The actor discussed his most memorable roles and the minefield that is the making of a feature film during a Q&A session with John Oliver

There’s a game you can play should you ever run across Tom Hanks in public. The two-time Academy Award winner doesn’t mind when people shout lines of his movies – so long as they’re a little deeper than “Wilson!” or “Houston, we have a problem”.

The actor joked that more than a few lines came from his older films, saying he “peaked in the 90s”.

“This guy looks at me and shouts: ‘Little boat!’” Hanks told interviewer John Oliver on Friday, at a high-energy chat during the Tribeca Film Festival in which the actor recalled a drive. “I pull away and I spend the entire drive with no clue what he’s saying. I’m to the other side of Los Angeles repeating ‘Little boat!’ I almost had to go to the IMDB!”

Finally it hit him – “Oh! Little boat!” - an obscure joke opposite a day player from the film Splash, in which Hanks and “Fat Jack” are in a tiny dinghy and the motor gives out. Jack swims away to fetch the “little boat” and, looking at the size of the vessel they are currently in, Hanks’ character shouts: “Little boat!”

Hanks chuckled and shrugged. “It made a connection.”

He and Oliver made a recurring theme of the uncertainty around how audiences will react to any given scene or film. Oliver, whom Hanks referred to as “the only voice left in the public forum telling us what we need to know”, asked about some of his more widely acclaimed films.

“Success is gossamer, it’s luck,” Hanks admitted. Thinking back on Forest Gump, which he said would probably be his most remembered role, he recalled a day agonizing with director Robert Zemeckis over long blocks of dialogue.

“Bob, is anyone gonna care about this guy?” Hanks sighed, to which Zemeckis cried out: “it’s a minefield, Tom, it’s a fuckin’ minefield!”

Hanks explained that when he looks at some of his films that weren’t as successful, he sees the spots where he felt, “Oops, we stepped on a mine here.” A bad haircut – “Oh, and another mine.”

He said he rarely watches his older movies, though he suggested that his directorial debut, That Thing You Do!, was one where everything came together. After warning the audience that he was about to drop a huge name, he shared that Bruce Springsteen told him the scene in which the Wonders, the band in the film, first hear their song on the radio perfectly captures that jubilant experience.

As Hanks told these stories, he was quick to go into impressions and accents – including a few English ones, which prompted Oliver to say that “every time someone utters the word ‘soccer’ an Englishman dies” – but he most charmed the audience with an impersonation of director Ron Howard on the set of Apollo 13.

Mimicking the director’s voice, Hanks explained that Howard’s style was to dictate each shot with logic. One time, he said, Howard was thinking aloud about the next camera setup, and co-star Kevin Bacon suggested that the scene called for a BFCUKB. When asked what that was, he explained that it was a “Big Fucking Close-Up of Kevin Bacon”.

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“Bill Paxton and I just loved that, and repeated that throughout the entire shoot,” Hanks laughed.

Hanks was at Tribeca ostensibly to promote his new film, A Hologram For A King, but neither he nor John Oliver mentioned it. During an audience question-and-answer session, he said that if he had the opportunity to have a drink with any of his characters it would be Charlie Wilson (of Charlie Wilson’s War), the Texas congressman who conceived of a major foreign policy initiative from a hot tub filled with strippers.

He also gave an encouraging, breathless monologue to a young, would-be actress looking for advice on perseverance. “Go and take that dinner theater job as one of the Pigeon Sisters in The Odd Couple, even if it means losing money to get out there, because someone is going to get dragged to it. And that person might work for Steven Spielberg, and they’ll come to the office and say, ‘I’ve found the person who is going to play Zorro’s mother!’”

It sounded a little far-fetched, but he sold it with exuberance and charm and had the whole crowd cheering, not unlike many a Hanks role from the 80s till now.