Cinema: Saving Tom Hanks

The scrawny man on the tiny log raft, drenched with salt spray and flailing on the oars, is learning the meaning of the word breakers. Most weeks, the beefy, cream-capped, electric-blue waves cresting over the reef carry hard-core surfers from around the world. But this morning they have a different job: to kick Tom Hanks' bony, tan butt.

The crew of Cast Away is shooting "the moment." Hanks' emaciated, exposure-ravaged character, Chuck Noland, fleeing the island on which he's been marooned for four years after a plane crash, pounds through the surf and raises the sail: the wall of a portable toilet that washed ashore. (The sight, I am assured, is meant to be inspiring.) "There isn't much acting going on today," apologizes director Robert Zemeckis, who teamed with Hanks on 1994's Forrest Gump. It's more like boxing. Hanks clambers, panting, onto the command ship Aftershock, barking, "Big ones! Those were great!" Like a prizefighter, he's wrapped in a towel. He takes a few slugs of Diet Coke, has a mouthpiece popped in--actually a set of prosthetic rotten teeth--gets his scars and scabs touched up and then swings overboard again. Perhaps out of patriotism, I avert my eyes from his skimpy loincloth. I mean, that'd be like checking out Thomas Jefferson's package.

The physical demands, Hanks says, aren't a big deal. This from a man who's chomped raw fish for the camera, was laid low for three weeks during last year's sweltering shoot on nearby Monuriki by an infected blister and then, over the year's hiatus, had to drop 55 to 60 lbs. (and grow a ZZ Top beard) and return for this rough, wet work. "People pay to do this stuff on vacation," says Hanks, 43, who earned his sea legs as a surfer.

What is rough, Hanks says, is carrying a major chunk of the movie solo. (Co-star Helen Hunt, who plays his girlfriend, isn't around for the scenes in Fiji.) "It makes you crazy," he says. "You're not sharing the storytelling lifting with someone you can react off of. It's almost like making a silent movie; you have to tell every aspect of the story physically, being totally alone." Well, not totally alone. The castaway adopts a piece of flotsam--a volleyball he names Wilson, for its manufacturer--as his best friend and foil. (Strangely enough, Wilson has the surname of Hanks' wife Rita, although, barring major script revisions, they never get that close.) "I've worked with kids and dogs," says Hanks. "Now I can add volleyballs."

America's clean-cut screen idol, emaciated, covered with sores, talking to sporting equipment and riding a toilet to freedom: Is that box-office gold or what? "It definitely took someone of [Hanks' and Zemeckis'] level to get this movie made," says screenwriter William Broyles (Apollo 13). Hanks hooked up with him to develop a pet idea: a modern desert-island story--the stuff of sitcoms and New Yorker cartoons--told 100% realistically. No Man Friday. No "bamboo bicycle that powers a generator," as Hanks puts it. "The influence of Gilligan's Island on our national psyche has been extremely powerful." To prepare, Broyles spent a few days with experienced survivalists on a remote Mexican coast, carving spears to catch sting rays, which he ate raw because he couldn't build a fire.