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Larry Crowne

Coverage by Nobuhiro Hosoki

Story : Once well-respected at his company, Larry Crowne (Tom Hanks) finds himself on the unemployment line after a wave of corporate downsizing. Drowning in debt and unsure of what to do with his life, Larry enrolls in college, where he becomes part of a community of misfits who are all trying to carve out a better future.

Opened July 1, 2011|

Runtime:1 hr. 39 min.

 

Q&A with Actor Tom Hanks

 

(Q) : Tom just finished a harrowing global press tour to support this movie. How are you so peppy and upbeat?

(Tom Hanks): You only really work half a day. You get up about 5:45 in the morning and you do all the talk shows and stuff and then you're done about lunch time and then you get on a plane and you go to another city. It's not that bad. Coal mining and being a cop; that's tough work. This is not so hard.
 
(Q) : This movie is incredibly sweet and uplifting and funny. What inspired the story for you?
 
(Tom Hanks): I don't know. The theme of the movie has to be a theme you think can withstand the attention of having a movie made about it, and in this case it was all about the American concept of self determination and reinvention. A lot is made out about the American dream being owning a home or raising a family, but I think really the American dream in actuality is about our ability to remake who we are if we want to and if we have to.

And in that regard, six years ago I was chatting around the office with Nia Vardalos, who wrote "My Big Fat Greek Wedding." She's a friend and I said "What if I was a guy and I lost my job and I never went to college and so I go to college and say Julia Roberts is my teacher. What would happen?"
 
(Q) : She was my teacher in college, so it's funny that you say that.
 
(Tom Hanks): Was she? What did she teach for you, home ec?
 
(Q) : Sex ed.
 
(Tom Hanks): It's not like you start off with this thing that you must, must, must, must cover, it was just an idea that I thought if we could develop this this could actually be a two hour, three act structured movie that could actually be about something without having the weight of the world upon it.

(Q): How did you and Nia develop this story as writers?
 
(Tom Hanks): First we talked at length for about a month about possibilities. Then she went off for a few months and wrote a full draft. Then I read that and pondered it, then we got back again and spoke at length about that draft and its strength and weaknesses and how it was experimenting with a theme. That went on for about three years and three drafts. That's just the way it works. First of all, we weren't getting paid for doing this, this was all written on spec, so it's not like a cash flow is actually going on.

And then quite frankly it had to lay fallow because it wasn't there. It wasn’t in our heads and we all went off and did some other things. Then about two years later, I guess not long after I had finished making "Angels and Demons" with Ron Howard, the second Robert Langdon movie, I picked it up again and said "What really is here?" And then I did all the draft that remained of that until we made the film.
 
(Q) : As a writer how do you know when something works?
 
(Tom Hanks): I don't know. I don't think you do. I think you have to hear it. We had two very important read throughs of various version of the screenplay that are very different from the final film, because you're waiting to hear not only what are the lines that resonate and might be funny that might get laughs, but you're also hearing whether or not it's really about the thing you wanted it to be about, whether or not the scenes are actually dictating to the performers and impacting the air of the read through in a way that makes you think oh you actually did say something important and new about what that very theme was.

We had a read through of the film I'm guess two years ago – a long time ago – in which Chi McBride, who I worked with on "The Terminal," played this part by Cedric the Entertainer and a few others, and we had a whole panoply of actors who were friends of mine who had worked for us come in just to read through and see what it sounded like. And from that there were drastic changes to what happens to Larry in the third act of the motion picture, one of them being we had engineered it in which Larry was able to still keep his house and still get the girl, and it was a huge gap.

And right afterwards Nia Vardalos said Larry has to lose his house and I said that's going to completely go deeper in examining the thing that we thought of. And it's actually a hideous process to have written it and then hear it and it just does not work. It's disastrous. You want to up chuck, you want to throw up, you want to apologize to everybody.
 
(Q) : Two years of your life.
 
(Tom Hanks): Two years, yeah, gone. But that's what the whole process is and you feel bad for about seven minutes and then you start pulling out the notebook and you get to work.
 
(Q) : In terms of the subject matter it's obviously very prescient given our great economy at the moment. Was that what triggered this?
 
(Tom Hanks) : Well that caught up with this because I just wanted to go to the idea of a guy who got out of high school, joined the Navy, did almost 20 years, and because of that he loses his job. That was the dichotomy that I thought was fascinating to deal with. And he's got nothing to do, literally nothing to do with his day, so that's why he goes back to college. We kept feeding on that. As the economy tanked by way of bundled derivatives, credit swaps, whatever, we set well let's nevermind that, let's just make it totally personal to Larry.

And personal it's your house and whether or not you put gas in your car and whether or not you can even afford to go to college in the first place. So the headlines sort of caught up with us right up until we were actually shooting the movie. I want to apologize if you've heard any of these stories so far. I have been around the world and I've told some of this to journalists in Singapore and Korea, so if you've heard it, if you're from Singapore or Korea and you've heard this, I apologize.

A few days before we shot the scenes in the bank with Rita Wilson, my wife…oh you haven't seen the movie. Okay, let me go back. On "60 Minutes" I saw a report on strategic foreclosures, which what you essentially do is you hand your house back to the bank and say "Screw you. I’m not in debt to you anymore; you own my house. I have no credit, but bye, bye, it's your problem not mine." And that now is something that Larry learns to do in his economics class that is taught by Dr. Matsutani, who is portrayed by George Takei.
 
(Q) : And I have to ask you, speaking of the bank scene, your wife looking smoking in that wig.
 
(Tom Hanks) : I find that a wig and high heels usually just raises the attention span of almost every man in the room. Am I wrong ladies? I don't think so.
 
(Tom Hanks) : Larry lives next door to Cedric the Entertainer, who has a perennial yard sale going on at his house.
 
(Q) : Have you ever had to reinvent yourself the way he does, to that extreme?
 
(Tom Hanks): Well not to that extreme, but I've been an actor since I was 20 and that's kind of my job; put on other people's clothes and pretend to be someone other than I am.
 
(Q) : This movie is a really nice addition to the normal summer slate of movies of the "Transformers" ilk. Was this always meant as a summer release?
 
(Tom Hanks): Well there's no such thing as a time when big blockbusters don't come out anymore. It used to be that the big special effects laden movies started coming out on the anniversary of "Star Wars," and now I think everybody knows that pretty much every week there's some big, massive movie that's coming out with a lot of CGI. When you've got to go off and have meetings with the executives and the marketing people when they start thinking about the strategy and I said "Look, I don't fucking care."

I said "What's wrong with July 1st? Go ahead; there's no difference." Because big movies come out all the time. What's been out since May 1st? "Thor" and the thing with the deal and the guy and the rocket head and now the monsters with the robots and smash it up. It's every week so the only way you could compete honestly in the marketplace is if you have a movie that might be unique. There are no movies like "Larry Crowne" that are out there. None. None whatsoever. We go against the grain over so many things.

For example, Larry's helmet. We shot it in California. These are the battles you fight. We shot in California, we had huge, big, massive production meetings about whether or not Larry and the scooter squad, the people that ride the scooters are going to wear helmets or not. It is a safety issue and it's the law. But then the hair people come and they say "Tom, you just have to know that every time you put on that helmet it's going to mess up your hair and we'll need 10 minutes in order to fix the hair before you go on to the next shot. So you cannot pull up in a shot, take off your helmet and start talking. You can't do that."

And then you talk to the prop department and they say "We don't know if we can get clearance on this certain helmet." So we just said we'll just wear the helmets and if my hair is bad my hair is bad. And if you see any movie or tv show with people on motorcycles I guarantee you either they don't wear helmets, which is against the law, because stars don't want their hair messed up.

Or they always pull up with their helmets on and there's always a cut away so that they cut back and they don't actually have the helmet on, they're just lifting it off the top of their head, because lo and behold, their hair is perfect underneath the helmet. So that's the logic of how that happened. It's kind of like everybody comes back from the grocery store in a movie always has some celery sticking out of the bag because how would you know where they've been? Or a container of milk or a loaf of French bread. I'm giving up all the secrets here, all the secrets.
 
(Q) : Where did you guys find that Moped, or scooter?
 
(Tom Hanks): We shot this on location at Cal State Dominguez Hills and we went and scouted the actual well, where do they park the scooters? And they parked them right here and this blue Yamaha from what year was it? 1990-something? It was held together by gaffer's tape and I said this is Larry Crowne's scooter. So we left a note on it saying "Dear scooter owner, I'm Tom Hanks and I’m making a movie. Please call this number and you will earn big bucks because we want to buy your scooter.

This is not a joke, no lie. Please call. We are not pulling your leg." And eventually the guy did call and lo and behold he's a former service man, much like Larry, he's going back to school, much like Larry, and he made $60,000 off of us. I'm joking! I'm so joking! We paid him handsomely for a scooter that needed a lot of work. Who rides a scooter in here, anybody? There you go, hipsters.
 
(Q) : Let's talk about directing a little bit before we turn this over to the audience. Did you always plan to direct?
 
(Tom Hanks) : No, I did not. We worked on the screenplay for a long time and before I took it over and actually started writing the screenplay myself I went to a number of directors who shall remain nameless, and here's what you must understand: the worst thing a director can here from an actor is "Hey, I've got this idea for a movie I'd like to star in." Directors will run away from you faster than the Flash or Green Lantern. They don't want to have anything to do with an actor who has an idea about a movie they want to make. Directors want to make their own ideas into movies.

They don't want to have to appease an actor or listen to an actor or say "Maybe in the third act Larry can lose his house." They don't want to hear any of that. They want to make their own movie and the directors want to boss you around; they don't want to be an employee. So all the directors that I talked to said "Yeah, that might, yeah that could be…why don't you send me what you have?" and then you never hear from them again, because nobody wants to.

So it evolved into a place where selfishly as an actor I didn't want to let Larry Crowne go or just dissolve into nothing, and it got to a place where it was so much in my head from writing it that you really do have to declare alright, if possible I would like to direct this movie, and "if possible" is a big deal because you have to raise the financing based on an unproved quantity, which is can this guy direct a movie? There are a lot of people that don't want to give that up.
 
(Q) : But you've directed before.

(Tom Hanks): Well I directed once before and it was a fine movie, but it was a long time ago and the returns now in the motion picture industry are brutal, it's a much harder game. And the also is will I have the stamina in order to do it? And quite frankly, 18 months of preparation, it was okay.
 
(Q) : I just wanted to know how much you take past criticisms into account when you're writing a screenplay.
 
(Tom Hanks) : Well, none. There's no such thing as criticism I think when you're writing a screenplay. There's just reaction and all reaction is valid. You're talking about a piece of creative output that is in flux, and the question is is do you get it? Does it resonate? Did it make sense to you? Is there something ephemeral that comes out of it? Did anybody ever read the book by William Goldman, I think it's called "Nobody Knows Anything"? Okay you have, so you know what I'm talking about.

He gave this one particular idea of an adaption to a bunch of different screenwriters and they all came in with different takes on what it is. And they're all valid, so when you're in the process of giving your script over and you're saying okay, I've written on this enough, I don't know what to do now, I need input from somebody else. It's not criticism that you're getting it's literally just reaction. And you can take it, you can forget it, you can believe it, you can follow it, you can choose to let it hurt your feelings or not, but what it really is, it's not an assault on your ego on your output, it's they've read the movie, they've seen the movie in their heads and maybe it doesn't resonate the way you quite think it is.

I've talked to a lot of people who have said a lot of times "Mr. Hanks, I have written this really great screenplay," and I always say "How do you know? You think it's great, but if it can't withstand the scrutiny of somebody else reading it you've got a problem" So there is no such thing as criticism. You listen to everything and you take everything into account. Whether or not you follow it or not it's got to be your own ideal for what the story's going to be.
 
(Q) : Do you have a reader in your life that looks at something first and that you really trust?

(Tom Hanks) : No. I have plenty of people that do that at the Playtone world headquarters, which is a 17 story building in Santa Monica, California, which if you press the right button unfolds into a robot and attacks other buildings. There is a constant flurry of activity and there are always people who have read stuff that is interesting and even also read source material that can or cannot be turned into something that's great.

or example, a long time ago somebody had read this great article in I want to say the "Miami Herald" or the "Boston Globe" or maybe the "New York Times," and it was about this taxicab company in Miami that was being forced out of business and it was the only taxicab that served this really rough part of Dade County, and I thought that's a great story. That came out of a newspaper article and then we go ahead and pursue that.

There are a lot of people that read scripts and say "Hey, here's a pretty good script." But by and large reading scripts is homework, it really is homework. You have to sit down and not read it as a piece of literature but read it as this visual blueprint, and if it doesn't work there's nothing you can do for it.
 
(Q) : What do you find personally paramount in a screenplay? The story or the characters or how it flows?
 
(Tom Hanks): I get what you're saying because there are some that are really crackerjack. There are a lot of people out there who are very, very fast while they're writing screenplays and you read them really quick. You can read them in 40 minutes and say "Wow. I saw the movie in my head; it was great." It's the theme that it's examining more than anything else. There have been times that I thought this is a great script because it's examining the theme of blank, and it turns out it didn't.

I thought it did but it wasn't the theme that the director was examining or really what the movie had deep inside its bones. There are always going to be funny lines, there's always going to be cool stuff that you get to see, and there are going to be screenplays that as of page seven you don't want to read anymore and if it gets past page seven you'll take it up to page 30 and you might not want to read it anymore. Everybody knows that there has to be that page 30 incident that then propels the rest of it. So screenplays sometimes fall apart just in that they are written in this kind of form that does not translate to your own visual skills.

Whether or not it has a theme in there that is truly being examined is sometimes lost in the mechanics of writing a screenplay. But I will look all the time really to well what's this thing talking about, what is it about? Because not only do you then have to go through the work of making the movie as a creative artist but then you have to go off and talk about it around the world and embrace it, and that's no easy chose.

And then it also is going to last forever whether it's good or bad. And I've made some really bad movies that are still out there that are still being seen by people and I want to kill all the people. And I guy is holding up a copy of one. "The 'burbs"? Is that "The 'burbs"? What is it? "The Green Mile." That's a good movie, that's a fine movie, I have no complaints about that.
 
(Q) ; Out of all the films you've done which one are you most proud of? What do you consider your masterpiece at this point?
 
(Tom Hanks): I've made a lot of movies and they're all intense personal experiences that make me lose sleep and take a really long time. And sometimes they're absolutely heartbreaking in their final analysis and other times are so good that I can't even believe that I'm in such a thing. I guess in order to give you a bona fide answer, which is it isn't a fair question, you little prick, but I will nonetheless answer the question. They have all been magnificent labors of love and I won't say "Larry Crowne" because it would just be too friggin cheesy, but "Cast Away" took eight years for us to figure out how to do.

And it was a prefect example of the three people that are necessary in order to make the movie come to life. I had this idea about a guy who goes down on an island when he's working for FedEx. Bill Broyles was the only writer I ever mentioned this to who understood that there was really drama to be found in a guy having to suss out the necessities of life, which is shelter, fire, food, and water, and company. So the two of us were able to come up with a fabulous idea and a really good draft of a screenplay right up about to page 66 and then we were lost. We didn't know how to get off the island. We started to things like hey, pirates come and hey, Elle Macpherson and the swimsuit models from "Sports Illustrated" show up.

We were just trying to figure out anything, and it wasn't until Bob Zemeckis, the director, came in. And we talked to him at one point and he came back a year later and said "Yeah, I've been thinking about that island movie of yours. You know what you've got to do is…" and he had the solution. So I would have to say I think I've been very lucky. I've made about 30 movies and I think seven of them are pretty good and I think that's one. That's my joke; I'm being self deprecating, which is part of my job. So sit down you little prick, and next time you pay for the Caesar salad.
 
(Q) : In your wonderful movie "Philadelphia" you had a scene after your party when Denzel Washington is sitting over here watching you. You were holding onto your IV and I think it was Maria Callas' music.
 
(Tom Hanks) : Yes, from "Andrea Chenier," if I'm pronouncing that correctly.
 
(Q) : It was exquisite. But I've never seen a scene where I thought the character, you, was so lost in the beauty of the music and in what you were going through as an individual and your suffering. I think I would always want to see that scene again.
 
(Tom Hanks): I can tell you an interesting thing about the subject that you're actually bringing up. Usually making a movie like that in which music is playing that people are hearing they are not able to play while you're shooting the scene. They start it up and then they stop it and you have to imagine what's going on because it gets on the track, the audio track, and in order to cut that together they have to not only cut to picture but they have to cut to sound, which is almost an impossible thing to do; it's very hard. So we shot that scene about three o'clock in the morning in Philadelphia. I was familiar with the piece and we were talking with Jonathan Demme and who did the sound?
 
(Q) : Chris Jenkins.
 
(Tom Hanks): Chris Jenkins? No. Was that his name? Chris Jenkins the sound mixer? Thank you. Chris Jenkins the sound mixer. And we were down and we were trying to figure well how do we do this? This is an incredibly evocative piece of music. Are we actually going to do that thing where we start it and then stop it? Oh because I had dialog in it, and if you have dialog in it that really limits what you can do with that footage. And we were thinking about well maybe we can start it a little bit, and Chris said "I have a thing called a miracle ear that's a little earwig speaker that maybe I can broadcast it into your ear.

But it's going to be weird because it's only going to be coming in one." And Jonathan Demme, to his credit, said "How about we just turn the music up and shoot it?" and that's how we did it. So the music was blaring throughout all of that scene, so it was not that difficult to become lost in Maria Callas' aria, because we were listening to Maria Callas' aria. And that is completely rarely the way that you make movies.

The only other time that I know of from somebody, John Candy told me a long time ago that in "Planes, Trains & Automobiles" John Hughes threw all those rules away and just played the music really loud and let them go to it with the music in it. Usually the filmmaker would not have the courage to do this, so thank you very much.
 
(Q) : What kind of advice would you give to future hopeful actors or filmmakers?
 
(Tom Hanks) : I think we live in a very interesting time because you're actually in a store that sells products to make it possible for you to do anything you want to as a filmmaker, a screenwriter, an animator, or also an actor. The only advice I can give anybody is to do it all the time. Do not wait for someone to invite you into the creative process. If you want to be a screenwriter don't wait for somebody to say "Hey, you know that idea you had? I'll give you $10; sit down and write it."

If you want to make a movie you know how to work MacBook Pro. I don't know how to do it but my crack staff knows how to do it. You can edit it yourself; you can make it all happen. There are people right now that are sitting on the edge of their bed making movies on their MacBooks and they're going to be seen by somebody. They'll be on YouTube or they'll be on iTunes or they'll just send it out to friends. We've all seen viral videos that have gone all around, like that girl that sang about Friday. We've all seen that, right? And there are plenty of others that you get to do anything you want to now and it will actually exist. Let me tell you a quick story. I’m going to drop names now; do you mind? Steven Spielberg…
 
(Q) : Wait, is he a like a director?
 
(Tom Hanks): Actually, he's a buddy that I mow his lawn every other week. In the old days – of course he's inundated with movies – he would get stacks and stacks and stacks of "Dear Mr. Spielberg, I've written this screenplay," and he would throw them all away because at the end of the day with enough acumen or time you could write a screenplay. But if someone sent him as much as a seven minute 8mm film that they made that they cut together he would watch all of it.

He saw every short film that ever came through his office, because those people did everything. They made the movie, they got their friends to do it, they shot it, they cut it, they did the due diligence. Now that was hard to do in 1978 or 1985, but if you've got a creative bone in your body now you can make almost any movie that you want to somehow. If you have a theme you want to examine or a beat you want to show or even a talent you want to expose you can do it.

The other example of this as a great one is Moby, who is a Grammy award winning musician. His first album, I heard him interviewed, he said "I never thought anybody would listen to a record that I made sitting on the edge of my bed" late at night on his computer. So my advice to anybody is just do it. Just do it every chance you get, do it everywhere you can, and you'd be amazed what can happen when somebody sees your work.
 
(Q) : If you could revisit any of your wonderful roles in a sequel which would you choose and why?
 
(Tom Hanks) : The only ones that we've done kind of made sense. I mean Woody and the "Toy Story"s; those are actually completely independent movies. It's odd to be calling them sequels but they are, and that's because it just makes sense. Toys never die and they never cease to have adventures and the people at Pixar are kind of geniuses. "The Da Vinci Code" movie and "Angels and Demons," that's almost like a Sherlock Holmes film. It's the same guy and he's got a different kind of case. I made other movies that have been quote-unquote successful and they would like to have sequels to them, but they don't warrant it, quite frankly.

The character would just in the same circumstance again, you wouldn't be able to examine the theme unless you did it all again. I heard this thing about studio executives. No executive has ever been fired for green lighting a sequel, which is true because it's easy. Hey that one made money, make another one. Do it again! And sometimes they work and sometimes they don't.

I have not done any film beyond the ones that were sort of built into the DNA of the character and the movie that I think warranted having a sequel made. There was a lot of pressure to like what do you want to remake "Forrest Gump" or "A League of Their Own" or something like that? I don't know how to do it, I don't know why to do it, it would probably just be some version of the same movie you just made, and so honestly what's the point? I've got better things to do.
 
(Q) : But they figure there's a built in audience so it will make money.
 
(Tom Hanks) : As everybody knows now, and some sequels are great and some sequels aren't, but it's okay, that's the way it works.

End.