Tom Hanks: Tom's crash landing

Tom Hanks used to be box-office gold. Not any more. He tells Leslie Felperin why his recent movies haven't really taken off

It is perfectly possible to admire the screen work of Tom Hanks, to enjoy most of his movies, and even to meet him, as I did last week, and think he's a pretty nice guy, and still feel entirely baffled as to why he's one of the biggest box-office stars of all time.

He once remarked that, "I don't threaten any man's sense of virility, or any woman's sense of security or decorum", although that sentence could constitute a mild threat to clear English. But that doesn't really explain how a talented, photogenic but not terribly good-looking actor turned into a one-man cash machine.

The facts, however, are irrefutable. Since 1992, the worldwide grosses for his films total something in the region of $4.4 billion, give or take a few million. What's really interesting is that it's not just a matter of Hanks having been in a few huge-earning blockbusters. His biggest hit remains Forrest Gump ($329,694,499, according to Variety, making it the 13th most successful movie ever) followed much further down the list by Toy Story 2 ($245,852,179 box-office total, number 33 on the list). The x-factor is the consistency of his appeal, the way nearly all of his films make a lot of money - from his breakthrough hit Big (1988), where he played a 12-year-old bewitched into a man's body, to Cast Away, in which his shipwrecked survivor doesn't even speak for an hour. There have been flops (The Bonfire of the Vanities) but all but two of his films have grossed $100m in the last decade.

However, just recently, observers have started to wonder if the famous Hanks fairy-dust is finally starting to lose a little sparkle. Even though Road to Perdition, in which he was cast against type as a cruel hitman, made upwards of $160m, it was seen as a critical disappointment. The Ladykillers, in which he gives a deliciously ripe performance for the Coen Brothers in the directing chair, only just made its money back with a take of $60m.

And then there's The Terminal. You would think it would have been a surefire hit given that not only does it star Hanks but was directed by Steven Spielberg, with whom Hanks has worked twice before to great financial and critical acclaim, on Saving Private Ryan and Catch Me If You Can. But the film, in which Hanks plays an immigrant from a made-up Eastern European country who gets stranded in JFK airport when a coup back home invalidates his passport, performed relatively poorly when it came out in the US in June.

It opened the Venice Film Festival last week, and the very fact that Hanks was available for print interviews, as opposed to just TV sound-bite duty, is an indication that they're trying to give the movie an extra push for its European release. Hanks will undoubtedly get a cut of the box-office too, so it's in his own interest to up the publicity on the movie.

Not that we're complaining. He's Mr Nice Guy after all. It comes up quickly that the movie has, ahem, underperformed, and Hanks has the answer ready. "Well, audiences' reaction is a very fickle thing," he says with just the tiniest touch of exasperation, launching into the subject at such length that we suspect he may have talked about this quite a lot already. "An awful lot of it is timing, to some degree. I mean, I would love to blame the marketing department, but you can't blame the marketing department for everything. 'My car didn't start, I blame the marketing department!' or 'I was late today and it's the marketing department's fault.' It either lands in the consciousness of the people for that exact time or it doesn't. Now, with The Terminal - it could very well be that we just landed in the wrong time. We're making this movie about a post-9/11 world and it's about an airport and there are all these things that can just not hit the American consciousness the right way."

Hanks is keen to stress that it's not just about the money. "If you start trying to second-guess the box-office performance of your choices, then I'd be here promoting Forrest Gump 4 instead," he says. "The thing is, it's boring, for one thing. [I think he means second-guessing, not promoting.] And you would take away all of your truly creative urges. I mean Steven [Spielberg] has made a number of movies which you could call poor, under-performers at the box-office, but does that mean he shouldn't make a Minority Report or an Amistad? Or I'm not going to make The Ladykillers with the Coen brothers? I would hate to work in an atmosphere where there is a logic that says I don't get to make a movie with the Coen brothers, or I don't work for the third time with Steven Spielberg or Meg Ryan."

For all it's problems (too long, too sugary sweet), The Terminal does rest on a compelling conceit about the weirdness of airports, the peculiar atmosphere of these non-places where people wait or rush but never live. When was the last time Hanks had to wait in an airport? "Well, quite frankly, I fly in private planes," he admits, somehow managing not to sound impossibly smug about it. "I don't want to burst your bubble, but I don't want to lie either. But I do remember in Chicago once I was on the ground for like four hours and there were fist fights back in coach, you know? All the liquor was gone, the businessmen were drunk and the stewardesses were locking themselves in a cockpit so they wouldn't have to deal with us any more. I finished my book. What do you do when you're on a plane so long you get to finish your book?"

Things are considerably more comfortable for Hanks now. "We were going home last night from the festival opening, Steven and I, and so we were still in our sweat-soaked tuxedos from the big thing. There was a moon and we're in this boat going back to Venice and we both looked at each other and said, 'How did this happen? How did we end up being here?' We never ever stop thinking that, but there are some days where, look, it's just work and you're on your ninth city and they don't like your film and you wonder why you're knocking yourself out. I'm 48 years old. I've been doing it for a long time. It started off as this huge adventure. It became this hideous job for a while, but that stuff is all gone now. I can't believe I'm still being invited to things like this."

Then, as if to proffer an illustration of just how jammy this "huge adventure" can get, Denzel Washington saunters over from where he's been doing press interviews for Man on Fire to say hello to his co-star in Philadelphia. After a bit of backslapping, they start pretending to interview each other.

"What attracted you to Man on Fire?" Hanks asks.

"Well, shall I tell you first about the story, or about the character?" asks Washington.

"Oh yeah, tell me about the character! How did you come up with the idea? How did you make yourself into a monster like that?" he jokes.

They compare shirts (both are wearing flattering vertical stripes, a little more needed in the slightly pudgier Hanks case) and discuss Washington's boxing training and Hanks' lack of it.

After Washington has strolled off, and we settle back down to business, I ask Hanks if he would ever consider doing a low-budget movie. "Oh yeah," he says nonchalantly. "There are a lot of things coming up that will be 'quote-unquote' low-budget films."

He doesn't go into specifics but is soon off at a tangent, rambling a little. "I am not interested in these iconographic movies. I'm not interested in these kind of dimensional characters in which a bad guy is very specifically a bad guy and a good guy is very specifically a good guy. I mean, even the most popular movies of the year, I go see them and they're frigging boring to me because a bad guy is a bad guy and the good guy is a good guy and the good guy almost loses but he still wins...

"The vast majority of movies that come out right now are aggressive, angry and dark and cynical. There are times when I really want to see a movie that is honestly cynical and honestly angry, but the vast majority are not honestly angry and not honestly cynical, they just kind of have this attitude that bores me as a cinema-goer and certainly bores me as an actor."

Funny he should mentioned being bored. What did he mean a few minutes ago, before Denzel arrived, about the times when his job was hideous? "Well, it seemed like there was a period of time, quite frankly, where it seemed like all I did was work and then talk about myself and talk about the movies we had made," he explains.

"And I couldn't get past the fact that my kids were growing up without me. I got to a point of thinking how much self-analysis can I go through, going out and promoting these movies? But I think there was a period of time when I worked too much. I made too many films. And I worked too much because I thought they would never ask me to make any more movies so every one that comes along I've got to say yes to, so it gets to be like 'what movie am I promoting today? I can't remember!'"

There's a mischievous twinkle in his eye now. "Now I'm much more selective and much more specific and I have countless conversations with, for example, my crack team of showbusiness representatives, and they say 'so what did you think of it?', and I say at the end of day, I cannot dedicate a year of my life making a movie and then going off and selling it and talking about this big fat piece of shit. I can't do it. Forgive me. And that becomes very important to me, so I can't take a job unless I know I'm going to be able to come out and be honest with you guys and so, you know, there you have it."

Hanks is either sincere or truly a great actor, because I actually believe he means that.

'The Terminal' is on general release