“I will get up and leave the room before that scene comes on.” Tom Hanks said that about Cast Away, the 2000 film that earned him an Oscar nomination for best actor.
He was a guest on The Rest Is Entertainment, answering a listener’s question about mistakes in his career. His answer was less about regret than about a habit. He rarely watches his films after the first time, he said, “’cause they never change.” Every one of them, good reviews or bad, is “such a profound experience of success and failure,” because of moments where he feels he missed.
“And sometimes these are the big moments,” Hanks said. “I simply did not get there. And I know it.”
The watch
The scene he named comes late in Cast Away. His character, Chuck Noland, has finally been rescued from the island and is back in the house of his former girlfriend, Kelly Frears, played by Helen Hunt. He hands her watch back to her.
“There’s a moment where I just think I’m not there,” Hanks said. “All it is is a turnaround on me.” The gesture he makes there strikes him as false. “It is me and is not Chuck.”
He did not catch it while filming. Hanks said he only saw the problem when he watched the finished movie for the first time, and that the crew had been moving on and he “wasn’t there.”
Spotting the good takes
Asked whether he ever gives himself credit when a scene works, Hanks was blunt. It only happens, he said, when he has no memory of shooting it at all. He does not sit through his films pointing at the good bits. What he notices is the weather and the wardrobe. “I was cold. Looks like I’m warm, I was really freezing that day,” he said. Or: “That beard was sticky.”
