Tom Hanks: Hollywood often not ‘best venue’ to tell ‘true’ Iraq, Afghanistan war stories

Actor Tom Hanks says Hollywood is often not the place to go for producers who want to tell “true” war stories about Iraq and Afghanistan.

The star of  Steven Spielberg’s classic World War II film “Saving Private Ryan” recently attended an event at the Elizabeth Dole Foundation, where he addressed the difficulties of presenting the genre to a wide audience.

“I don’t know that Hollywood could create as authentic a story about Iraq or Afghanistan or people on their fourth, fifth, sixth tours of duty that couldn’t be told much, much better by a documentary or caring news media,” Mr. Hanks said during the Nov. 29 event, Stars and Stripes reported Monday. “It’s a tough thing. We argue about this all the time, ’What is going to be the best venue for the story?’ And many, many times, it is not a Hollywood movie. It’s something else. The trick there is, how do you get eyeballs on it?”

The actor stressed that creative teams should aim to be as objective as possible when making war movies.

“I think in Hollywood, the best thing anyone can do is to tell the true story, to be authentic about it and not mythologize — make it easier than it really is or make it worse than it really is,” he added.

Mr. Hanks is currently slated to star in “Greyhound” in 2019, an adaptation of the 1955 novel “The Good Shepherd,” by C.S. Forester. The Naval thriller will tell the tale of a commander attempting to protect a convoy of merchant ships on their way across the North Atlantic from America to England.