The Ezra Klein Show: What Tom Hanks Thinks of America

From New York Times Opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show.

I hate to do this because I know the cliche when the host says,

my guest today needs no introduction.

But what I'm really going to sit here and introduce who Tom Hanks is to you.

It's a waste of your time in mind.

But he does have a new book out, the making of another major motion picture masterpiece,

which follows up his short story collection, Uncommon Type,

both of which are Real Delight.

And there's a reason I wanted to have this conversation,

and I'm going to try to let it unfold,

but I've always been interested in Hanks as a kind of interpreter of America.

And also somebody who gets something that has often fallen out of fashion,

both politically and culturally,

even as it maintains a huge amount of strength and appeal,

which is the power of sincerity in American culture.

And the way in which there's this constant push and pull

between elite intellectual culture, which is more cynical,

which is more ironic, and mass culture, which is more sincere,

in many ways, patriotic, at least wants to believe that we all can agree on things,

even if the people in it don't all agree on things.

And Hanks is somebody who's navigated the currents of this for a very long time now,

very adroitly.

I don't think you can have played the role as the movies star everybody can agree on, right?

The nice guy of American movies for this long,

in this many changing versions of America,

without understanding something pretty deep about the American psyche.

So that was the conversation I wanted to have with him here,

and it was a lot of fun.

As always, my email as a recline show at nytimes.com.

Tom Hanks, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me as a recline.

So I wanted to start in your earlier book of short stories, Uncommon Type.

And in that book, you have a typewriter appearing in every single story.

You've talked a lot in different interviews about your love of typewriters.

And I'm going to admit to being a cynic here,

I thought this was maybe a cute affectation.

So you had a hobby for the public.

But then one of our producers, Kristen Lynn,

wandered into Gramercy typewriter company in New York.

And the owner told her that you text him photos of typewriters you see in your travels

with questions about them.

So this is clearly real.

What attracts you to typewriters?

The permanence of a typewriter.

When I was a kid, my dad, who on the GI Bill went to USC, he got out of the Navy.

He was in the Pacific and he bought a second hand Remington typewriter.

He ended up being a professor.

He taught restaurant and hotel food preparation at Laney College in Oakland, California.

And he would type his tests in a syllabus on this ancient typewriter.

He had such a vicious pounding nature when it came to physical work that the letters

on the most used keys, the S and the E, were literally worn away to different shapes

than the rest of the keys.

And I would hunt and peck on that as a little kid,

but it was this formidable ancient piece of gim crackery that had survived my dad's use.

And I looked upon it as it might have been the only thing my dad had that was pre-my existence.

And so my handwriting is atrocious.

And there was a story in the collection called These Are the Meditations of My Heart.

And though it is a female protagonist, it is the story of how I got my first quality typewriter,

a machine designed and engineered for the recording, permanent recording of your thoughts

and wishes and love letters and memos and shopping lists.

And when I walked home from a Cleveland, Westside Cleveland business office machines

with a Hermes 2000 typewriter, I knew I had then with me the vehicle for a type of permanence

that I did not have in other parts of my life.

I must say, I will confess, that machine is long gone, lost to a lot of moves in my kids,

pounding the living daylights out of it until it became in disrepair.

But I have since replaced it.

And I do get other typewriters, and I always travel with one.

And here's the thing, though, Ezra.

It's one thing to own typewriters.

It's something else completely to use them.

And I type every single day.

My main personal correspondence is in typewriters.

I send letters all the time, and sometimes I have any number of people that I keep a regular correspondence with

because a typewritten letter is never thrown away.

That's one thing.

And two, if you take care of it, it will last as long as the carvings on the stone wall

of the Temple of Karnak in Egypt.

You are not just applying words onto paper.

You are stamping them into the fibers with permanent ink.

And there's something about that that I find very, very romantic.

And I will also say permanent.

And that is why I have way too many typewriters.

And Ezra Klein, if you were to say to me right now, well, I'd like a typewriter.

One would be on your desk in about two and a half weeks from my collection under the promise, however, that you use it every single day.

That's a lot of power to hold.

Can I admit something to you into our vast audience?

I think that's the purpose of any podcast, Ezra.

I've never learned to type.

I am even today a hunt and peck typewriter.

I can do 85 words a minute hunt and peck, but I guess like your father who had, I think you described it as a thunderous typing.

One of my good friends used to call me the black Sabbath of typing because it's so loud.

I've been in press conferences with Nancy Pelosi and others and I've had staffers come to shush my typing because it was distracting the principle from-

On a laptop? On a laptop?

On a laptop. That is the force with which I hunt and peck.

Well, how many of those have you used up in your career?

My God, if you're actually flying physical pressure onto a laptop, they got to take a beat.

It's tough karma to be my laptop keyboard.

But wait, wait, you never learned essentially touch typing.

Never.

QWERTY, AAA space, FFF space, really?

Yeah, it keeps being on my list.

I took a summer class in it for a minute.

This is definitely what people came to this podcast to hear me telling you about my typing.

But I took a summer class in it for a minute, but I had a lot of trouble paying attention in those days and just dropped out or didn't complete it or didn't learn it or whatever.

And then I just was, I don't know, good enough hunt and pecker, but I've been meaning to go back to this.

So it is one of my goals for the next couple of years to actually learn how to type.

85 words per minute, this is nothing.

The speed of which one types has nothing to do with it.

It's the thoroughness with which one types.

When you start typing and you do not stop typing until you get to the end of the idea, that's the only thing that matters.

That is fair.

I think I probably type 30 words a minute because I keep going back and forth and trying to figure out what I really want to say.

Well, let's get to that question of what you want to say because what I always like about thinking about the way people write,

is it different mediums and technologies?

You do think differently in them.

I would write a different piece on a typewriter from writing it in the iPhone notes app and writing it on my laptop from writing it by hand,

where I have terrible, I guess, like you handwriting.

So how do you think differently on the typewriter?

What is different about the words that come out than if you're doing them on a computer and a notebook?

A pondering is the way I would say it.

Knowing that it's going down and it is going to be permanent.

Look, I'm not against going back and just X-ing out everything on the line and then starting all over again

or just stopping in paragraph and then beginning again fresh at the top.

But there is sort of like a curly-cued thought process that knows where I do write slower than I think,

but the paradox is I end up typing almost as fast as the final version of what I want to say does come out.

Because it is going to be down there forever and there's no such thing as a delete key and I don't even pull the paper out

and rip it up and throw it away unless there's so many typos in it that none of it makes sense.

But it's going to last a very long time if you end up saying this is what is complete.

So I do go a little bit slower, but I also want it to read as though it's more like a curacaoer screenplay

than it is one of my own.

I wanted to have some jazz to it somehow and sometimes that can be an overuse of ellipses

and sometimes it can be starting a sentence with the same word over and over again.

And this is the stuff that you end up putting into everything from a letter to somebody that you don't know very well

to something that I'm just leaving for my wife in the morning because I'm out of the house at 6.30

and I know she's not going to see me until later on in the evening.

But I guess to have the same sort of sense of gravitas that whatever I typed out a piece of paper was thought about

was not just thrown off the cuff like you would a text or an email or something in your notes.

I have a, this is how insane I am.

I have one rig at home.

I built a desk myself while I designed it and a friend of mine who was good with wood helped me build it.

And what it is, it's the right height for a typing table.

And I took a Hermes Media Professional Quality typewriter and I bolted it to a flip up surface.

So I can type anything I want to and then pull the paper out, flip up the typewriter so it's up and out of the way

and then on the surface below it address it, make any changes or whatever and sign it and off it goes.

So that's one aspect that's insane about it.

But the other aspect is I went out and bought a huge box of old school dot matrix printer paper,

the type that is perforated and has the, what do you call it?

It has the things on the side.

The sides with like little holes that you tear off?

With little holes.

Sprockets.

It has sprockets on it.

I did not know that word.

Okay.

Let's call it sprockets on a dot matrix printer.

And essentially I have one piece of paper that is, can be like three and a half miles long.

And I roll that in and I can go for anywhere from three to seven pages without having to stop.

That's how it gets you Ezra.

That's, that's how it gets you.

So is a new book written on a typewriter?

A lot of it was, but nothing anything that counted.

I mean, I do all sorts of paragraphs and notes and ideas and outlines on a,

and I oftentimes don't use any of it at all.

But what, what the, and it's a line of world, would you do that?

Hanks.

And the reason is, is because the percussiveness of it, the sound, the rhythm it ends up being

like a bit of a snare drum that I can feel in my bones as I go around.

And when I can really get going on it, the sound and the rhythm of the chuk, chuk, chuk,

Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch is the sound of, it almost like is a Charlie Chaplin

score for modern times or something like that. It's a, and it makes me feel like I end up

getting into some sort of like a zone that I hear and see and feel all at the same time.

I think I compare the sound of that is like a ball peen hammer on an anvil as you're pounding

out a horseshoe as opposed to typing on a laptop which is like just a little clicking of knitting

needles. Sometimes I just need the bigger volume. I need the heavier sound.

So the new book is called The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece,

and it is about a movie called The Masterpiece in Question Nightshade, The Lab of Firefall,

and that movie is built on a comic. So tell me about the comic you've invented in the,

in the book. Tell me about the source material at the center of this little universe.

Source material for motion pictures oftentimes go back to the thought that was in somebody's head

when they were six years old. I've talked to any number of the directors who remember seeing

something, not necessarily from the movie, but witnessing something in their lives

that has always hung with them. In this case, one of the characters saw a comic book

when he was only five and it was right after World War II and there were an awful lot of

stories out of the war. And in the coin of the realm of this day and age, it ends up being

incorporated into a long-standing series of superheroes and there's a superhero by the name

of Eve Knight who becomes Nightshade and she has incredible powers that she's trying to flee from

and she can never sleep and she envisions being haunted by this flame thrower who ends up entering

into her life in order to come for her grandfather who himself was a veteran of World War II.

And so the vernacular here is one of a superhero battle of powers and wits and sensuality that

has kind of been the coin of the realm now for quite some time. And so in order to write a book

about the making of a movie, the special effects laden superhero movie seem to be recognizable

enough with having to get into too many of the specifics. I wanted to spend a moment in the

comic because I'm a comics nerd and you stretched across something that I think is interesting

there which is the original inspiring comic. There's a lot of scenes in the book of 1950s, 1960s

Americana and the comic that inspires all this with the Marines and the flame throwers is from this

early era where comics represent this kind of Americana. Very famously the first Captain America

comic. It has him punching out Hitler on the cover of it. Then later comics become much

likelier to critique that kind of Americana which seems to me to happen with this character's time

goes on. And that feels true for movies too to me that we've moved in general from culture that

aims at a kind of consensus, the sort of what everybody can agree on, to culture that aims at

a kind of critique. Does that feel true to you? Yes it does and it comes hand in hand with the

advancement of essentially computer graphics. I mean you don't have to go back very far to

remember they couldn't make comic book movies until CGI and computers made it possible. I mean

when I was a kid I mean you don't have to go back very far. I mean George Reeves is Superman of the

1950s. It was incredibly fake. Maybe you know Michael Keaton's Batman and Christopher Reeves

Superman, even those were made with wires and stuntmen and special effects that were still

firmly rooted in the physical world. CGI comes along and you can literally do anything that

can possibly imagine. So don't you wonder sometimes Ezra is how many Spider-Man's there can be that

seem to all exist in the same timeline or now different timelines or how often Batman surprises

somebody in a club in Gotham City? Someone always seems to say who are you? And it's like

have you seen all these other Batman movies for crying out loud? They keep coming back around

and around and around. But the glory I think that comic books that had for me was they existed

pretty much in one universe. They each one had a very specific beginning, middle of an end and

an end and there was a big difference I think between DC Comics and Marvel Comics mostly

and because of the story lines and the maturity of the Jack Kirby and the Stan Lee Marvel that has

I think brought it through to the course of today there seems to be a never-ending appetite for

more looks into what is I guess the psychological drama that goes into these people that have

incredible superpowers and what did they do with them and how did they use them and along with

physical aspects of making a movie where absolutely anything can happen it also seems to be the case

with the story lines too. They go into places that I can never ever predict and I guess that's

part of the attraction. I want to hold for a second on why there's such an appetite for it

because I think there's something interesting there too but I want to go back to something here

on this question of consensus versus critique because it feels to me like it recurs in the

book in a few different ways. So you have these old comics and the book spends a bunch of time in

sort of 50s and 60s America that are a little bit more about representing America as a kind of

holistic, united front and then modern comics and I think a lot of modern movies are much more

about critiquing that right. The movie that kicks the Renaissance of comic movies off Iron Man with

Robert Downey Jr. that's very much a critique of the military industrial state and one man's

complicity in it and the beginning of the book not the part about comics but the part that sets

up the plot almost entirely includes a pretty stirring attack on haters of movies but it read

to me as a little bit more than that on a culture of being more interested in why we don't like

things and then why we do like them and it felt to me that you're playing quite a bit here with

this question of why we've moved from things that were meant to be in this consensus zone to things

that were meant to critique the idea this consensus was a good zone ever in the first place.

I think it's because we have entered into a realm of cynicism seems to be much more of

a default position for an awful lot of cultural exchange. Who's behind this? What does it really

mean? What's really being said? What's the PR version of what is being put forward to it? What's

the real nefarious purpose that is behind this? Without a doubt I think there is a sort of positivity

that says you know as everybody gets together and does their best we can actually get together and

figure something out together and yet you take that concept and put it into a cynical position

which I do think is sort of like the first stop that an awful lot of cultural exchange goes through

is number one, well why? Will it really make a difference? Who gains and who doesn't gain and

what does this really mean? And I think that in a type of superhero movie the common battle I think

were the most approachable aspect of the battle is not good versus evil. It ends up being some other

combination of well I'm not really well versed in all the movies there but when you have somebody

evil coming from some other dimension or conquer the planet earth without a doubt well you know

that's evil and the good has to get together and do it but even in the alliance of those against

ends up being all sorts of conflicting emotions and conflicting motivations.

Look there's two types of cynicism. One is righteous cynicism you know like follow the money you

know that's a pretty good brand of cynicism but there is the other type which is just natural

knee jerk kind of oh come on this really who do you think you are? What are you even trying to do

this for? What are you trying to prove? And I think that that represents in a lot of ways what

people the most fun thing in order to search out oftentimes is well what's the conspiracy behind

all of this the the nature of what's going on in the in the smoke filled rooms and the cabal of

people trying to sway their influence and I think that's represented in in these huge huge huge

movies in which we have conflicted superheroes that seem to still be somehow those plucky misfits

who still are able in order to learn their lesson and come together. I'm going to admit that this

was never really a question about superheroes but a question thinly guised about you. I can handle that

which is that one of the things I see when I look at your work in the books in the movies

is there is much more sentimentality and I mean that really truly is a compliment in an age of

a lot of irony and that's also sort of true in the image it is either built around you or that you

have built around yourself there is a sense of yeah maybe it's sincerity positivity I'm not sure

exactly what to call but it does feel a little counter programmed today it feels like it harkens

back and a lot of the source material harkens back to an idea of a kind of America that was there once

and probably still is but has become a little out of intellectual fashion so first I should just

ask does that resonate for you as an interpretation. Yes I think it does look I'm 66 I was born in

1956 and I did not have a standard type of youth or home I was wandering around on my own pretty

unsupervised from a very early age I was an eight-year-old kid that was riding the bus for hours

on my own in the Oakland California and looking back on it now I can remember there were some

malevolent characters out there that I figured out pretty quickly were malevolent but I will tell

you this I came across many many many more people who seemed to be fair and kind and honest sometimes

it was you know the old guys who ran the candy store that was down on the corner who seemed to

delight in having a bunch of kids around now that doesn't mean there wasn't some sleazy guys who

outside the candy store saying hey would you I'll buy you some candy would you like some candy.

I was aware from a very young age that there were folks out there to be avoided but I also

was able to enjoy over and over again I guess because sort of like the faith and hope of people

that didn't have to have any sort of faith or hope they didn't have to cotton to me.

We moved around a lot my dad and my mom got divorced very young and we were my dad was in

the restaurant business and there were three of us and I had a younger brother that didn't live

with me and we were always on our own we were seem to be all we were latchkey kids before in the

we I didn't even know what a latch was but we made our own way and we made our own way and we

seemed to be laughing more often than we were terrified even though we lived in some places

that were naturally quite lawless but I had a teacher for two and a half years Mrs. Castle

who just told me I was smart and she told me I was curious and she told me that I was good natureed

and I didn't know I was any of those things but I ended up understanding so I think I have

always carried I guess some degree of those qualities to me because I I don't think I ever

lived specifically in fear despite the fact that I lived in an awful lot of confusion all the time

but again I was lucky because there was always some combination of friends I made whose parents

were really cool who were you know the semi-adoptive presence in my life for a number of years

and along with the backdrop too that was going on you know one of the themes that keeps coming

back in an awful lot of my work I will I would admit is the war specifically World War II

because every adult that I knew spoke of the war in capital letters well that was during the war

that was before the war that was right after the war and they wore those years in their

shoulders in their body language they talked about it as it was the shared common Rubicon

that they all crossed and there was part of me that just thought I wish I had something like that

in my life and I didn't have anything like that until you know John F. Kennedy was assassinated

when I was in what second grade then also at two because I was in school and it was part of

the Daily News and also the Daily Science class was the space program was going on

and it was Mercury and it was Gemini and it was Apollo and they landed on the moon and talk about

a Rubicon for all humanity I mean July 20th 1969 was everybody knew what they were doing they

are all they were all at home watching the moon landings all around the world and so I had these

two superstructure themes that every adult was participating in and one is the war which we won

the other one was going to the moon which was an evolutionary step in the history of all of

humankind that turned out to be possible but but also the winning of a kind of war with the

Soviet Union well and that was yes and that was always ongoing and you know I remember I also very

much remember thinking at the time it can't be that simple what was going on at the Soviet Union

was almost comical and it's in an ebbness at the same time that it was lethal in its

contrariness to the human condition I remember thinking human beings don't live like that

in the you know the grand scheme of what all the stuff that was communist and of course after

69 we were very much involved in Vietnam that I knew this was not world war two I never went along

goody two shoes with you know the concept of that was a just war and it was the same thing and all

the lessons that we learned in the past we can apply to the future even I knew hey that was then

this is now and shouldn't we all know better I was aware at a pretty early age that oh I think we're

being lied to here guys I think they're lying to us and then on the top of that I graduated from

high school in 1974 so we had the Watergate hearings and everything that was going on along with that

so I was very much aware that America was in a brand of tumult right there but what I did not

give into was an ongoing type of cynicism that said it's all corrupt that it is all worthless

because even then I was coming across people that were honest and forgiving and willing to

sit down and discuss the differences but I didn't I never I always was saying well

where's the fractions in this what are the divisions in this where is it going to be evident

that there are folks who are out there constantly thinking of what is the right thing to do here

and also dare I say it what is the correct American thing to do here because I was aware that

just from basic educational aspects of it that here's what I knew is that in the United States

of America your parents could come into your room and say we're moving you would load up

everything into car and you would move as many as 300 miles away start all over again and guess

what there was a school that you would go to that wasn't all that difference in quality from the

school you had been going to and it was free and it was in walking distance and you were going to

have some brand of a teacher that was going to evaluate you on their own individual perspective

of who you are and that to me that's what America was at its most basic so I'm going to pick up on

America there because I've taken America as your great subject which isn't true for everybody in

your line of work I don't think America is the subject of Tom Cruise or Will Smith or a bunch

of other great actors and in particular the stories America tells about itself you mentioned

that a lot of your work is revolved around World War II you've also done amazing movies about

Vietnam and I think World War II is sort of where America's idea of itself or in some ways one of

its modern ideas of itself cohered and Vietnam is where it also began to fall apart like this huge

counter narrative emerges in a very central way it has always of course been there in other ways

and that's true in your book too I mean it it spans these wars the heroes come out of these

wars in different ways the the people in them are affected by the wars in different ways

so how do you see the way that the stories America tells about itself and the stories

America now responds to changed in the tension between these two it's because we've forgotten

our history we no longer study it is right now that's what I would say and I'm only a layman

historian I read history for pleasure but again and again I think there is a through line to our

history of the United States of America that is both checkered and promising without a doubt

there's that line from days to confused you know they're letting out for the summer and just

remember the 4th of July is celebrating a bunch of rich white slave owners who didn't want to pay

their taxes you know there is there is a great truth that those were the guys who signed the

Declaration of Independence World War two of course we were still a segregated nation if you

were black and American you unless you were part of the Tuskegee Airmen and perhaps in some parts

of the Navy you did not fight you served food or you packed bags so we can't pretend that a perfect

America went into all of these things in the past but an improving America did I go back again and

again to the preamble of the Constitution of the United States that says in order to form a more

perfect union and I when I come across examples of that I find it nearly heartbreaking that it's

not taught or it's not spoken of in a way that is interesting when history is not taught we do not

have an appreciation for how far we have come as the originators of an incredibly imperfect form

of government but just about the best that has ever existed despite all of its imperfections

because it is governed from this concept that we are we are always trying to create a more perfect

union I've read John Steinbeck's travels with Charlie oh I love that book that's a great book

and there's a scene that I remember in reading that I'm going to say I read it in late junior

high school I read it when I was 13 or 14 or 15 years old and he's driving along in his pickup

truck with his with his camper on the back and Charlie his dog and he sees an old black man

walking along a hot road and he stops John Steinbeck says and said sir would you like a ride

and the fella gets in his cab and they drive along and Steinbeck speaks about trying to

reach out and connect with this fellow trying to communicate somehow that you know he understands

the plight in the south and this you know this was the early what late 1950s early 1960s when he

made this so civil rights and the divisions between black and white america are at the forefront of

the daily news and he fails John Steinbeck fails what he's trying to do he's trying to reach out

to another american probably maybe his same age but of a completely different race and he

cannot make a connection why because the divide is too wide it's too huge it's written in capital

letters capital w for white and capital b for black and I remember reading that and being a little

bit chilled because it was an example of how big the divide was and it reminded me right there that

we still have a long way to go if we were going to create a more perfect union vietnam

vietnam was not a great war for the united states and you can go back any number of areas and say

here's all the reasons that we should never have asked a bunch of young boys to go off

and fight for our country as they were asked to and as they did that doesn't subtract for a moment

everything that they went through and everything that they experienced and it certainly doesn't

remove any of the baggage and tragedy that they carried with them for the rest of their lives

after that for a whole generation of people vietnam is the rubicon that was crossed and I wouldn't

and I think perhaps it could be that one of the degrees of cynicism that has existed ever since

is that just as when I was five 10 11 years old and every adult that I knew was talking about the

war as in what they did from 1941 through 1945 nine 10 11 year old kids how they're hearing about the

war but it's the one in vietnam and the lessons that come from that is a very different sort of

burden

you're probably used to this being the the case in this conversation by now but this what's going

to come here is not going to be crisp but I want to pull out something I think is interesting here

my topic is american politics much more than it is american culture and and what I take to be a very

live question is this tension between appealing to the story of the improving america the good

america the better angels of america and living in the story of america's fractures of its

shortcomings of its shortfalls and both the left and the right I think have their versions of this

right now if you think about the way the rhetoric of a george w bush differed from the rhetoric of

Donald trump if you think of the way the rhetoric of joe biden differs from the rhetoric of many on

the left that there is always this tension and I think it's often an elite and mass tension

the intellectual culture tends to be much more focused on critique on what is wrong

and mass culture tends to be very interested in sincerity on politically speaking here patriotism

this gets called corny you have unbelievable amounts of love for the the play hamilton and

then there's kind of an elite backlash to it and this just comes on again and again

and one reason I'm having this conversation with you is that I actually see you as somebody who

has for a long time been exploring the boundaries of that kind of mass interest in the sincere

in you know you were mr rogers a few years ago you were captain solely you you've often gravitated

around these places where even now america's figures it can agree on even now america's figures

whom a lot of people find beautiful or inspiring because they seem to somehow not be

inside the divisions and rogers is maybe a good example of this and a particular example of this

he's become almost canonized in the past couple of years and when I watched that movie it had much

more dark elements than I was expecting in it so I'm curious about this attraction for you I mean

is this a conscious thing for you that that you are looking for what people can actually

agree on at a time when the the culture seems to have turned towards emphasizing what we cannot

I don't take any of these gigs unless there's something about it that absolutely fascinates

me and I said well that hasn't been explored there's something that is deeply rooted that

are going to show something else and I have played a number of people who I had to talk to

before I made the movie about them jim lovell on a poll 13 charlie wilson charlie wilson's war

richard Phillips and captain Phillips chesley sullenberger sullen and I met all sorts of people

who knew fred rogers extraordinarily well and out of there comes the chance to get down to a sort of

rude philosophy about them or well let me put it this way I think the best versions of making

what I call nonfiction entertainment is behavior and the procedure that illuminates the grand

motivations of who they are and I'll just give you this about fred rogers is I don't know if you

notice but fred rogers was an ordained minister he was the reverend of fred rogers

and he went to his church and said I do not want to have a church I want my church to be

children's television and television was so new they kind of said huh what how do you do that

no that's not how this works and he ended up explaining what he could do with his theological

background that then became the mr rogers neighborhood that we're familiar with and

mr rogers never used the word god in any of his broadcasts he never taught about heaven or hell

he never talked about the 10 commandments or the apostles he never brought up the bible

what he did was he tended to the fears and the understandings of his congregation and his congregation

was made up of three and four-year-old kids who were afraid of being sucked down the toilet

if they fell into it while it was being flushed well you start with that and then you just get

to this kind of place where after that I mean even fred's wife would just say well hey you know

well tom you know fred was a complicated guy in life is just one damn thing after another isn't it

and you take that into account and you realize well that's the case with all of these guys that

I've played charlie wilson and certainly richard Phillips and certainly sully who on one hand did

something magnificent in saving the lives of every single person that was on that plane

he knew that if anybody had drowned that he would be blamed what I see I guess in all of these guys

is some form of will breaking pressure that they do not show and in some cases the movie is not

interested in showing but as the actor playing all those guys I have written about that back

breaking pressure that that will defeating uh demote possible demoralization did they do the

right thing are they doing their job right are they endangering anybody and that's what I bring

to the process well before we end up shooting and because it's nonfiction because it is based on real

people in real circumstances even though as I said to all these guys I'm going to say things

you never said be places you never were and do things you never did inside that still has to be

sort of the molecular DNA of that all encompassing truth of why they do what they do for living and

or in the subject of the movie along with how they did it and that ends up being behavior

and procedure and to me as an actor and as a guy who reads history and of course now it's trying to

write something that actually reflects the world as as I know it that's job number one man there's

nothing more fascinating to me than that the moment in that movie that sticks with me the most

is when the journalist asks mr rogers wife about how fred rogers manages to be so damn nice all the

time and she says he works at it all the time it's a practice I'm curious about this on two levels

one what you learned from reading about studying that side of him right the swimming the praying the

things that kept him grounded in himself but but two I have to imagine and I feel like it was

threaded through the answer you just gave me that you've got a reputation for me a nice guy you get

called America's dad I mean there's a certain amount of backbreaking pressure I'm sure in feeling

like there's this public palm hanks who cannot be betrayed I'm curious what practices you took

from rogers or what practices you have yourself to maintain groundedness in that well it does require

a certain degree of work but there also has to be with it I think a sense of the value to it I mean

it's valuable I think to the self what do we all want to be Ezra I think we all want to be compassionate

right I think we all want to be both enlightening and enlightened by all that we go through and

all that we discover and all that we witness and I think also I think we want to both experience

joy and if there's a way in order to create it I think we all want to be able to create joy because

I've sort of woken up every morning from being a socially conscious human being of some degree of

seeking joy but that doesn't mean the world is always wonderful because enlightenment comes from

bitter compromise enlightenment comes from tragedy enlightenment comes by way of conquering

something that if left service is going to somehow destroy destroy you compassion likewise we want

to both be able to feel the compassion of others but what good is that if we don't have compassion

for other people including those that we don't know I mean the story told about John Steinbeck

picking up that old the black man in the south they had compassion for him but what enlightenment

did he get from that exchange he got from that the divide is so great that it can't be penetrated

in the length of the 20-minute lift into town I do understand the purchase and sort of like contract

I have with with the last three generations of moviegoers because my career happened to coincide

with the invention of the VHS tape cassette so I have babysat and awful lot of kids who were left

at home in order to watch any number of movies while mom and dad went out and now of course we

live in a circumstance where you can see anything you want to anytime you want to so I know that

you know I've been an awful lot of people's living rooms and even the stuff that is probably

more obtuse and not exactly the type of everybody's movie cues I can't tell you how often somebody

comes up to me says I was in a hotel room and I was in you know Dalhart Texas and I ended up

watching that movie that you made in Saudi Arabia what was that about it's and then we could talk

about this this movie I made called hologram for the king and everything that that it stood for

so I know what that is and I don't discount it for a minute but at the same time you have to walk

this fine line and I think perhaps mr. Rogers did and I'm going to think that also sully did and also

Richard Phillips is you can't let anybody take advantage of that good nature and there are people

out there that are hell-bent on doing that very thing to take advantage of that good nature or to

assume that somehow you're a pushover or somehow assume that it's not real that it doesn't really

count that it's not really who you are that you're putting on some put a form performance and I'm

not going to look without a doubt the vast majority of press junk that anybody does in order to promote

movies that's as much a performance as the one you give in the movie you have to go off and you

do that kind of stuff but that's part of the everybody I think understands it's a part of the

exchange as well but then what's the what's the value of going to be look I try to go to bed at

night with as little self-loathing as possible and what I've learned over the course since since I

was born in 1956 as well what I've learned is that that requires an awful lot of work at being

authentic with people to the degree that you owe them your authenticity and an awful lot of people

out there that I've come across are worthy of sort of like 100% of how I understand my job and how

I understand the what I've contributed to something because I have those same people that have

contributed to me you know somewhere between James Brown and Chrissy Hind and and Paul McCartney I

have people that I wouldn't know what to say to them if I met them because I would just be foaming

all over all over them saying yeah I can't like what you meant to me when I was growing up I'd be

the same exact way and to get from them which I have on occasion a kind of a nod and an understanding

and an appreciation for what that is they put on clinics on how to be authentic as well and

understand that it's a shared moment as opposed to a performed one and what have you learned from

that when when somebody comes up to you and you mean something to them and you've never met them

how do you help them have the moment they want from you that they don't know how to get I have a

friend that went off actually I think he wrote about it in his book Matthew McConaughey he told

the story about being at this juncture in his life and I hope it's in the book otherwise I'm dropping

too big of a name in which case Matthew I apologize but he ended up seeking out a monk

all right in a monastery somewhere that he heard was this great spiritual guide

and I've since talked to other guys who have you know talked to Buddhist monks and what have you

and what he did was he poured out his life and all of his struggles to this guy for the better

part of you know five hours they just walked and talked and they just talked and talked and

all everything about Matthew's life came out all of his struggles all of his struggles all of his

difficulties all of his all of the tests that he felt as though he failed and whatnot and where he

was now and it was all over the monk said this to him me too which is that's the thing to say

because when someone is coming up to you what they're saying is yeah I understand yeah me too

yeah on one hand you say I'm glad you liked it I'm glad you saw it I'm glad it spoke to you

but what they're really weighing in with what we're really trusting you is is the weight of what

that did for them at that time and we all have versions of that weight that was measured and

lifted by some piece of art some piece of you get to know somebody on a plane and you have a

conversation with them and then you land and you never see them again but you never forget somehow

that conversation had with somebody on the plane because it is a shared burden that's that old

saying you know a problem shared is the problem halved when someone comes up to me and they're

not asking for a selfie you know they're not they're not trying to have a moment of exchange you know

like I was I was once walking through the same door as Mickey Mantle was I was not about to say

anything to Mickey Mantle you know I just kind of like looked at him you know and that was all

that was required but when someone invests a moment in time with me to say hey that really touched

me or that really helped or better better yet hey I've never forgot seeing that movie that you were

in I think what I what I try to say is I know that feeling I know what that means and ain't you cool

and then sometimes I say slap me five and then we get on with it we go our separate ways

you clearly have a hell of a work ethic you've made more movies than I can count you've done

written the past couple of years two fiction books that are you put them together with almost

a thousand pages of Tom Hanks writing what role does rest does pleasure does play hold

in your life or or in your work oh I have vast amounts of time off where I don't do anything

I will say that I probably have attention deficit disorder based on knowing what time it was by what

was on TV from a very early age and there was always yeah look there's a commercial on about

every 17 minutes so I take a break every 17 minutes but the concentrated work that I do

in my day job as an actor is extremely focused and let me also say finite it goes on for a

certain point and then is done and when that is done then I do nothing for weeks months at a time

but I am always clouded with ongoing ideas so I think then that's a good place to end

always our final question what are three books you'd recommend to the audience

three books would be bear town by Frederick Bachman it's the first in a trilogy about this

hockey youth hockey club in a small town in sweden I'm looking forward to reading the next two

knowing a little bit about Sweden and enough about hockey to be able to enjoy it

the swerve by Stephen Greenblatt how the modern world began it's about the discovery

in 1417 of what had been a long lost Latin book or codex of Lucretius that in 1417

more less gave way to modern thinking and the advent of the of the renaissance

and trust by Hernandez which is a fabulous book the structure of which is just gorgeous

and tells an awful lot about what I'd like to think of this non-fiction entertainment by way

of a novel gorgeous books Tom Hanks thank you very much well thank you as recline I enjoyed talking to you

this episode of the s recline show was produced by Annie galvin fact-checking by Michelle Harris

with Mary Marge Locker our senior audio engineer is Jeff Gelb our senior editor is Roger Karma

the show's production team also includes Emma Fogau and Kristen Lynn original music by Isaac Jones

audience strategy by Christina Siamaluski and Shannon Busta the executive producer of New York

Times opinion audio is Annie Rose Strasser and special thanks to Pat McCusker

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.