After his stint in space as an astronaut in Apollo 13, Tom Hanks will be seen fighting Somali pirates in Captain Phillips. The actor shares his fascination with real life stories
Two-time Oscar-winner Tom Hanks is no stranger to playing captains in distress. The 57-year-old actor famously starred as Commander Jim lovell in the true-life drama Apollo 13 and now, he is exploring another imperilled leader in Sony Pictures’ Captain Phillips, directed by Paul Greengrass. But while Apollo 13’s Jim lovell was lost in space, Captain Phillips’ hero is all at sea.
Hanks takes the title role in the film, which recounts the true-life tale of the storming by four Somali pirates of the US-flagged MV Maersk Alabama — a cargo ship sailing with a 20-man crew and 17,000 metric tons of cargo that was bound for Kenya — in April 2009. Captain Richard Phillips was at the helm of the ship and was taken hostage by the pirates who fled the Maersk aboard one of the ship’s lifeboats.
“I’m fascinated constantly by non-fiction entertainment,” Hanks says. “I’m the type of guy who reads the newspaper and sees a story that really happened and says, ‘Well, this is better than most movies.’”
“We’ve seen quite a few fictionalised versions of what can happen when bad guys try to take over a ship or a plane,” he continues, “but because this is a real event, it presents one of the biggest challenges a filmmaker can face, which is: what really happened and how do we make that so gripping that it warrants holding a place in commercial entertainmentIJ”
The answer is found in the narrative of the real-life event itself and the remarkable courage that Captain Phillips displayed during his ordeal, despite a lack of experience in dealing with such testing encounters. The captain recorded the events of the hijacking and his kidnapping in his memoir A Captain’s Duty: Somali Pirates, Navy Seals, and Dangerous Days at Sea, which provided the bedrock for the film’s script written by Billy Ray.
“It is in a lot of ways a story that is almost written in screenplay form,” continues Hanks. “The book that Captain Phillips wrote was a straightforward delivery of what he went through and 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, and you have some evocative antagonists.”
In a bid to further boost the truthfulness of his film, Greengrass also kept the Somalis separated from the rest of the cast, so that when they met for the first time the chaos of the situation would play with vigour and genuine emotion.
They finally met in an explosive scene where the pirates burst into the bridge and confront the captain with their firearms. “We heard them coming,” Hanks recalls of that moment. “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 saw these living, breathing guys for the first time. They are incredibly skinny. They’re the thinnest human beings you’ve ever seen and they’re incredibly scary because they were waving automatic weapons and pistols at our faces and screaming at us.”
Next up Hanks will play Walt Disney in the biopic Saving Mr Banks. Starring as Captain Phillips, however, was a unique experience, says Hanks. “It is 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 Abu Dhabi to Djibouti down to Mombasa is very impressive. Now, that being given, you throw in the fact that armed pirates suddenly board them, well, then you really come back to a number of very basic things. And number one is: how do we stay safe, and how do we get homeIJ” he says.
A similar, daunting task faced Jim lovell on the failed, moon-bound expedition aboard Apollo 13. Hanks spent time with lovell, just as he did with Phillips, “and Jim lovell said that you were always trying to be proactive,” he notes of his meetings with the astronaut. “It’s like an advanced game of solitaire. You’re always trying to turn over another card, and sometimes it took a while to be able to determine what card that was. With Richard, he became the only guy working with the four pirates,” he says.
When the pirates fled the Maersk aboard one of the ship’s lifeboats they took Phillips with them as a hostage and the US Navy dispatched the warships Bainbridge and Halyburton to enact a rescue. A tense, waterborne standoff then ensued. “You have to discover your sea legs right off the bat,” Hanks says of his experiences shooting at sea.
The actor also says that he found the real captain a very inspiring man, “an incredibly pragmatic guy”, who went through something quite extraordinary and barely survived.
“And you know what he’s doing right nowIJ” asks Hanks. “Well, he still goes out to sea for six weeks at a time. He is an absolute true merchant mariner who has great pride in what he does. I find that impressive,” he concludes.
Captain Phillips releases on October 18.