The Tom Hanks movie Steven Spielberg calls a “groundbreaking achievement”
Pretty much every director has their favourite actor that they love to cast the most. For Jean-Pierre Melville, it’s Alain Delon; for Martin Scorsese, it’s Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio; and when it comes to the legendary Steven Spielberg, there are few actors who are as closely associated with the filmmaker’s work as Tom Hanks.
Hanks has worked with Spielberg on five brilliant movie occasions. He played the lead role in 1998’s World War II classic Saving Private Ryan, an FBI agent in Catch Me If You Can, a stranded Eastern European in The Terminal, plus gave further efforts in Bridge of Spies and The Post.
However, even despite the close collaboration between Hanks and Spielberg, the fact remains that the two Hollywood icons have not always been able to work together as often as they might have liked. In fact, Spielberg once named the Tom Hanks film he would have loved to direct but could not.
In an interview with Time magazine, Spielberg explained that he would have loved to handle the 1993 legal drama Philadelphia, which ended up being directed by Jonathan Demme. Hanks starred as an attorney who hires another lawyer, played by Denzel Washington, to help him sue his former employer, who sacked him after finding out that he is gay and has AIDS.
Spielberg admitted that he knew Hanks “really well” at the time he was making Philadelphia while the director himself was setting about for the production of Schindler’s List. The director knew the story of Philadelphia but hadn’t read the script written by Ron Nyswaner. Still, he “knew what audiences were about to see”.
When Spielberg went to see the film when it came out, he was blown away by Hanks’ effort, which saw the actor win the Academy Award for ‘Best Actor’. “For me, the proof in knowing someone very very well, and not knowing someone at all but knowing his character very well, is when I went to see Philadelphia and forgot that I even knew this man,” the director pointed out.
What was even more impressive for Spielberg, though, was the way that Philadelphia managed to discuss sensitive socio-political issues and open up audiences to new ways of thinking. The AIDS epidemic was a serious matter in the 1980s and early 1990s, and Spielberg called Demme’s treatment of the issues “one of the most noble statements I had seen in film”.
“It was a ground-breaking achievement in the social context and the context of tolerance,” he added. In fact, Spielberg proceeded to say that watching Philadelphia ended up being “one of the most shattering experiences I’ve had seeing a movie,” not only because of Hanks’ performance but because of its overall brilliance.
Demme’s film was one of the first to openly address the AIDS epidemic and its homophobic consequences, leading to a ‘Best Original Screenplay’ nomination for Nyswaner, although he lost out to Jane Campion, who had blown audiences away that year with The Piano.
While Spielberg would have indeed liked to work with Hanks of Philadelphia, his own film at the time, Schindler’s List, also made a big impression, winning seven Academy Awards from 12 nominations. Still, Spielberg has always had a penchant for telling the most important stories, and while he also earned acclaim in 1993, he would always have wished that he might have been able to take on Philadelphia.