Saving Santa from the f-word

Tom Hanks has a favour to ask as he gets up to leave the room. "Please censor my language," he says. The Oscar-winning actor points over to the woman who's been sitting quietly in the corner throughout the interview. "Look at my American publicist over there. She's thinking, 'Oh Tom, oh Tom'," he says, assuming a high-pitched female voice.

The publicist who arrived to bring the session to a close looked equally surprised as she opened the door to hear Hanks utter the f-word very loudly. He was giving his reaction to some US TV stations refusing to show Steven Spielberg's war film Saving Private Ryan recently for fear the bad language would see them sued by the upset viewers.

Hanks, who stars in the award-winning D-Day movie, went into four-letter mode to point out that the network that banned Private Ryan is the same one that shows a reality dating show called The Bachelor in which, he explains, "a guy essentially gets to f*** any girl he wants to until he decides which one to pick. They don't actually use the word but communicate without question that's what this guy gets to do."

Instantly, he apologises for his language. He's merely making a point and, as one of Hollywood's top movie stars he's certainly entitled to his opinion. "I was out of the country when that happened," he says. "I thought, 'Have we become a nation of pussies' - and by that I mean chicken, fraidy cat - 'worried about legislating morality when the on-off button is all you need'?"

Any alarm felt by his publicist was no doubt prompted by the fact that Hanks was here for the premiere of a U-certificate Christmas movie, The Polar Express, in which an eight-year-old boy boards a train for a trip to see Santa Claus at the North Pole.

Chris Van Allsburg's book is one that Hanks read many times to his children. He bought the rights and took the project to director Robert Zemeckis, with whom he worked on Forrest Gump and Castaway. They decided to use a new computer animation technique to turn the story into a movie, making it the first feature film to be shot entirely in performance capture technology.

The actors, wearing special suits and covered in hundreds of sensors, performed their scenes without sets and props. Their performances were then transferred into the digitally-made film. The result looks like animation but the movements and emotions are based in reality.

This enabled Hanks to play no less than five roles, including the young hero, the conductor and Santa Claus. Originally, when they'd been considering a traditional live action film, he'd only seen himself as the conductor. With performance capture technique he could play any role he wanted - or even every role if he desired.

'Bob said, 'You can play the kid' and that was really a light bulb going on. As soon as you're free from having kids in the movie, who essentially you have to trick to perform, it really became quite freeing. Because the book and the story of the movie is told in the first person by the boy, all the recollections come from his own brain and all the adults resemble his father. I believed those were the roles the boy created in his own head and, therefore, I could have a take on all those."

Five roles didn't mean he pocketed five pay cheques. "I just took my $300 a week and made it work somehow," he jokes. "We shot the whole thing in 35 days. It's not something I'm anxious to do again, not at that pace. As soon as you could imagine what you wanted to do, you could do it. You didn't wait for lighting or props or costumes to be adjusted.

"The only thing that took up time was if one of those special sensors that cost about three bucks a piece fell off our face. They had to find it and replace it or the computer was going to read your ear or your cheekbone down on the floor."

The process was different to voicing cowboy Woody in the Toy Story computer-animated movies. "There, you go on a sound stage and read the lines in 17 different ways. They take the one they want and edit it all together. That's interesting to a degree, an art form and discipline in itself," he says.

"With The Polar Express we got to be actors. We didn't have costumes or props but the human interaction was as real as we could make it. We were pouring our guts out dressed as idiots, but we all felt like actors rather than recording artists."

Unlike the hero, Hanks, at that young age, wouldn't have hesitated in jumping aboard the train. "In fact, I'd have been waiting for the train," he adds, saying he was fearless as a youngster. "I moved around a lot as a kid and had no trepidation of being in a new place. I kind of enjoyed it. My house was a pretty entertaining place as it was. We didn't have any real rules that we had to adhere to. I was used to pretty much calling my own shots."

His parents divorced when he was five, and afterwards he travelled around California with his father. He once described his upbringing as "three moms, five schools and ten homes". Having to constantly settle into new surroundings with new people was good preparation for acting. "A lot of being an actor is having no self-consciousness in order to do something very artificial - to get out on stage and pretend to be somebody else," he says. "I wanted to be the guy who told the stories and moving around shook out any self-consciousness I would have had."

He's now one of the world's best-liked, most successful movie stars, as well as the first in 50 years to win back-to-back Oscars for Philadelphia and Forrest Gump. He doesn't possess obvious leading man looks but has proved equally adept at comedy and drama in pictures like Sleepless in Seattle, Saving Private Ryan, Apollo 13, A League of Their Own, The Green Mile, Castaway and The Road to Perdition.

From a less-than-auspicious big screen debut in slasher movie, He Knows You're Alone, he's gone on to notch up seven $100m plus movies at the US box office. Money alone doesn't motivate him, although he has said that "if you have to have a job in the world, a high-price movie star is a pretty damned good gig".

His run of blockbusters was halted by this summer's release of the Coen brothers' remake of The Ladykillers, with Hanks taking the Alec Guinness role, and Steven Speilberg's The Terminal. If he's worried people will start claiming he's lost his appeal, he doesn't show it.

He has no interest in adhering to a rationale that keeps him from working with the people he wants to work with because the financial results might not be so great. "You can't be a slave to the concept of box office. If I was I'd be doing Forrest Gump 5. I would be the richest, fattest, most bored actor on the planet Earth," he says.

The choices he makes are for himself, while conceding that all those high-grossing films "make us look like diabolical geniuses".

"It's like Forrest Gump, we thought maybe people might be interested. If it only made $80m, it would have been, 'Hey, you guys made a great subversive movie'. But because it made a gillion dollars worldwide, it was 'What was your plan, who were you taking on?'," he explains.

* The Polar Express (U) previews in cinemas this weekend and opens nationwide Friday.

Published: 04/12/2004