Tom Hanks ranked his favorite experiences on movie sets during an interview on “The Bill Simmons Podcast,” and the top three titles included “Cast Away.”
Host Bill Simmons asked Hanks to rank the top three movies he’s worked on? Hanks, tweaked the question by saying “Forrest Gump” was off the table.
“What are your three? You have to pick three,” Simmons said.
“I would not do it according to the way the movies came out,” Hanks said. “I would do it by way of the personal experience that I had when I was doing them, which is very different.”
Hanks started with number one, “A League of Their Own.”
“All I did all summer was play baseball,” he began. “I shagged flies. I ate turkey dogs. I took infield with Robin Knight and a ton of other people. I played baseball all summer long in Evansville, Indiana, and in Wrigley Field.”
“I had all my kids with me, I had all my family with me,” Hanks continued. “We lived in a house in the middle of cornfields… It was a great summer, and my entire family still speaks about it.”
“Cast Away,” which earned Wilson the volleyball a page in popular culture history, came in at number two.
“We had just bold adventures when we were making that movie,” Hanks explained. “I mean we were out in the middle of the ocean just — you know — trying to grab shots. We were off in Fiji on two different occasions… There was nothing but adventures every single day, every single night.”
Hanks then shared a funny story about how he started his days while working on the film.
“The sun was not yet up in the East, and I would get up wearing nothing but a Speedo and a T-shirt. I would make myself a cup of coffee. The house would be quiet — everybody would be in bed. Stars were out. Moon was out. The sky wasn’t even yet to turn blue, in the East, and I would make a cup of coffee then I would stroll down the gravel road to where the pier was. And then I would swim out to the special fishing boat … get on with the pilot and the mate and one of the guys from the crew. And we would head out, and for 50 minutes the sun would be rising behind us on the open sea, and we would be heading towards the island of Monuriki, which is where we shot.”
There was no power on the island, so Hanks said they stopped filming before it got dark, and he recalled the sun setting behind him “pondering all that we had shot.”
The third and final film was shot in Europe.
“The last film I would say was magical for me was a movie called ‘Cloud Atlas,’” he said. “We shot it on a hope and a dream and nothing but a circle of love in Berlin, Mallorca and Dresden.”
Hanks noted he enjoyed being surrounded by history.
“But the work itself was, we were part of this big, massive ensemble of fantastic people who were just trying to do the hardest, best work on this deep throw,” he explained.
You can watch more of Tom Hanks’ interview with Simmons here.