this, because someone had put in the script, there

02:42was a lack of portholes in this porthole?

02:49I'm sure you know this anecdote.

02:53Dying is easy.

02:54Comedy is hard.

02:56True or false?

02:58Can you be funny if you grew up with a built-in swimming pool in your backyard?

03:02I don't think you can.

03:03If you grew up being able to swim any time you wanted to, you experienced none of the shortcomings

03:10of a life that you'd turn into self-deprecation.

03:12That's right.

03:13You can't do it.

03:14It's tough.

03:15Can you play tragedy, though, if you grew up, if you have at ease?

03:16Doesn't it all come from some inner pain, angst?

03:19Everybody's.

03:20Yeah, sure.

03:21You bet.

03:22Look, it's like Bertolt Brechtman, the whole thing is a struggle and there's where you find

03:28your triumph.

03:29You hear the thing about it that will kill us all at some point, is it's three o'clock in

03:34the morning and you have something very specifically that you'd know, you've known for months you're

03:39going to act this beat with this scene and it's three o'clock in the morning and it could

03:43be anything from rain birds going off to, you know, taxi cab drivers or something like

03:48that honking horns and it's like, all right, the movie is now upon your shoulders.

03:54Don't fuck this up.

03:55And then they sit back and you wait and you've got to go there, man.

03:58You've just got to.

03:59Tragedy?

04:00Comedy?

04:01Is there a moment you can think of where that's just a...

04:03It happens ten times a week sometimes, you know?

04:08You played a comedian in the room with Sally Field.

04:11Oh, Punchline.

04:12Hey, the Safdie brothers told me to tell you that they love Punchline.

04:16Is that right?

04:17They watch Punchline a lot.

04:19Playing a guy who's supposed to be funny, the only way to do that was to go out and develop

04:25funny material.

04:26And I probably did six, you know, appearances of something where all I really did was jump

04:32up and down on a trampoline.

04:33I had no sense of anything.

04:35But you were, because...

04:36I got it.

04:37I saw you training.

04:38I put it together.

04:39I saw you training.

04:40I was a young comedian at the comic strip and you used to come in and go up there with,

04:44and Barry Sobel used to come in.

04:45Yeah, yeah.

04:46Barry, Barry and I, we ended up, and I ended up after a while.

04:49Was he good?

04:50Not that night.

04:51Not if you saw me at the comic strip.

04:52No, I saw you a couple times.

04:53And you were good.

04:54You came up right away where the comedians were mad that you were calm on stage and cool

04:59and you were being yourself.

05:00That took a while to get there.

05:02But the best I can describe it is you just have to go there.

05:06When I was in junior college taking acting classes, and there's 10 of us there, and we've all

05:11been to the American Conservatory Theater performances of certain things, and we usually look at comedies

05:16going, oh, yes, that's very funny.

05:19Oh, I appreciate the work behind that joke.

05:21But the assignment for one day was, okay, on Wednesday, everybody's going to come and

05:26you're going to be funny and you're going to make each other laugh.

05:29And it was stone, nothing.

05:32No one could do anything funny because that was the task at hand.

05:36So comedy is hard because you know instantaneously whether or not your soup is good food.

Tom Hanks Discusses His Great Performances: "You Almost Have No Control" | Actor Roundtable

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