Tom Hanks admits he's never seen the original Ealing version of The Ladykillers and says he'd probably never have taken on the role if he had. Steve Pratt reports.

IF you're going to remake one of the best-loved Ealing comedies, The Ladykillers, perhaps it's best to have an actor like Tom Hanks in the lead. He's just the type of high profile actor needed to head off criticism of daring to tinker with a classic.

He's an actor with a golden touch when it comes to picking movies. As well as two Oscar-winning roles - as an Aids-stricken lawyer in Philadelphia and the lovable chump Forrest Gump - he has a CV packed full of hit films, including Sleepless In Seattle, Saving Private Ryan, Apollo 13, Castaway, The Road To Perdition and Catch Me If You Can.

It's a great record and, throughout it all, Hanks has remained a nice guy. No reports of tantrums or temper on the set, just an actor willing to try out different things and usually succeeding. For his part, Hanks was keen to work with the Coen Brothers, whose brand of intelligent indie fare has made them favourites on the art house circuit.

Their last film, Intolerable Cruelty, was a mainstream comedy, and so is The Ladykillers, about a bunch of crooks who use the home of an elderly woman as the base for tunnelling into bank vaults.

Hanks hasn't seen the original 1955 film starring Alec Guinness. Out of all the Ealing comedies, he's only seen Kind Hearts And Coronets. "If someone had come and said, 'Would you like to do an updated version of that, I wouldn't have done it. What am I going to do, do it exactly the same? Make some obtuse changes?

"Being oblivious to the original made it possible for me to see it as simply a Coen Brothers movie. I knew the original existed, of course, but kind of like the way that you know that certain Charlie Chaplin films existed. I don't know the particulars of it. I've seen a couple of stills and that's it.

"Like for example if the brothers came and said, 'What would you think about having some teeth?', if I'd seen the original I would have said, 'No, you can't because Alec Guinness did teeth'. But I had no concept of teeth or no teeth."

He had a year in which to let his character, Goldthwait Higginson Door, "simmer in the pot". He enjoyed the character building, both physically and emotionally. "It was fun because we had a lot of time," explains Hanks.

"If I'd read it and three weeks later we were shooting, it would have been a disaster. But they were busy doing Intolerable Cruelty at the time. So I sat there and simmered in the pot. But yeah, that's the reason I'm an actor. This is the great fun of doing this and that in particular."

He still hasn't watched Guinness's performance in the original. "I'll get around to it one of these days," he says. All the same he knows that comparisons will be made.

"I think it's fair in the same way every season somebody does a Hamlet and it's compared to the Hamlet of the last season. Sometimes it's better and sometimes it's just different. And you can't deny that it's based on an original and a lot of movies are like that."

The difference is that the film is made by the Coens, whose credits include Blood Simple, Fargo, Barton Fink, The Big Lebowski and O Brother Where Art Thou?.

Hanks, 47, approaches most roles in the same way and he doesn't say yes to something unless he has an instinctive knowledge of what he's going to have to do to get there.

"Nice guys? Bad guys? I just try to play somebody who believes in what they are saying more than anything else. I play people with confidence, whether they are trying to kill an old lady or not, they are still convinced they're doing the right thing and this is the only way to get things done."

He doesn't understand how an actor can sit at home thinking that next time he has to do something different. Trying to steer your career in that way would "probably make for a crappy movie", he says.

"Even with The Road To Perdition or something like that, it can't be 'Hey, it's time to go off and completely change the image'. If you try to do that you could do anything - play a woman, play Superman, do stuff like that. There's just nothing to be had from it."

The Ladykillers did offer him a first, the chance to go to the Cannes Film Festival where the film was featured in competition. He found the event was everything it's supposed to do - ridiculous glamorous and sunny.

"If there is a quintessential film festival, this is it," he says. "I wish I could go see movies. I wish I didn't have to sit around and talk about my own. I wish I could go out there, have a coffee on the beach, and get in and see three movies a day. That would be a blast.

"Unfortunately, I only get to see one - and I've already seen that. Not a surprise to be had in it, except how they translate some of the words."

* The Ladykillers (15) opens in cinemas tomorrow.

Published: 24/06//2004