Cool Captain Phillips performance could mean a third Oscar for Hanks

It took Tom Hanks three minutes to realise shooting Captain Phillips was going to be “hell on Earth”.

The film, which opened the London Film Festival on Wednesday, tells the true story of the 2009 hijacking of US container ship Maersk Alabama by a crew of Somali pirates.

After abandoning their take-over attempt, the pirates held its captain, Richard Phillips, hostage for five days as they made their way back to the East African coast on a lifeboat, pursued by the US Navy.

“In Malta, before we started shooting, I asked to go out in the lifeboat to see what it was like,” Tom recalled when I met him at the May Fair Hotel in London this week. “It’s a very slow vessel and it took about 40 minutes to get out beyond the breakwater into the open sea. I needed about three minutes in that open sea and said ‘OK, I’ve got it, turn this around now’. That’s all it took for me to know this was going to be a particularly authentic hell on Earth.”

Director Paul Greengrass, known for his gritty realism on films such United 93 and Bourne Ultimatum, was not afraid to film on the open water and even kept the cameras rolling after his focus puller and assistant director were sick over their llustrious lead actor.

Oddly enough, when Tom met the real Captain Phillips he told him it wasn’t always so bad. “He told me that during the five days they were in the lifeboat there were moments of great hilarity, they all laughed at some point,” said the 57-year-old.

“There was a lot of knot tying, they made Phillips demonstrate his knot tying expertise, but at the same time there was a steady erosion of the physical ability to keep going. He was worried about one big guy who was a loose cannon and felt he might shoot him in the head at any moment for very little reason. I spent five or six hours with him on two occasions and each time little details would come out, like how hot it was.

“It’s not the most realistic of moments to walk into somebody’s house and say ‘Yes, I’m that Forrest guy, that’s me, and I’m going to be playing you in a film whether you like it or not’. But Richard had been through quite a bit of celebrity exposure right after this happened, he’d spoken to the media a lot so he understood the oddity of it all and accepted it completely. He’s a very well adjusted, funny guy.”

Before his arrival in the UK, the two-time Oscar winner took to David Letterman’s Late Show to reveal he’d been diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes after battling high blood sugar for the past 20 years.

“It’s not Type 1, which is the really serious kind, and I know what to do, I have access to good doctors and I eat good food,” he expounded on his condition.

“The losing and gaining of so much weight during my career (Hanks shed three and a half stone for his role in Cast Away) may have had something to do with it because you eat so much bad food and don’t get any exercise. But I think I was genetically inclined to get it and it goes back to a lifestyle I’ve been leading since I was seven years old.

“Everybody’s going to have some degree of health problems as they get older. I think I’m pretty good on cholesterol, it just so happens my body type and my lifestyle leaves me susceptible to high blood sugar.”

With the actor being talked about in terms of a third Oscar for this latest role, career wise at least, life couldn’t be sweeter.