Tom
Hanks and Robert Zemeckis
talk Holiday Magic
by Lynn B
 Actor
Tom Hanks has starred in some of our favorite films. He will forever be
loved as the voice of Woody in the Toy Story films. Director
Bob Zemeckis has directed a host of movies that are no doubt in our video
or DVD collections (the Back to the Future films, Castaway,
Forrest Gump, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Romancing
the Stone, etc.) When these two friends get together to film a holiday
classic, you know you are in for quality and something that will have
a good deal of heart. The Polar Express, adapted from the short
classic book of the same name, breaks digital ground and the actor and
filmmaker got together recently in New York to tell us about the challenges
and benefits of computer-generated motion capture acting and the processes
they faced to translate this loved book to film.
AGW: Tom,
this is your third animated movie (although this one is a different process).
How does this compare to say voicing Woody?
Tom: Looking
at myself in the Toy Story movies, it’s a little puppet.
He sort of looks like me, but his head was nine-feet-tall. The difference
between that and The Polar Express was extraordinary because
The Polar Express really is me as opposed to some rendering of
a character that supposed to be me.
AGW: What
drew you to this particular story?
Tom: The book,
the 29 pages of it, is a haunting, very effective story, and you really
can’t quite put your finger on it. I’ve been reading it to
my kids, I think, since it was published. And, as you get closer and closer
to Christmas, you read it more and more. There is something very stunning,
quite frankly, about (author) Chris Van Allsburg’s paintings. They’re
not drawings. They’re impressionistic versions of this child’s
house and what it was like to be on a train and all the aspects of the
adventure that they go on. It’s a very elegant, simple, but complicated,
sophisticated story about what Christmas means to each and every one of
us.
AGW: Bob,
is this a movie that could have been done live-action? Why the choice
to do it in CGI?
Bob: One of
the first things I said to Tom was ‘I don’t think this would
make a very good live-action movie.’ That was for a couple of reasons.
One, I thought it would be impossible. Or it would cost billions of dollars.
And two, you would be throwing away what I thought was the essence of
the book, which were those paintings. The paintings are where the emotion
comes from. And the third problem would be hanging a giant movie like
this on some kid actor, and you’d have to go around the world and
try to find him and hope that you get a great one. You’ve got to
hope you’ve got the next Haley Joel Osment because the whole movie
hangs on him.
AGW: So once
you decided on a new CG process, wasn’t the story the next hurdle?
Tom: Every
one of these (animated) movies is an incredible risk. At the end of the
day who is going to care? If they don’t care, we’re in big
trouble. Down through history people were saying ‘Let me get this
straight. You’re going to make a movie about a baby monkey and you’re
going to do it with a little clay figure and you’re going to do
it one little shot at a time. What a stupid thing. No one is going to
care about that.’ And the movie is King Kong. Or George
Lucas is making some rock-em, sock-em space thing with guns and robots.
Everybody says, ‘Nobody is going to care about that.’ And
it ends up being Star Wars. The only thing that is going to matter
is the story.
AGW: Tom,
are you worried that more CGI motion-capture acting is going to make live
actors obsolete?
Tom: Motion
capture is only going to work for certain films. It’s not going
to put any other type of movies out of business. In fact, motion capture
has been used for movies you yourself have said are great. There’s
been The Matrix. There’s been Titanic. What this
can do from an actor’s point of view is free us up to a huge degree.
Like if Meryl Streep can perform the greatest Genghis Khan in history,
then Meryl Streep can play Genghis Khan. It’s an extraordinary opportunity
for actors to no longer be limited by size, weight, color of hair, gender
or race. That’s actually really great news. Right now it’s
still pretty expensive but it is possible now to play any character in
any circumstance in a way that simply was not as feasible before.
AGW: So was
this kind of acting for computer easier in a way?
Tom: I found
that it was exactly like rehearsing a play in the round. You don’t
have to worry about lights, angles, rails, cameras or over the shoulder
coverage. We essentially did a great series of 10 or 15 minute plays in
which we did it all in real time, and when we were done Bob had everything
that he needed to. So, as far as being an actor goes, it was a blast.
 AGW:
How weird was it to be acting with a ton of sticky little “jewel”
things on your face for the computer to scan?
Tom: Every
time, before we’d roll, somebody would be responsible for coming
up to us and going like this (he pretends to press jewel after jewel on
someone’s face). They’d say things like ‘scanning complete’
or ‘Mo-cap ready’. Bob actually gave us a seminar on what
it was we were supposed to expect and we were still kind of confused.
Then we did it for the first time and we said, ‘Oh, OK. We just
do it and we play and then that’s it. Cool’.
AGW: Each
kid on the way to the North Pole has something punched on his ticket.
What would your tickets have said?
Bob: Well,
having written the screenplay, mine probably would have said, ‘I
Believe’.
Tom: Mine
would have said ‘Calm Down’.
AGW: Tom,
what special holiday memory can you share and favorite holiday movies?
Tom: I always
took the Greyhound bus from Oakland, CA to Red Bluff, CA, to go to my
mom’s house. The day we’d get out of school we’d go
down to the Greyhound bus station and get on the bus for three and a half
to five hours, depending if we were transferring through Sacramento or
not. And I’d have a little stack of comic books and look forward
to hopefully staying awake by the time we pulled into the frigid cold
of Red Bluff. And I’d hope we sat next to some nice old lady passing
out banana bread. Happened quite often. And my favorite traditional Christmas
movie that I like to watch is All Quiet on the Western Front.
It’s just not December without All Quiet on the Western Front
in my house.
AGW: How did
the writer/illustrator of “The Polar Express” feel about the
film adaptation?
Bob: Chris
(Van Allsburg) was really supportive on this. He was just great. We spent
a whole day where I acted the movie out for him and he was great. He just
listened and said, ‘Sounds great’. Chris never wanted this
to be an animated movie. You couldn’t make those paintings look
like that in a cartoon. So, what he wanted to make sure of is that the
style of the movie had the same resonance as his paintings did. And when
we showed him our conceptual art, he couldn’t be more thrilled.
The guys from Sony (computer effects) had him come down and actually do
some seminars with their artists and they could ask questions all day
long about how he painted, so they would get some insight into what it
was that he was doing as an artist.
AGW: Tom,
at what point did you decide to play 5 characters?
Tom: Well,
when Bob explained that the process would make it possible for grown-ups
to play the kids, that Nona [Gaye] could play the girl and I could play
the boy and Eddie Deezen and Peter Scolari could come along with it, then
I was okay. [The adults] are all the caregivers. They’re all the
authorities in this boy’s life and he imagines them as variations
on himself, his uncles and variations on his father. Santa Claus to this
boy was not this roly-poly accountant that came down the chimney every
day. He was this huge, muscular man that had to lift up this massive package,
this sack of presents. He had to be a big, strong guy. Bob said ‘you
could play every role in this movie’. I said ‘Wait a minute.
There are girls in this movie and I’m gonna play all the elves’?
AGW: But you
did manage five. How did you establish the differences between them?
Tom: Well,
they all were extremely different and a lot of it came from the specifics
of what costumes they were wearing. We did full-on wardrobe tests and
wardrobes were assembled for each one of these characters. We all went
through the standard process of costume fittings and choosing the props.
We can show you the photographs of Nona and myself and everybody in our
actual costumes. Then we were data scanned for a day and video referenced
for a day, and then we just sort of had to remember. I had to remember
that the conductor had a hat and had a vest with pockets. I would change
my shoes depending on which character I would play. The body language
all just kind of came about. There’s no trick to it because my job
is to make manifest these other people. You just imagine what they are
and you come up to a kind of physiological understanding and then you
stick to it.
AGW: What
do you tell your kids about Santa? How do you keep the belief alive?
Bob: In the
movie, Santa Claus says to the boy, ‘I am a symbol of the spirit
of the holiday’. That's the whole belief thing. When the symbols
of the spirit start to become confused with reality that's when you get
into problems. That's why I think the spirit of the holiday is what all
the trappings are ultimately all about.
Tom: My kids
would say ‘Is there a Santa Claus? Is he going to bring us stuff?’
I say ‘So let's get this straight: you go to bed on Christmas Eve.
Do you leave out the milk and cookies?’ ‘Yeah’. ‘Are
they gone in the morning?’ ‘Yeah’. ‘Are there
Christmas presents there that weren't there the night before?’ ‘Yeah’.
‘Well, then, what's your point? Do you believe or not? Santa doesn't
care if you believe in him or not. He just cares whether you go to bed
when I say so’. [laughter]
AGW: How do
you go about creating a balance to make a film for adults and kids?
Bob: I have
a very simple philosophy about movies and kids, and that is, when I was
a kid, I never wanted to see a movie that was made for kids. I only wanted
to see a movie that was made for adults. My approach was to make this
movie for adults because kids get everything. I think one of the things
that they resent is when they're being talked down to. I just made the
movie that I would enjoy and that other people would enjoy.
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