The best scene in Captain Phillips wasn't even in the script
At a recent press conference, star Tom Hanks revealed that the film's immensely powerful final scene was unscripted and unplanned.
Captain Phillips is a strikingly powerful movie, with a commanding lead performance by Tom Hanks that's easily the best work he's done in a decade. But for all its strengths, the film's best scene (and the scene that might earn Hanks an Oscar) comes at the very end of the movie — and it wasn't even in the script.
(Spoilers for Captain Phillips to follow.)
Most directors would probably have ended the film with Phillips being escorted to safety on the USS Bainbridge — or flashed forward, to show Phillips' homecoming with his wife and children in the United States. Instead, the film follows Phillips as his rescuers lead him to the ship's infirmary. Phillips is covered in blood, disoriented, and near-delirious with shock, and a medical examiner gently attempts to calm him down as he asks about his family between sobs.
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The scene is extraordinarily raw — surprising, heartbreaking, and human in a way that few recent films have achieved. But how did it come about? In a press conference following a screening at the New York Film Festival, Hanks — who called the scene "a moment like I've never had making films" — revealed that the scene was entirely unscripted and unplanned. "It's not on the page at all," explained Hanks. "It was not meant to be the last scene in the film." Here is Hanks' full explanation of how it came about:
Paul Greengrass, however, refused to let Hanks be so modest:
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Scott Meslow is the entertainment editor for TheWeek.com. He has written about film and television at publications including The Atlantic, POLITICO Magazine, and Vulture.
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