We also got the Rockettes on stage and it was great. The movie, although a hit, still could not fill the huge theater though I noticed
TV & Movies
Tom Hanks goes toe-to-toe with Emma Thompson in 'Saving Mr. Banks'
He co-stars with Emma Thompson, who plays P.L. Travers, creator of 'Mary Poppins'; film focuses on Disney wooing her to get the film rights to her book
By Ethan Sacks / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Sunday, December 8, 2013, 2:00 AM
Print
Share This URL:
Stars recall origins of the Mary Poppins story in 'Saving Mr. Banks'
It took about as long for Tom Hanks
to grow out his mustache to play Walt Disney – roughly three weeks – as
he did actually working on the set of “Saving Mr. Banks.”
But the two-time Academy Award winner’s latest movie -- which even before Friday’s release in New York is drawing rumblings of another potential Oscar nomination -- feels like the natural culmination of one of the best runs of his career.
The 57-year-old actor has spent 2013 sprouting equally impressive facial hair as the late, great New York Daily News columnist Mike McAlary in his Broadway debut, “Lucky Guy,” and followed that up with a critically lauded turn in the real life “Captain Phillips” who endured a hellish five-day ordeal as the hostage of Somali pirates.
“I need to get out of the business of playing real people because I can only grow so many mustaches and beards,” the 57-year-old and now clean shaven actor quipped to the News. “I’d like to play a racing car that folds into an Octobot.”
Hanks showcases transforming skills of a different stripe in “Saving Mr. Banks.”
Directed by “The Blind Side’s” John Lee Hancock, the movie chronicles the two-week stretch in 1961 when the animated purveyor of entertainment invited “Mary Poppins” creator P.L. Travers (Emma Thompson) to Los Angeles to convince her to sign over the movie rights to her children’s classic. What Disney didn’t count on was Travers’ crusty refusal to budge on just about any detail -- such as forbidding the use of reds in the picture –- and the lifetime of baggage she carried around from the tragic fate of her father (Colin Farrell) during her childhood in Australia.
For Hanks, the project was sprinkled with magic Tinkbell pixie dust -- the chance to work with Thompson, a friend through director Mike Nichols and one of the few actresses that can match him Oscar for Oscar.
“It’s not a casual tennis game at the club on a Saturday, it’s actually the Wimbledon Finals,” says Hanks of their on-screen repartee. “You’ve got two people they’ve got their spins, their lobs, their backhands, they have an entire mental game that they have prepared.
“Every time we worked together, both of us were very naturally at the top of our game.”
“I had courtside seats,” adds Hancock. “I just kept thinking when I was watching this that there was almost a (Spencer) Tracy/(Katherine)Hepburn thing happening there, too.”
“Write that down, write that down,” Hanks demanded to a News reporter.
“I didn’t want to yell ‘cut,’ I just wanted them to keep going,” continued Hancock.
But boy, did Thompson, 53, realize she’d have to dig deep to win those
points when she first heard the original audio of Travers berating the
“Mary Poppins” song writers, Richard and Robert Sherman.
RELATED: WOMAN BEHIND 'THE BLIND SIDE' HAS A CAMEO IN 'SAVING MR. BANKS'
“Generally speaking if you play a character for two hours in a movie, there’s some kind of moral consistancey that will allow you to take that person on the journey,” said Thompson.
“(Travers) is a deeply inconsistent woman, who will suddenly do something that looks like out of character. And I thought, ‘God, It’s just going to look like I’ve made a mistake. I’ve just f--it up. I’ve forgotten what she’s like. But actually, of course, the inconsistency was part of her, that’s what made her so interesting to play.”
Hanks brought his A game, too, particularly because he felt a little
extra pressure being the first actor to portray Walt Disney -- and for
Disney Studios, no less.
He may have spent three weeks in front in front of he camera, but he devoted a lot more than that. honing the part: watching hours of archival footage and interviewing Walt’s eldest daughter, Diane Disney Miller (who passed away on Nov. 19.) Heck, there were memos about his mustache length.
There was one manerism, though, that was off limits in a Disney movie.
“There was no way we were going to show Walt doing something that he did often during the course of the day which is smoke cigarettes,” says Hanks. “He was a three pack a day smoker, we had to have very specific reality guidelines that we had to do because we didn’t want to have an R-rated picture.
Frankly, though, “Saving Mr. Banks” is the type of smartly written
movie that feels more likely to come out in an era when you could still
light up in the movie theater. It’s a compact drama that runs the risk
of being trampled underfoot of the big budget “Hobbit” or outshined by
the wattage of the star-heavy “American Hustle,” both of which will also
be debuting in theaters this weekend.
“You’re talking about it as if it’s only chance of finding an audience is if it’s an outlier because all movies have to be literally, specifically one thing,” says Hanks. “It has to be some version of Oscar worthy or a sci-fi thing, it has to be an R-rated “Let’s get laid” comedy or a horror film. It’s something that actually should be common sense, good movies attract audiences in the end, but it’s just the nature of how much corporate pressure goes into the releasing of movies.”
Hancock is more blunt.
“The lesson that I learned on the Blind Side which took three years to get made, because all the ‘geniuses’ had a million reasons why it would never work at the box office,” he says. “And when you listen to them state them, it made sense. It’s a sports movie, so there’s no international, that’s 60 percent of our profits so that makes no sense; it has Sandy Bullock in it, and while men like Sandy, they don’t go to her movies ...
“...And then it comes out and makes $300 million,” he adds.
Whether or not “Saving Mr. Banks” makes a similar haul, whether or not Hanks gets validation from what he calsl “the roller derby” of awards season for “Mr. Banks” or “Captain Phillips,” it doesn’t really matter. And while he hasn’t acted since “Lucky Guy” wrapped on Broadway in early July, Hanks can’t wait for his next proverbial tennis match.
“Oh man, you start all over again, man, it’s just like the newspaper business,” says Hanks, flipping the tables on his interviewer. “Hey you wrote a newspaper yesterday, why bother today?”
ON A MOBILE DEVICE? CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE VIDEO.
But the two-time Academy Award winner’s latest movie -- which even before Friday’s release in New York is drawing rumblings of another potential Oscar nomination -- feels like the natural culmination of one of the best runs of his career.
The 57-year-old actor has spent 2013 sprouting equally impressive facial hair as the late, great New York Daily News columnist Mike McAlary in his Broadway debut, “Lucky Guy,” and followed that up with a critically lauded turn in the real life “Captain Phillips” who endured a hellish five-day ordeal as the hostage of Somali pirates.
“I need to get out of the business of playing real people because I can only grow so many mustaches and beards,” the 57-year-old and now clean shaven actor quipped to the News. “I’d like to play a racing car that folds into an Octobot.”
Francois Duhamel/Disney
Tom Hanks as Walt Disney and Emma Thompson as P.L. Travers in “Saving Mr. Banks”
Directed by “The Blind Side’s” John Lee Hancock, the movie chronicles the two-week stretch in 1961 when the animated purveyor of entertainment invited “Mary Poppins” creator P.L. Travers (Emma Thompson) to Los Angeles to convince her to sign over the movie rights to her children’s classic. What Disney didn’t count on was Travers’ crusty refusal to budge on just about any detail -- such as forbidding the use of reds in the picture –- and the lifetime of baggage she carried around from the tragic fate of her father (Colin Farrell) during her childhood in Australia.
For Hanks, the project was sprinkled with magic Tinkbell pixie dust -- the chance to work with Thompson, a friend through director Mike Nichols and one of the few actresses that can match him Oscar for Oscar.
“It’s not a casual tennis game at the club on a Saturday, it’s actually the Wimbledon Finals,” says Hanks of their on-screen repartee. “You’ve got two people they’ve got their spins, their lobs, their backhands, they have an entire mental game that they have prepared.
François Duhamel/Disney
Tom Hanks as entertainment tycoon Walt Disney in “Saving Mr. Banks”
“I had courtside seats,” adds Hancock. “I just kept thinking when I was watching this that there was almost a (Spencer) Tracy/(Katherine)Hepburn thing happening there, too.”
“Write that down, write that down,” Hanks demanded to a News reporter.
“I didn’t want to yell ‘cut,’ I just wanted them to keep going,” continued Hancock.
François Duhamel/Disney
Emma Thompson as P.L. Travers, the creator of “Mary Poppins,” in “Saving Mr. Banks”
RELATED: WOMAN BEHIND 'THE BLIND SIDE' HAS A CAMEO IN 'SAVING MR. BANKS'
“Generally speaking if you play a character for two hours in a movie, there’s some kind of moral consistancey that will allow you to take that person on the journey,” said Thompson.
“(Travers) is a deeply inconsistent woman, who will suddenly do something that looks like out of character. And I thought, ‘God, It’s just going to look like I’ve made a mistake. I’ve just f--it up. I’ve forgotten what she’s like. But actually, of course, the inconsistency was part of her, that’s what made her so interesting to play.”
François Duhamel/Disney
Director John Lee Hancock, Tom Hanks and Emma Thompson behind the scenes of “Saving Mr. Banks”
He may have spent three weeks in front in front of he camera, but he devoted a lot more than that. honing the part: watching hours of archival footage and interviewing Walt’s eldest daughter, Diane Disney Miller (who passed away on Nov. 19.) Heck, there were memos about his mustache length.
There was one manerism, though, that was off limits in a Disney movie.
“There was no way we were going to show Walt doing something that he did often during the course of the day which is smoke cigarettes,” says Hanks. “He was a three pack a day smoker, we had to have very specific reality guidelines that we had to do because we didn’t want to have an R-rated picture.
François Duhamel/Disney
P.L. Travers (Emma Thompson, r.) doesn’t seem too impressed with Disneyland or Disney himself (Tom Hanks) in “Saving Mr. Banks.”
“You’re talking about it as if it’s only chance of finding an audience is if it’s an outlier because all movies have to be literally, specifically one thing,” says Hanks. “It has to be some version of Oscar worthy or a sci-fi thing, it has to be an R-rated “Let’s get laid” comedy or a horror film. It’s something that actually should be common sense, good movies attract audiences in the end, but it’s just the nature of how much corporate pressure goes into the releasing of movies.”
Hancock is more blunt.
“The lesson that I learned on the Blind Side which took three years to get made, because all the ‘geniuses’ had a million reasons why it would never work at the box office,” he says. “And when you listen to them state them, it made sense. It’s a sports movie, so there’s no international, that’s 60 percent of our profits so that makes no sense; it has Sandy Bullock in it, and while men like Sandy, they don’t go to her movies ...
“...And then it comes out and makes $300 million,” he adds.
Whether or not “Saving Mr. Banks” makes a similar haul, whether or not Hanks gets validation from what he calsl “the roller derby” of awards season for “Mr. Banks” or “Captain Phillips,” it doesn’t really matter. And while he hasn’t acted since “Lucky Guy” wrapped on Broadway in early July, Hanks can’t wait for his next proverbial tennis match.
“Oh man, you start all over again, man, it’s just like the newspaper business,” says Hanks, flipping the tables on his interviewer. “Hey you wrote a newspaper yesterday, why bother today?”
ON A MOBILE DEVICE? CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE VIDEO.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please leave a comment-- or suggestions, particularly of topics and places you'd like to see covered