Yesterday we heard from Director Paul Greengrass on his epic movie Captain Phillips based on the real-life story of merchant mariner Captain Richard Phillips, who was taken hostage by Somali Pirates during the Maersk Alabama hijacking in 2009. The movie hits UK cinemas next Friday 18th October and earlier in the year we got to attend a press conference at the Summer of Sony with Director Paul Greengrass and star of the movie, Tom Hanks. If you missed our review of the movie, you can have a read it here. It’s fair to say it’s one of the best films of the year and each of 5 stars we gave it are much deserved.
Today we hear from the title character played by Tom Hanks who talks about taking up the challenge of recreating these re-life events, the first time he met the Somali ‘pirates’ and the difficulties filming at sea.
——————-
What was it about this story which compelled you to take the role?
Tom Hanks: Well, I’m fascinated constantly by what is sort of called nonfiction entertainment. I’m the type of guy that reads the newspaper, reads the magazines, and sees a story that really happened and says, well this is better than any movie could possibly be. It is in a lot of ways a story that is almost written in a screenplay form. The book that Captain Phillips wrote was a very straight forward delivery of what he went through. But on a larger scale, when you realize that you’ll be able to put this up on the big screen and it’s going to have an awful lot of elements that will go into, I guess, kind of like the roundhouse of commercial filmmaking, it’s got an incredible visual vista. It takes place in an oddly glamorous locale, believe it or not, even though it’s a container ship. You’ve got this motley crew, a ragtag group of protagonists. You have some very, very evocative antagonists. And it is also a territory that because it actually happened, I don’t think anybody dares make a movie like this anymore. We’ve seen quite a few fictionalized versions of what can happen when bad guys come on and try to take over a ship or a plane or the White House or wherever it is you’re going to be. But because this is a, this is ripped right out of today’s headlines, I view the challenges of filmmaker as being perhaps the biggest one you can face, which is what really happened and how do we make that so gripping that it warrants holding a place in what essentially is a commercial entertainment? I’ve done that over and over again, every chance I’ve had on movies like APOLLO 13, and you know, other things like SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, what have you, and I just find that that for me is the best way in order to spend the vast amount of time of solving the puzzles that goes into just trying to get people into the theater. I think it’s very, very compelling in the fact that it actually happened makes it even more so to me. And working with Paul Greengrass was no small effect. You know, Paul has done that on a number– The first film I saw of Paul’s was BLOODY SUNDAY, and I thought that that film alone because it was a period piece and it was dealing with a very, very dark day with real people and real events I thought, well, I remember a long time ago I flagged Paul Greengrass as someone I’d like to be able to work with. So this was a melding of an awful lot of really great opportunity.
You’ve previously played Jim Lovett in Apollo 13 which goes into a crisis of its own, does the story of Captain Phillips have any similarities? And how well do you handle yourself in a crisis?
TH: Well, you know, the great thing about doing this is a lot of these movies end up being sort of like crisis training. You know, if I can be going through something, say well, let’s say well, what would Jim Lovell have done? The thing about this is, you know, it’s a very particular skill set that Richard Phillips has. It’s a world that is unknown to all of us because we just assume that containers full of goods easily make it from one place to another and it’s a part of regular commerce. But the juggling act that a guy like Captain Phillips has to do in the course of getting from what is it, Abu Dhabi to Djibouti down to Mombasa, is actually a very impressive amount of work that he does with an amazing skill set that has to do with very technological stuff as well as a huge amount of people skills, ’cause he’s got to maintain a degree of discipline through a very complex crew situation. As a matter of fact, in talking with him I asked him what was the vast amount of work that he does when he’s at sea and it’s paperwork and dealing with the three different unions that govern how things run on board your average container ship. Now that being the given, you throw into the fact that they’re suddenly boarded by armed pirates, well you really come back to a number of very, very basic things. And number one is, how do we stay safe, and how do we get home? Both of the movies we’re talking about, they definitely had that. And it does require an ability to, you know, to wing it and have sort of this gestalt overview of all the possibilities and which ones are going to work and which ones are not. You know, talking to Jim Lovell on APOLLO 13, you know, he talked about the fact, the idea that you just were always trying to be proactive. It’s like a very advanced game of solitaire. You’re always trying to turn over another card, and sometimes it took a while for you to be able to determine what card that was. With Richard Phillips, he did this amazing thing which I guess it’s standard operating procedure, is that he became the sole guy that was working with the four pirates. And it was always, he says — you guys haven’t seen the movie, but when you see the movie, he says over and over again, I don’t know, I’m just here with you. I don’t know. I can’t answer that question because I’m here with you. And that’s actually a tool at his disposal which you can use in a crisis, where people can be asking outlandish questions about the how and the why, and you as the spokesman can always come back and say, I don’t know that because I’m just here with you. Let me find out, let me find out, give me time to find out. And I found that to be one of the many fascinating things that Richard Phillips did. And look, you can use that in your own quiver of dealing with a crisis. But I don’t think, you know, the crises I face don’t involve burning up in the atmosphere or being shot by a Somali with an AK-47. So I got it pretty easy.
What’s it like shooting at sea?
TH: Well you have to discover your sea legs right off the bat as soon as that ship leaves port. We shot this in Malta, and every day we went down to the port, got on the ship and the ship left, which is, you know, that’s a big ship leaving port and coming back every day. But that thing, that ship does roll, you know, you think it’s going to be steady but it’s not. But I didn’t have any real problems with sea sickness and I don’t think the crew did until we started working in the lifeboat situation. That was a very uncomfortable and unpleasant atmosphere to be in. We shot, of course, on a sound stage in London where it was on a gimbal that moved around, which is not the same as being at sea. This is interesting actually. On a gimbal it goes this way, and it goes this way, and it goes this way. And it goes a little bit like that. But when you’re at sea, that thing drops in a much more, and we were, we had a couple of shots in which sooner or later, everybody, what’s the word I want to say, upchuck, threw up? Um, restocked the snack shack, whatever you want to call it. And we were just trying to get the shot to get them out of the way at that point in order to do it. But, you know, part of it was, that this was the amazing thing I think about Paul Greengrass and Barry Ackroyd who was our cinematographer and the entire crew, no one was intimidated by the physical demands of shooting this movie, both on the ship and in Malta. And then we were dealing with the US navy when we were in Norfolk, Virginia. After a while, we made jokes about they’re going to ask us how we made this movie about, you know, a guy in a life boat in the middle of the ocean. And says, well, this is how we did it. We stuck a guy in a lifeboat in the middle of the ocean and then went out in the middle of the ocean and chased him with cameras. It was a pretty impressive array of run and gun film making that went back to the days I think when both Paul and Barry were shooting documentaries for the BBC. So, it all came in. And all the cast and the crew were up for the challenge. Because otherwise, you know, you’re shooting a movie in a sound stage somewhere in Culver City and the biggest adventure you have is choosing whether to get off at Overland or to go all the way down to Motor.
What do you think is a quality you have to have to be a great leader?
TH: Well, I think it’s confidence more than anything else. I think that you have to have the conviction of what your decisions are so that you don’t brook discussion. At some point, you know, you’re the guy who says, “Well this is the way it’s going to be.” And if you have been able to imbue I think the right amount of respect with your team, that they will understand that you’ve thought it through and they’ll be willing to follow. I think there’s not a lot of books that you can read about, you know, leadership traits and what have you, and I actually talked to Richard about this, Richard Phillips, you know, ’cause I said, what do you do if you got like a crew of twenty-six people and three of them are knot-heads? And, Paul, Richard said, I’d be overjoyed if only three of them were knot heads. Usually it’s a lot more. So you’re constantly dealing with a brand of people skills that requires, you know, you’ve got to give them the respect. But at the same time, you have to have the, I think, the conviction and the confidence in your own decision so that they will at some point put their cares away and follow them. I don’t think, I don’t have any, I’m not a leader, I just play one in the movies. So I’m always stealing from some of the parts I played in order to incorporate my fake life into my real life. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t
Can you talk a bit more about Richard Phillips and your relationship with him? Was he really involved? Did he feel okay with everything that you did?
TH: Well, it was interesting because he had already been through a big maw of this type of attention already. He went and met the President of the United States, and he was on TV all over the place and he really went through about a month in the barrel as being the guy that was rescued by the Navy Seals, having been kidnapped by Somali pirates. I went up to his house a couple of times and, you know, one of the first things I said to both he and his wife is, now you know, we’re going to do a fake version of what you went through. At some point, I’m going to say something you never said and I’m going to be somewhere you never were and I’m going to do something you never did. But when you take that into account, it’s still going to be on board a ship just like the Maersk Alabama and in a life boat just like the one that you were in, well after that, it’s all, you know, it’s a toss up. He understood very much. So I mean, it was interesting. He wrote a book about what he went through, and even just by doing that, there were people who were on board the ship and elsewhere that said that that’s not the way it happened, you know, so right there, you have a microcosm of all the different perspectives that could go into something like this. And we, of course, were going to be another translation of it. But I will say this about Richard, he’s a mariner. I mean, this is what he does as a living, it is not a, it’s not a hobby. You could ask him questions about well, do you ever like go out in the morning and stare off at the horizon and ponder, you know, your place in the universe? And I think he would say, I would love to be able to do that, but quite frankly I’ve got to do an inspection of D deck, and then I’ve got to meet with the chief in order to find out when we’re going to overhaul our, you know, scupper plates. I don’t even know what a scupper plate is, but that’s the kind of stuff that he has to do. So I found him to be an incredibly pragmatic guy who went through something quite extraordinary, you know, and barely survived. And you know what he’s doing right now? Well he still goes out to sea for, you know, six weeks at a time. So, he is an absolute true merchant mariner who has great pride in what he does and, you know, I think he would rather have not been kidnapped by Somali pirates. But it kind of worked out this way for him anyway.
Paul Greengrass mentioned that you you and the four pirates were apart until they actually burst through in that scene. What was it like reacting to these four guys suddenly appearing?
TH: Well it was extraordinary actually, because I was on the deck with also Michael Churniss and a couple of the actors who are in it, in the, in the film, and we literally went through as human beings what the characters went through. We heard them coming. Paul’s big thing was he was setting up this idea that they start off as these little, little figures in boats and then they look like spiders running around on board the ship. And you hear them getting closer and closer, their guns firing. And then when they finally came in and burst, I mean, literally burst onto the bridge, we see these living, breathing guys for the first time. They are incredibly skinny, that’s one thing about them, they are incredibly skinny, they’re the thinnest human beings you’ve ever seen, and they’re incredibly scary because their heads are huge, their teeth are really bad, and they were waving, you know, essentially automatic weapons and pistols at our faces and screaming at us. I can tell you, it raised the hair on the back of all of our necks. It was a very very, very emotional and visceral kind of moment. We were truly petrified. Now that being said, that happened for the first take. By the third take, you know, they’re saying, hey man, I just want to say, I can’t believe I’m working with a guy who played Forrest Gump, you know, that happens after a while, because you have to get down to the aspect of making the movie. But because that was the first time we had met, it actually was the top of the pyramid as far as the experience goes. And it did establish a type of, a union with them, because the entire day after that first scene was me trying to calm them down and not get anybody killed and keep everybody at peace and say what do you want to do, let’s take care of that, I don’t know, I’m just with you. So, a lot of times when you’re making films, the first time you meet really does sort of impregnate the relationship that you have with the rest of the movie. Well that was a very good way of getting pregnant, if that makes any sense whatsoever. It was a smart move on Paul’s part, because on that day, where we did an awful lot of work, I mean, we probably shot, you know, seven pages that day or something like that. Everybody was very much in tune with what the emotions were because we were feeling the emotions ourselves.
———————
Captain Phillips is released October 18th. See all our coverage of the movie here.
