They’ve been called the Tracy and Hepburn of their time.
The cutest couple on the big screen today.
The most combustible combination of chemicals to hit Hollywood’s periodic table in decades.
Credit: EW
“They use this oil to lubricate the telescope?
But it turns out nobody’s making the oil anymore.
They haven’t made it in years.”
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“Uh-huh,” Ryan says.
“There’s only, like, 20 gallons of this telescope oil left.
So now they have to switch to ordinary motor oil.”
Everett Collection
“Uh-huh,” she says.
“It was a really interesting article.”
Fortunately for themand usthey’re much more fun to watch on film.
The answer, of course, was a resounding yesat least at the box office.
“No, it’s not a sequel,” Ephron insists.
“It asks a different question than Sleepless.
This time it’s more like, Can Mr. Wrong turn out to be Mr. That’s really what this is.”
Actually, that’s only half of what it is.
“But two people falling in loveespecially these two peoplehas international appeal.
If there is such a thing as a perfect couple, Tom and Meg are it.
They’re like Mr. and Mrs. “I am not interested in that at all,” Ryan says.
“I don’t want to talk to anybody I don’t know.”
Even Ephron tried a chat room once but found the experience depressing.
“The spelling was so horrendous,” she says, “I had to leave immediately.”
Next thing you know, Hanks and Ryan are discussing telescope lubrication on the Upper West Side.
Actually, it wasn’t quite that easy.
“But I decided to disregard that concern,” he says.
But Shop Around the Corner is very different.
This is a very young Jimmy Stewart.
This is Jimmy Stewart before Jimmy Stewart was Jimmy Stewart.”
Ryan, 37, had doubts tooalthough none of them had anything to do with Margaret Sullavan.
“I really loved the script and wanted to work with Tom and Nora again,” she says.
“But people were starting to get the idea that all I could do was romantic comedies.
I’ve done something like 30 movies and only seven have been romantic comedies.
But I was getting locked into that.
It was starting to get irritating.”
“It was a no-brainer,” he decided in the end.
Ephron felt the same way, buttypical New Yorkerwas having trouble fitting the film into her schedule.
“It was the one fight I had with Nora,” says Donner.
But she was like, ‘Wait in line.’
But then Ephron, 57, is still a relatively new director.
But Mail is only her fifth directorial effortand you might’t really count the first one.
It was so embarrassing.
They’re like jack-in-the-boxes in that movie."
The learning curve on Sleepless was slightly less steepalthough at times just as slippery.
Her relationship with Hanks had some rocky spots too.
“I gave her a bunch of grief,” he recalls.
“Mostly about my character’s relationship with his son.
She had written it more like a mother-son relationship.
It got pretty cantankerous.
But she listened.”
By all accounts, the making of Mail went more smoothly.
Working with her old Sleepless bedfellows helped as well.
“We speak in shorthand,” Ryan says.
She’s intensely articulate and can language anything."
We can all finish each other’s sentences.
We didn’t have to learn to trust each other."
Not that Mail was a totally painless endeavor.
According to Hanks, it sometimes made storming Normandy feel like a day at the beach.
“It’s movies like Mail that wear you down,” he says.
And having to be so aggressively fresh for every scene.
That’s when it almost feels like you’re working for the post office."
“You’re slave to the rhythm of the comedy.
You have to have this repartee.
you might’t take your moments.
Playing a really dramatic character is much easier.
I remember on Courage I would spend an entire week saying, like, five words.”
For Ephron, the hard partonce againwas in the cutting room.
The most delicate editing challenges, though, were the scenes of Hanks and Ryan tapping out their e-mails.
Sweet, but hardly the sort of gripping footage that burns up the screen.
“Those sections are very carefully short,” Ephron says.
“One thing we discovered is that each e-mail had a breaking point.
I mean, you’re able to practically see Tom’s brain cells working when he’s typing.
We never talk about the movie or the mechanics of the scene.
We just talk about goofy things we’ve read or seen somewhere.”
“Chemistry is a really weird thing,” Ryan says.
“Sometimes you feel like you don’t have it, but it ends up on the screen anyway.
Other times you feel a really strong connection, and it ends up looking flat and dead.
So the thing with TomI don’t think it behooves me to examine it too closely.
If I started trying to dissect it, it might go away.”
Ephron nods in agreement.
“In one of my movies there was this unbelievably charming scene,” she says.
But the truth is, off camera they weren’t speaking to each other at all."
That’s not a problem for Mr. and Mrs. World.
Ryan tells Hanks that she saw a really pretty bottle of iced tea at a deli the other day.
Hanks mentions a lovely bottle of mineral water.
But at least they’re talking.
