“The message from Michael the father to Michael the son is that you get to choose the road you’re on in this life, but don’t choose what I have chosen - the road I’ve been on all my life,” says Hanks. “Somewhere in my past, I made the choice to go in a certain direction, and it leads right to perdition.
“While I was reading the script, I actually thought of the verse from the Bible that says, ‘He who sows the wind shall reap the whirlwind’. That’s what happens to Sullivan: he’s married, the father of two, and has one of the bigger houses in town… and it’s been paid for with fear, intimidation, violence and blood. Now he’s in the midst of something he should have known was coming.
“Somehow, he is able to block out the reality of his world and believe it will have no consequences,” adds Hanks. “But, of course, it finally does. At the moment we’re dropped into the story, it is literally the last day of that false perspective.”
Dean Zanuck, son of veteran producer Richard D, received the original graphic novel as part of a pitch. Intending to do no more than glance through it, he found himself hooked, so he sent it off to his father who was in Morocco shooting Rules of Engagement. The elder Zanuck was as enthusiastic as his son.
“I read it and was instantly attracted to it,” he recalls. “It had wonderful action and colourful characters, and just had all the elements of being a very entertaining, provocative picture.
“But it was the relationship between the father and son that develops through the course of the story that really got me. I called Dean and asked him to send a copy over to Steven Spielberg at DreamWorks. To my amazement, two days later the phone rang in my humble little room in Morocco and it was Steven. He said, ‘I love this. Let’s do it’. And that’s how it happened.”
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“It is a serious gangster movie set in what was the last mythic American landscape - the thirties, the Depression era,
when there was still space to lose yourself in the vastness of America”
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In the end, Dream-Works teamed up with Fox to make the film. Spielberg, meanwhile, also sent the project out to Hanks, who expressed interest just on the basis of the original graphic novel. The Zanucks began to cast around for a director, and among those they talked to was Mendes. The young Englishman’s enthusiasm immediately won them over. “The way he spoke about the story and his plans for the film, we felt the movie elevating before our very eyes,” says Dean Zanuck. “He had an extraordinary grasp of the material.”
Mendes reunited with veteran cinematographer Conrad Hall, who also won an Oscar for American Beauty (his second, after the one he received for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid - which, of course, starred Road to Perdition’s Paul Newman when he was Hanks’ age).
