Tom Hanks

I don't think you can set out to do that. I don't think that's something you can say, our movie is going to change anybody's mind. That doesn't work. Any time you try to do that, people hate your movie and they don't even bother going because they know how they feel about something. I think that "Philadelphia" is a movie that tries to accurately capture the spirit, the social climate that we're living in in 1993 and 1994 in America. I think that's what it's trying to do. I think movies can do that.

I think that they can approach the story and capture it on film somehow so that years from now we can look back on the movie and say, "See, that's what was going on back then, that's the objects that they were wrestling with." Sometimes movies can do that to great fashion and forever be wonderful, forever be great movies, like "The Best Years of Our Lives"or"On the Waterfront"or"A Hard Day's Night". And other times they can't. Sometimes they end up being kind of, you look at a movie like "Gentleman's Agreement" from 1950, wherever it is, and it's like, what was such the big—why was there a big deal about that?

I think that's what Jonathan, as sort of the anthropological filmmaker, tries to do, but, or maybe not, but that's the reason that I was attracted to this as much as I was, because here was a chance to try to film a story that was going to encircle all of the tragedy and volatility and humanity of what we're going on now with the idea of homosexuality and with AIDS.

What do you think why the society is so anxious and so hateful against the sick of AIDS?

Well, I think that we have of late fostered this kind of political climate of great polarization. I think there are a number of issues that are very divisive. And that there are any number of, I think that people are celebrating that divisiveness. I think it's viewed as sort of politically powerful. I think that there are issues like guns and abortion and homosexuality and religion and prayer in schools that bind together people so that they can point fingers at everybody else, saying, "We're right and they're wrong."

I think it's a very easy thing to do, and I think that that's what's going on. And I think that when you come down to the idea of AIDS, which is so much a matter of life and death for so many people, that it can just be turned into that abstraction in the back of everybody's heads as being just another one of those very volatile issues that decides which side of the political spectrum that you land on. The humanity of all of those issues is lost because it just becomes a big headline, a big title, a big subgroup in order to hang all of these rules for whether or not you agree with somebody.

For a long time, Hollywood didn't produce films about this subject. Is now beginning a new liberal period?

I don't think any liberal period is being ushered in in any way, shape or form. I think that you're dealing with money, and money is usually very conservative, and the making of money is usually very conservative. I think what you're seeing perhaps out of Hollywood as a business is the need in order to tell different stories in new ways. I think that the audience has become weary of seeing the same exact formulaic expression of movies, stories that are supposed to be entertaining.

I think that it's right now, certainly over the course of the last few years, the kind of movies that we're seeing, like "Philadelphia"and like"Fearless" and like "Fried Green Tomatoes"and"The Remains of the Day", and all the films of people like Merchant Ivory. I think that you're seeing a great more kind of eclectic kind of storytelling that is not just plugging in yet another formula that is guaranteed to make money, because even those formulaic movies that are guaranteed to make money don't make as much money anymore. So I think the audience is getting hip, and they want to see something brand new. I don't think politics has anything to do with it.

When they asked you to play the part of Andrew Beckett, what did you think? Did you decide immediately?

I decided immediately upon reading the script. I thought it was a very timely tale to tell. I thought that I was the perfect actor to play Andrew. I thought that no one else could do it better than me. I understood why they were coming at me with the option to play the role. And I thought that the chance in order to be in one of these kind of photo records of how we lived was very important, that myself as an actor, that's the kind of stuff that I'm sort of rooting out anyway, that I'm trying to find in the first place, I think any actor would. And to be able to land on as fully rounded a human being as Andrew Beckett, that was just my good fortune.

How did you prepare your work? How did you study the situation of the sick of AIDS?

Well, I spoke to a doctor. I spoke to a number of doctors, but one in particular who walked me through the virus and how the body does battle with it over the course of time. That was a great education at a time when I actually thought that I had already known this kind of stuff. But I also talked to gay men who have AIDS who you wouldn't be able to tell that they were gay. There was nothing about them that said that they were gay. And asked them about their lives and where they have been and what they've done and how they ended up being where they are now.

And I learned in a very naive kind of way just how much I had in common with these men as opposed to how different I was from them. But that's all part of a much, those are the specifics of what happens in the preparation for a thing, but it ends up being the small human connections that you make with the director and other cast members and that end up making the performance come out on the set in front of the camera.

Yes, what kind of experience was it, living with AIDS at the film?

Well, it's a curious blend of being very technical, you know, because you have to make the movie over the course of those four months, and that required an awful lot of concentration and wherewithal and discipline. But you couldn't, I couldn't, you know, the issues that we were wrestling with on the set and in the movie end up being manifest all the time. I mean, I have a little boy, he was three, at the time he was two and a half years old. I could be making this, I would come home and he'd be running around the hotel with his little cowboy hat on playing his games and I couldn't help but think about him growing up and him growing up in this world and what would happen.

When do we start judging these little creatures? When can they start doing something so wrong that we no longer have any compassion for them? When does that happen? I couldn't help but think something like that. I couldn't help but step out of the shower and I had lost so much weight that my ribs are showing and my pelvic bones are sticking out and I'm working very hard in order to make that happen and here I know people who are working in the movie with me that day can't help that from happening no matter what they do, can't help but have that stuff affect you.

Did you learn something making this film?

Well, I don't think I went through any big sort of cathartic moment where the clouds parted and I saw things in a whole brand new way, but I still, I will say that the degree to which I felt I had the ability to do something about my world has shifted from this. That the concept of tolerance is certainly more magnified in my own image. How I think of my neighbors is a little bit different now than it was before. How I think about my friends who are gay, who are dying of AIDS is very different than it was before, how I think about what I need to do and what we all need to do in order to help a virus, to have a vaccine to be developed, to help the people who are suffering from AIDS right now, to help them live longer, that's very different from what it had been before the movie.

Part of my sense of social responsibility is greater because of the emotional investment that I had in the movie and in Andy Beckett.

What did the sick of AIDS say about this film?

Well, in the United States we've had a reaction that's been across the board. Some people thought we were just fabulous. Other people thought that we should have done better. Other people hate the movie and loathe what we've done with it because it's not political enough or because it's not angry enough. I have met people with AIDS who have just utterly responded to the fact that the human story that they're going through is up on the screen, and that means more to them than anything else. I've met people who have AIDS, who have lost people with AIDS, who think that it's a very nice effort, thank you very much, but it didn't go far enough. And I've met people who have lost family members to AIDS that are just completely touched that what they have gone through as human beings is up on screen without the politics attached to it, and they like that, they see human beings up there dealing with this, because that's really what it comes down to.

Everything else is blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, unless you've sat next to someone over the course of years who has died of AIDS, and that's pretty powerful stuff.

Okay. Thank you.

Thank you very much.