Tom Hanks stars in A Hologram for the King

Tom Hanks can certainly talk the talk. He could, as the saying goes, sell coal to Newcastle. Or ice to the Eskimos. Or sand to the Arabs, come to that.

In promoting the quirky – nay, eccentric – A Hologram for the King the 59-year-old two-time Oscar winner has slipped back into the Everyman mode thatinformed his performances in movies like Cast Away.

But this latest, based on the novel by Dave Eggers, needs a little bit more of a push than normal…

“Alan Clay is that American for whom life has been turned upside down,” says Hanks, introducing his character. “He used to make the greatest bicycles in the world. He ran the company that made all the mistakes that seem to have been made in the last 30 years: they stopped making them in Chicago, started making them cheaper and cheaper, went overseas, they went to China and now it’s nothing more than a nameplate that’s put on. Then he gets this job: he’s got to go to Saudi Arabia to try and sell a three-dimensional holographic Facetime business conference to the king.”

It sounds… odd. Barely the sort of material that sets the box office alight. But then Hanks can afford to veer off into uncharted territory.

What’s more with Tom Tykwer at the helm – the two previously collaborated on Cloud Atlas – Hanks felt the project had a chance to find its way, and its audience.

If he was a pal of the director, Hanks was a fan of author Dave Eggers. As well as making A Hologram for the King Hanks will be seen in The Circle, from Eggers’ 2013 novel, which also stars Emma Watson, Karen Gillen and John Boyega. Clearly he’s a devotee.

“Dave Eggers writes these movies that are almost surreal and also most subversive because they’re about people in circumstances [into] which logic takes them but you can’t predict what’s happening,” observes Hanks. “And Dave does not need movies to be made out of his books. He had the most fabulous memoir on planet earth, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and I know screenwriters personally who say, ‘I’ve got a take for that! I know how to make that into a movie’.

“I told every one of ’em, ‘That book should never be turned into a movie. It would lose all of the voice of Dave’. So when I met Dave I said, ‘You’re too smart to ever just sell your books to movie studios… but this one’ll really work great!’”

The uniqueness of Eggers’ voice is what attracted Hanks. And it is Hanks’s appeal as an American Everyman that gives it an added cachet. But what is it? There’s an element of romance, a chunk of travel, a sense of personal change and moving on, the notion of experiencing something outside the norm of one’s existence.

“From a business perspective the movie has to be one thing, and one thing only: a romance, an adventure, a comedy. It seems that the marketing people can only really sell those types of films.

“What is it? I think it’s true, authentic. It’s an honest look at the voyage that this particular guy is on, which is fraught with desperation and frustration to get to some other place. I think anybody – but particularly Americans – who look at it will think, ‘I’d probably feel that way if I was in a place like Saudi Arabia.’”

He adds: “Real life is not meant to be fascinating and when a movie is made about any subject it automatically has a glamour attached to it because it’s bigger than life and there it is up on the screen. When I read it I was rather astounded by what he went through. It was crazy. In that case we’re making a movie about almost a fantastic life experience.”

The building blocks of the book didn’t necessarily translate to Tykwer’s movie, which though set in Saudi Arabia couldn’t actually be filmed there. Cultural and political sensitivities prevented it. But perhaps to the average audience one stretch of desert is very much like another…

“Saudi Arabia… it’s equal to trying to make a movie about Antarctica. It’s hard to get the stuff down there and it’s hard to survive,” observes Hanks.

“The reality is that Saudi Arabia is a very complicated place and the rules are almost incomprehensible to us. If they just say ‘no’ then you don’t get to shoot there. The things that happen in a place like Saudi Arabia have to be approved by the Ministry of So-and- So, and they did not approve. They didn’t approve of Dave’s book, probably, or the script that we wrote. It could be for any reason. So we couldn’t make the movie in Saudi Arabia. We could make the movie, just not in Saudi Arabia.”

Hanks enjoys being a movie star. He takes it seriously. But he knows he’s reached a point where he can segue into unusual material and survive the journey with his box office allure intact. Part of the draw was his friend Tykwer, the one-time indie darling whose limited and eclectic output includes Run Lola Run.

Hanks is ebullient when detailing their friendship and collaborative zeal.

“I love the guy. If I could go back in time and change my career I’d want to do what he did. He was a young guy in Berlin and he was a projectionist in a movie theatre and then he became the manager of it. He programmed all the selections and [would] have all of his friends come down at three o’clock in the morning to watch these art films on their own huge screen. And from that he became the director that he is. I think we were actually twin brothers at some point that slept across the floor from each other in beds and talked about movies all day long.”

A Hologram for the King (12A) is on nationwide release.