Last week, I discussed some of the actors who have tried to portray Walt Disney on film and on stage over the decades. This week, the column concentrates solely on how Tom Hanks tried to become Uncle Walt in the acclaimed film Saving Mr. Banks (2014) using quotes from dozens of different interviews he gave during the initial release of the film.
Saving Mr. Banks (2013) was a theatrical film that focused on the story of the development of the classic Disney live-action feature film Mary Poppins (1964). It purported to tell the story of author P.L. Travers and her confrontations at the Disney Studios, including with Walt Disney himself, in transferring her beloved nanny to the silver screen.
Emma Thompson played Travers and Hanks was cast as Walt Disney. Hanks is a popular and award-winning actor who is ranked as the second-highest grossing box office star of all time. His starring role in the film Captain Phillips, also based on a real-life incident, was released the same year as Saving Mr. Banks.
Saving Mr. Banks was both critically and financially successful. It grossed more than $112 million at the worldwide box office against a $35 million budget, and received several prestigious award nominations from a variety of different organizations. In particular, the performance of Emma Thompson was repeatedly singled out.
The movie was initially developed as an independent film from Essential Media Entertainment and BBC Films scripted by Kelly Marcel and Sue Smith. In 2011, when producer Alison Owen approached the Disney Company for permission to use some copyrighted elements, the film was acquired by Disney which allowed a greater use of those elements when filming started in 2012.
Disney CEO Robert Iger himself called Hanks who was 57 years old (Walt was roughly five years older in the film) to urge him to play Walt and even toyed with having the actor impersonate the company's founder at a board meeting, though that stunt never came to pass.
As Hanks told the New York Times January 3, 2014:
“Iger said: 'Look, we have a bit of a circumstance here. We have to make this movie about Walt Disney. We didn't develop it. It came to us from somewhere else. It's a great script, and if we don't do it, that means somebody else might be able to do it, and we're going to look heartless. But if we quash it, we'll look like we're trying to hide something. So will you play Walt Disney?'
“I was immediately dry-mouthed by the prospect. It's just the hardest work that is to be done. There's a billion hours of video, of Walt performing as Walt Disney, being a great guy. But I found enough actual footage of him in interviews when he'd really like to be done with the subject.
“Like when he doesn't want to talk about Fantasia (1940) again, because what he's really here to do is show you the new Animatronic birds that are going to be going into the Enchanted Tiki Room. When I could find him showing any legitimate kind of consternation, that was worth its weight in gold for me to be able to use in his working with Travers.”
Disney CEO Bob Iger called Tom Hanks and urged him to play Walt Disney in “Saving Mr. Banks.”
Hanks in an interview with Moviefone December 12, 2013 said:
“I thought, 'Oh hell.' The burden, you know. Honestly, the responsibility. I heard about it first from Tony To, the head of physical production at Disney. He and I executive-produced From The Earth to the Moon, Band of Brothers, and The Pacific.
“He says, 'You've got to play Walt Disney in this movie.' And I said, 'Geez, who needs that pressure?' I know I've turned playing real people into a bit of a cottage industry but it's like, 'please, can I just play a fake guy one of these days'?
“And then reading the screenplay… you can tell if you want to do a movie 12 pages in just because the DNA of the whole story and the whole philosophy of the movie is all right there. And because it was about this odd creative process and Walt was at the top of his game—Walt was already the Disneyland guy and he was actually busy building Disney World at the same time—it was a different Walt Disney than I had ever seen.
“And it was really Emma's movie, so I just said, 'OK. All right.' They kept saying, 'We want somebody recognizable like you to play somebody recognizable like Walt Disney.'
“And I said, 'Is that a good thing? I'm not so sure that's a good thing.' And then when I heard that Paul Giamatti was in it, I thought, 'Paul should play Walt. He looks [more like him].' But once I got to page 12, I just said 'yes' and I didn't even have a conversation with [director] John Lee Hancock. I said, 'Come on over. We'll talk about how we're gonna do it.' So we just did.”
One of the challenges with portraying a real person is getting all of the details right, as Hanks shared in a variety of interviews, including ones with the Los Angeles Times, BBC, Hollywood Reporter, Chicago Tribune, USA Today, and many others when the film was released:
“The responsibility of trying to get it right is the main thing. But anytime you're playing anybody real there is as much authenticity as the piece allows. You can't just go in and make stuff up. It's like if they were saying, 'You know, I'd like to have Walt Disney smoke a big cigar all the time.' I'd have to say, 'He doesn't smoke a big cigar. He smoked three packs a day of cigarettes.' We had a hard enough time trying to have him smoke, you know.
“If you saw him actually smoking cigarettes in this movie, it would be rated R. That's just the way it works. So we had negotiations of, 'You cannot light a cigarette; you cannot inhale a cigarette,' so all I could do was put it down.
“Now I always had a pack of cigarettes and sometimes I was playing around with them and a cigarette lighter here and there. But the man smoked three packs a day. Walt Disney was no saint. He was bossy and moody. He smoked cigarettes, fought constantly with the unions and that's the way I approached playing him.
“Walt didn't want people to see him smoke. There are a lot of photographs of Walt showing people around the studio, Disneyland and job sites, and he's pointing with two fingers. He actually had a cigarette in between the two fingers, but if a picture was taken, the cigarette was removed from the print.”
Tom Hanks as Walt Disney takes Emma Thompson's P. L. Travers to Disneyland in “Saving Mr. Banks.”
As part of his research, Hanks made two trips to the Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco's Presidio:
“It's like a trip to Disneyland itself,” Hanks laughed. “It's the third happiest place on the planet, behind Disneyland and Disney World. I spent at least six hours there each day I was there. I looked at every piece of video and heard every piece of audio and looked at every piece of artifact that was there. I did hear a conversation where Walt says to his daughter, 'Hey, get me a can of beer.' It was on an audio tape he made with an author doing a book on him.”
Hanks spent time with Walt's oldest daughter Diane Disney Miller, who gave him unlimited access to all of the resources of the museum for him to get a better understanding of Walt, and that how he presented himself in real life was similar to the persona that people saw on television each week:
“A surprise for me came from Diane about how much of just a regular Dad this guy was. We think of him as this great entrepreneur and he was but he was also a family man. I mean, Disneyland itself came about because he used to spend every Saturday with his two daughters. And after a while, he ran out of places that he could take [them]. There were pony rides over where the Beverly Center is now, and there was the merry-go-round in Griffith Park, but that was it.
“And he was sitting eating peanuts on a park bench in Griffith Park and the girls were on the merry-go-round, and he thought 'there really should be place Dads can take their daughters on a Saturday in Los Angeles.' And from that, Disneyland was born. I think that says a great deal about him and I tried to get that into my interpretation.
“It was an odd challenge to be confined in one way, but at the same time free to be the first person who ever puts a stamp on it as an interpretation of who he was. So it was important to be honest to who he really was as well as the character who was in the story.
“Anytime you are playing someone real, you have to have a philosophy going for as much authenticity as you can. It is kind of like playing Teddy Roosevelt or playing Carl Sandberg. You are a mixture of myth and record. You don't want to screw that up. You try to live up to it.
“There were people, who knew Walt, and still had contact with the Studio. They searched us out. Richard Sherman was a never-ending, literally, never-ending, fountain of stories, of facts, of anecdotes, bits and pieces of everything that had happened.
“A lot of the little anecdotes that we found, specifically from the likes of Richard Sherman and [that] were already in the screenplay, like Walt's cough…just ends up being one of the delightful cards in the deck to help bring this iconic man to life.
“I came away with that true sense that he believed everything that he said about his projects. And he completely embraced the possibilities of wonder in the movies that he was going to make as well as the rides he was going to come up with, and the things that he was going to build. I had a great road map in order to search out my characterization.”
After immersing in all the Disney memorabilia he could absorb, Hanks said that his key to playing Walt was the fact that:
“There are a lot of places where he sort of is playing Walt Disney himself. He's charming everybody, performing the way people want him to be”:
“But there are more naked elements when he's talking about his past — there was true reflection there. I listened to some long interviews where he talks about his past, about growing up and the struggles of getting the studio started, and I think he might have paid more attention to the things that went wrong than the things that went right.
“The only handicap there was a lot of it is Walt Disney playing Walt Disney, but even in some of that and plenty of others, there's that sense of joy and of wonder about what he was doing.”
Hanks was chosen because he had the same type of charisma and star power as Walt himself.
British producer Alison Owen said: “To get somebody to play an American icon like Walt, we needed somebody who was pretty iconic themselves — and it's hard to think of anybody who is better at that than Tom Hanks.”
However, Hanks didn't physically look like Walt Disney.
“I don't have the same facial structure as Mr. Disney had, so the mustache had to have a particular angle to it. It couldn't be too wide, but it couldn't be too narrow. It had to have a certain amount of skin between the mustache and the bottom of my nose.
“The creative team had close up, blown up like spy photographs of Walt Disney's face with arrows and measurements and graphics. Like a scale of hair per centimeter kind of thing. It was a very important mustache. His facial hair very rarely changed. By this time of his life, it pretty much stayed the same.
“Well, we had the most discussed, photographed, analyzed, diagrammed, tested mustache on the planet. I think actually the documents went to the United States government to discuss the angle of the shave, how much mustache was going to be there. This was the most important mustache in the history of mankind!”
Hanks' wife, actress Rita Wilson, “put up with it” but did not care for the new addition to her husband's upper lip. Hanks explained:
“As soon as we got the report from the lab that the [film] negative didn't have any scratches on it and there were no need for any re-shoots, off it went!
“I don't look too much like him but there is a line, there is an angular figure you can get by the way the boxiness of the suits and the playing around with various pieces of hair in order to get there. I had a little bit of luck in that Walt Disney at this time in his life was very much already Walt Disney. There is a bit of a vocal cadence and a rhythm that Mr. Disney had that took a while to figure out.
“I think his attitude was, 'Look, despite all the hardships, isn't life wonderful?' And I think you could probably say that Pamela Travers's [attitude was], 'Isn't life hideous?' He wasn't a warty guy. And it's fascinating and I think it's accurate that Walt Disney kept recreating his world over and over and over again.
“I can't smile like he could. My smile looks kind of demonic. But his was kind of 'Isn't it wonderful to be alive?' And he'd done that everywhere—from the U.N. to every room he walked into.”
To master Disney's voice, Hanks said he worked with his longtime vocal coach, studying audio tracks of the famed studio head.
“I would just listen to it in the car absentmindedly, or sitting at home,” he said. “I started reading anything in his voice. I read the newspaper as Walt Disney would; I read books, just to try to get the cadence of [his voice].”
Production designer Michael Corenblith worked from more than 500 photos of Walt's office, as well as studying the display of his original formal office furniture displayed at a special exhibit D23 exhibition in 2012-2013 at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Library.
“Walt was such a smart marketer and such a media-savvy guy,” Corenblith said. “Next to the Oval Office, his office was the most iconic office in America thanks to the introductions Walt filmed for his various weekly TV series, beginning in 1954 on ABC.
“I was a bit afraid because we wanted to be honest about Walt. I imagined the moment when Disney would say, 'Sorry, we like him better as a god than a human,'” stated director John Lee Hancock, best known for previously directing The Blind Side (2009), “To their credit, they were smart enough and brave enough to realize that a human Walt was not only a better character, but was easier to love.”
“My kids have literally encountered people who didn't know that my father was a person,” said Diane Disney Miller, who with her husband, Ronald, had seven children, at the San Francisco Museum's 2009 opening.
There is a tribute to Diane, who died on November 19, before the film premiered, at the end of the film.
Obviously, there will be many other attempts to try to capture Walt Disney in future films but it is apparent that he was really a one-of-a-kind personality with so many different emotional aspects that it will continue to be a greater challenge that other well-known historical figures.
