The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece

by Tom Hanks

I don’t hate any films. Movies are too hard to make to warrant hatred, even when they are turkeys. If a movie is not great, I just wait it out in my seat. It will be over soon enough. Walking out of a movie is a sin.

Hate should be saved for fascism and steamed broccoli that’s gone cold.

Making movies is complicated, maddening, highly technical at times, ephemeral and gossamer at others, slow as molasses on a Wednesday but with a gun-to-the-head deadline on a Friday. Imagine a jet plane, the funds for which were held up by Congress, designed by poets, riveted together by musicians, supervised by executives fresh out of business school, to be piloted by wannabes with attention deficiencies. What are the chances that such an aeroplane is going to soar? There you have the making of a movie, at least as I saw it at the Skunk Works.

There is always a good conversation to be had on a movie set, around the Production Office, and during the Postproduction process because most of moviemaking is spent waiting. The question How’d you get started in this racket? prompts hours of very personal, improbable stories, each saga worth a book of its own.

Movies last forever. So do characters in books. Blending the two in this volume may be a fool’s errand, wasted effort in the mining of fool’s gold. Don’t hate the final product. Think of it as quite good.

no matter how much you spent on building a bridge, you never owned the river.

“Making movies is about solving more problems than you cause.” Allicia noted the hope-filled, upticked arch of Dace’s right eyebrow. Pow. “It’s not for pussies.” Dace nodded. “Very, very well put.”

Production assistants. Not members of the DGA, but all hoping to be, unless they want to be producers, cinematographers, screenwriters, or, after working twenty-hour days on a movie, in some other line of work.

“I make movies because no other labor satisfies my quest to capture an unspoken truth, one so pure and undiscovered that the audience will slap themselves upside their heads for not having seen it long ago.

That’s what the actors do. They don’t remember anything but how they looked on the one-sheet. We Production folk remember everyone and recognize them for the rest of our lives.”

Irving Cloepfer had come to a fork in the road and picked it up.

curiosity fuels you and passion carries you along. Lose either one and you’re done.

she talked about the great divide between solving problems and causing them, and the importance of being on time.