Tom Hanks On 'You've Got Mail'

Two-time Oscar winner Tom Hanks once again is getting together with Meg Ryan in a movie directed by Nora Ephron. The team's first hit was Sleepless in Seattle. Now, they're in You've Got Mail, in which an online romance is threatened by real life.

Hanks had never gone online until online veteran Nora Ephron goaded him into it while they were working on You've Got Mail, he tells CBS This Morning Co-Anchor Mark McEwen. Hanks went to a chatroom dedicated to 2001: A Space Odyssey, and found that he was the only one in the room. He can't even remember the online nickname he used.

But once he got his first email, Hanks says, he began to understand the joys of online communication. "It's immediate, but you get to compose your thoughts," he says. "You get to space it out and do things with dashes and quotation marks and italics. I can see why there would be some people who would be so inclined, could really wax eloquent any time."

He compares the whole experience of making You've Got Mail to "getting together with old friends." There was no need to establish trust among the major players and the director.

"Making a movie," Hanks explains, "is like the first day in a new school. Do you like them? And do they like you?" The set of You've Got Mail, he says, "was a very, very comfortable place to be. Rehearsals were not like working at all. It was like laughing through a long lunch."

'You've Got Mail' (WARNER BROS)

Shooting on Manhattan's Upper West Side, he says, "was like shooting in a small town where everybody knew each other."

Although Hanks is regarded as a movie "natural," he tells McEwen that when he acts for the camera, it requires a lot of concentration. Humphrey Bogart, he says, once said that the most important aspect of screen acting is to concentrate.

Among his own big-screen favorites are Robert Duvall, for the body of his work; Gregory Peck in To Kill A Mockingbird, and Gary Cooper in High Noon. Says Hanks, "There are those performances where you are looking at really the guys who invented being screen icons. And they are mesmerizing."

Hanks himself made a huge impression with his first big starring role in Splash (1983), directed by Ron Howard.

"I didn't know anything," Hanks recalls. "I was operating purely on instinct, and God bless Ronnie Howard. He did take me aside in the course of maing the movie and he said, 'Listen, you're doing this wrong'."

Hanks explains that he had been starring in a TV sitcom (Bosom Buddies) for two years, and so tried to act for the movies in the same way he did for television, where "you had to score about every third lineÂ…a completely different sort of discipline."

He remembers that Howard told him: "Look, your job is not to pay off. Your job here is to love that girl. So find some other way of doing that."

He also has not forgotten, Hanks says, the day that Howard told him that he was not adequately prepared for the day's work. "When you're making your first movie, you only have to hear that one time," he says.

What did Hanks do? "I apologized," he says simply. "I hadn't read the call sheet correctly. I didn't realize I was shooting a scene where I had a full page of dialogue, and it took me a while to get it.

"I learned how to read a call sheet."

Hanks says a turning point in his career came when he made the movie Punchline (1988). For the first time in his career, he found himself looking for more than the fun of making movies, which, he says, was like going to a circus.

'A League of Their Own' (COLUMBIA PICTURES)

"I was 36, 37," he recalls. "This was originally a role written for a 52-year-old guyÂ…That was the first time I felt as though I was playing a full-grown man who had experienced bitter compromise in his life and now finds himself in the third or fourth phase of a 10-phase lifetime."

After that, Hanks says, he told his management team that he no longer wanted to play roles like the "young guy who can't fall in love no matter how hard he tries."

As a consequence, Hanks found that he had fewer roles from which to choose. "But what was left," he says, "was choice stuff."

Generally speaking, Hanks avoids action-adventure movies because "it's not interesting enough for meÂ…to give up the time of making the movie, then going out and talking about the movie." And, in any case, he points out, "There are a lot of those kind of movies out there. They don't need me in them."

However, there is some element of the action hero in the part he is playing in The Green Mile, the screen adaptation of the Stephen King novel which is now under production. Hanks calls it "an almost-perfect screenplay."

Hanks is a well-known supporter of President Clinton. He has stayeat the White House as a guest three times in the last five years. But don't expect the actor to run for public office anytime soon.

"Oh, Lord! It is almost sad that any ink is being given over to this concept whatsoever," he says. "I'm an actor in the moviesÂ… [When the media] ask me the question, I respond to them, 'Are you nuts?'"

What makes Hanks most proud?

"I have a nice family," he says. "It's loaded with funny, well-adjusted people."

He and his wife, actress Rita Wilson, live in Los Angeles with their two sons, ages 8 and 2, and Hanks' 16-year-old daughter from a previous marriage. He also has a 20-year-old son.

"I think that I live a responsible lifeÂ… I have a professional mode that is genuine - and I have a personal mode that is even more genuine."

Time magazine has named him one of the great things about 1998, and he already is a favorite to garner an Oscar nomination for his performance in Saving Private Ryan.

And, if You've Got Mail does well at the box office, it will be Hanks' eighth hit in a row, unprecedented in Hollywood history.