Word: newman
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...time is 1931. The story begins in a medium-size city near Chicago. There Michael Sullivan (Tom Hanks) works as a hit man for mob boss John Rooney (Paul Newman), who has raised him as his son--a man who bewilderingly, entrancingly combines Irish bonhomie with ruthless criminality...
...NEWMAN: I don't understand why competition has to exist between actors. Some guy starts with a marvelous character, and the script is all there. All he has to do is show up. Another guy digs it out by the goddamn roots with a terrible director and turns in this incredible performance. And someone says one is better than the other. That's what's nice about car racing. It's right to a thousandth of a second. Your bumper is here. That guy's bumper is there...
...NEWMAN: I never know what she puts in my food...
...given orders to the likes of Paul Newman and Tom Hanks, Sam Mendes hardly cuts an imposing figure. The soft-spoken, moon-faced Englishman who directed Road to Perdition and American Beauty, which won Best Director and Best Picture Oscars, is more Cambridge humanities lecturer than drill sergeant: he pays attention to his actors' needs. "Tom is freer in front of the camera, wants to improvise more," Mendes explains. "Paul needs to be more precise, to know exactly what you want." Neither man seems a natural choice for the hard-boiled '30s gangsters they play in Perdition, but Mendes relished...
...since taken easily to movies. "The joy for a director of theater going into film," he says, "is you only have to achieve something once." He still directs plays back home, but he's become a convert to film, enchanted with the ability of movie vets like Hanks and Newman to stay in character through rain, sleet or snow: "It could be 5 a.m., pissing down rain and minus 30 degrees--they've still got their fingers on the triggers. They are able to fire whenever required...