Not every film he did was great, Tom Hanks admits.
In an interview published with The New Yorker on Sunday, Hanks said, “Let’s admit this: We all have seen movies that we hate. I have been in some movies that I hate. You have seen some of my movies and you hate them.”
Hanks was speaking on how a film should be judged. Instant reactions are common, he noted.
“Someone is going to say, ‘I hated it.’ Other people can say, ‘I think it’s brilliant.’ Somewhere in between the two is what the movie actually is,” he said, referring to it as “Rubicon No. 3.”
“The first Rubicon you cross is saying yes to the film. … You are going to be in that movie,” Hanks said. “The second Rubicon is when you actually see the movie that you made. It either works and is the movie you wanted to make, or it does not work and it’s not the movie you wanted to make.”
“The commercial performance of the film,” Hanks said, is the fourth Rubicon, “because, if it does not make money, your career will be toast sooner than you want it to be. That’s just the fact.”
And the fifth and final Rubicon is time. Hanks said a great example of that is holiday classic It’s a Wonderful Life, which grew in popularity after its 1946 release only after frequent television airings. Another example of that is his own 1996 film, That Thing You Do!, which he wrote, directed, and starred in.
“I loved making that movie,” Hanks said. “I loved writing it, I loved being with it. I love all the people in it. When it came out, it was completely dismissed by the first wave of vox populi. It didn’t do great business. It hung around for a while, was viewed as being some sort of odd, kinda quasi-ripoff of nine other different movies and a nice little stroll down memory lane.”
“Now the same exact publications that dismissed it in their initial review called it ‘Tom Hanks’ cult classic, That Thing You Do!’ So now it’s a cult classic,” he added. “What was the difference between those two things? The answer is time.”