Last February, as he resumed shooting Cast Away after a hiatus when he grew his hair and beard long and lost 55 pounds' weight, Tom Hanks wrote the foreword for Astride the Moon, the autobiography of the Irish actor, director and former Abbey Theatre artistic director Vincent Dowling, which has been published by Wolfhound Press.
On Tuesday afternoon in London, during his international promotional tour for Cast Away, the mention of the Dowling book brings a sparkle to Hanks's eyes, and not just because it gives him a short respite from talking and talking about his latest hit movie which may well win him his third Oscar at the end of March. Sitting in a suite at the Dorchester hotel, and looking fit and trim, Hanks clearly hasn't gained any of the weight he laboriously lost for his new movie.
"Vincent's the reason I'm an actor, man," he declares. "He gave me my first union job at the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival in Ohio. That foreword is the truest words I've ever put down on paper. He's a charming guy, and unfortunately, I haven't seen him nearly as much as I would have liked over the past 20 years, although we have exchanged notes along the way. "I first met Vincent when I was 20 years old, and that was 24 years ago, and I probably have more vivid memories of the three years I spent at his theatre than I have of the last three movies I've made. That's just the nature of the way it is.
"Vincent told me two great things that I quote all the time. One is, to work in the theatre is more fun than fun. He said that on the very first meeting I had with him in Sacramento. And he also said all the great stories were about loneliness. The more I worked as an actor, the more I realised that those statements were absolute truisms. I can't wait to read that book - and what it says about me."
Cast Away is one of cinema's most extreme depictions of loneliness. Hanks plays a FedEx systems engineer, Chuck Noland, a hyperactive workaholic who lives by the clock - until a cargo plane journey ends in one of the most terrifying air crashes ever depicted in a movie, all the more unsettling for being shot from the cockpit's point of view. Chuck is the only survivor, waking to find himself all alone on a remote, uninhabited island where his precisely ordered existence is turned upside down. The man who was so dedicated to his job of connecting people suddenly finds himself disconnected from the rest of the world.
Proudly described as "rule-busting" by its director, Robert Zemeckis (who also directed Hanks in Forrest Gump), Cast Away takes its most daring gamble in its 80-minute central section, which in its entirety features just one actor on screen - Tom Hanks - and with no music and just the sounds of nature on the soundtrack. It's a tribute to the compelling screen presence of Hanks, the imaginative screenplay by William Broyles Jr and the perfectly measured direction by Zemeckis that this extended sequence remains so absorbing.
In some ways it was quite exhausting to be alone for all those scenes," Hanks says, "because what's missing is any kind of stimulus from any other place, so you have to make it up yourself. Being an actor requires so much imagination as it is. I won't deny, though, that there's something attractive about being the only actor up there. That's one of the great things about being a stand-up comedian, for example, in that it's only you up there and you get to hold the dictatorial sway over everything that goes on. The other side of that is that it's usually your own words and your own creation. As an actor you actually have to make manifest something else, something you yourself didn't write. You're only interpreting."
Hanks says that it became "mindnumbing after a while" to have so many scenes in which his only companion is a volleyball washed ashore from the plane's debris. He names the ball Wilson after its manufacturer, and he tries to keep a grasp on his sanity by addressing his thoughts to it, like a child with an imaginary friend. It is a complete coincidence, Hanks says, that the ball shares its name with Rita Wilson, the actress to whom he has been married for the past 12 years. "That was purely propitious screenwriting on the part of Bill Broyles. When I read it I said, `That's great, don't change a thing'. And it's much better than giving the ball a name like Adidas."
He says that there came a point in shooting the latter half of the film where he lost all sense of when the camera was rolling or switched off. "And when I had conversations with Wilson, the volleyball, I heard every word he said - and nobody else heard a thing! I think the process wore me down after a while and I kinda went nuts! "It was improvisation to a degree, but it had to happen in a severely real physical world, and a philosophical world. Bob [Zemeckis] and I went over and over why scenes were set where they were. The number one rule of survival is, get out of the sun. So there were scenes which could have happened outside because they would have looked more picturesque or whatever, but the fact of the matter was that they would not have happened that way.
Chuck would have not been out in the sun. He would have stayed in the cave all day long if he could. Once we all began to adhere to the reality of that physical law, it ended up affecting everything we could do in the course of each scene. The cave was the one place Chuck could relax on this island because it was cool, out of that godforsaken wind and sun, and there's colours dancing on the wall, giving him his theatre, his opera, his cinema, his television all rolled into one."
Tom Hanks himself came up with the original idea for Cast Away six years ago when he happened to see Louis L'Amour, the prolific author of western novels, on a TV chat show: "He was pushing some book and he was taking about being shot down in a plane during World War II. He had to live on this rock outcropping an atoll for some time until he was rescued, and he almost died. That was as much as he wanted to say about it.
"The chat show hostess thought this was just about the neatest thing in the world and she was going on about how unique it all was. And she asked him what he learned about himself during the experience. He said he learned he didn't want to die, that he wanted a ship to come and save him. And then she asked him if he ever wanted to go back and revisit that island.
"She could not get out of her head the romantic notion of being shipwrecked. As if it had been enjoyable for him climbing trees, eating coconuts, making a hut out of bamboo and learning how to make a hammock out of a rope-vine! Louis L'Amour was having none of this, and yet this woman did not get it. I thought that was an amazing dynamic, that what is assumed to be an idyllic experience is actually hell on earth."
Hanks proposed the idea to Broyles Jr, the screenwriter of Apollo 13 (in which Hanks played astronaut Jim Lovell) and Tim Burton's imminent re-invention of Planet of the Apes. "It was hard to persuade people at first that we weren't going to have any of the usual cliches of the shipwreck movie, like the playful chimpanzee or the kooky pelican, or pirates on the rampage, or supermodels who just happen to arrive for a photo-shoot on the same island. Could we keep all that stuff out and still hang a narrative on the story? That was the challenge."
Of necessity, Zemeckis shot the movie almost entirely in sequence, taking a break for a full year while he directed What Lies Beneath, his hit Hitchcockian thriller staring Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer, and during which time the initially paunchy Hanks lost over four stone for the later sections of the film. "There was stunned silence from the two studios financing the film, 20th Century Fox and DreamWorks, when I told them of our plan," Zemeckis says in a separate interview.