At the recent press conferemce in L.A., we had the good fortune of listening to Hanks as he served up a ton of talk about the real Charlie Wilson, working with Mike Nichols and Julia Roberts, his upcoming Pacific TV project, and whether he updates his MySpace page.

Tom Hanks and his take on the surge of recent political movies:

"Well... I think the thing about political movies here - Mostly they are meant to teach a lesson and communicate the editorial opinion of the filmmaker. I’m not necessarily interested in that. I’d love to see movies that examine the issues and taking in account the human content of all our struggle is important, but I don’t need to hear or to see somebody’s movie that is going to tell me the truth about what’s really happening. So make a documentary. And then I look at how good your documentary is and then I decide whether or not you are doing it in a real way. It’s interesting that we are now going in the fifth year of the war in Iraq and we now start to see film[s] about the war in Iraq . I don’t know if it’s possible to make films about the war in Iraq just yet, and here is why: somebody makes a movie, they cast actors and they get them to think and they go to Marrakech to make it sort of look like Iraq, or whatever it is, or they go to Death Valley and build some sets - Maybe there are some stars that you recognize or unknown people that you don’t know who is who... But is that going to be more truthful than me going on YouTube and Googling combat scenes from Iraq or voices from Iraq? My instinct is no, it’s not going to!

"I would rather see a Frontline, or an hour documentary about stuff that’s going on, as opposed to something that has been planned a year and an half ago, and then shot eight months ago, has a marketing campaign behind in order to try to get it. Not to discount anybody, every filmmaking says what it wants, but I don’t know if you can encapsulate the human toll or prospective of what’s going on in Iraq by making a movie about it. There were three movies about Iraq that were nominated for best documentary last year. I watched them all in a row and I could not believe the amazing disparity of their perspective. They were agreeing about the same thing, but the way each movie has it’s own perspective - all told, a story one completely removed from the other. One was about a guy and a kid, one was about a unit of medical people and the other was about a Shiite, a Sunni and a Kurd. The tapestry that they communicated was so much more complex, so less easy to put your finger on, so heartbreakingly human that they didn’t even dare to say, 'Here are the specific things we wanted to say.' They were just reflecting back to us what it was like from an Iraqi’s point of view, from an American’s point of view. I think that’s where films about the war right now are going to let us down, they are gonna be trying to tell us one or two or two and a half side of what’s going on. That’s impossible right now. The best films about World War II weren’t made until five or six years after World War II."

Hanks on whether he met with the real Charlie Wilson:

"Oh yeah, many times. He was on the set, [and] visited us. I don’t know if he came before Aaron [Sorkin] delivered the screenplay, but Charlie came in very early on and said, 'Look, I don’t care what you say about me. You can show me doing anything, I don’t care, I did it all anyway!' [laughs] It’s all true. He was just dead set on us getting his motivations right and getting what he viewed as the important story told. And this was essentially the defense of the people of Afghanistan. He hated Russia. He wanted Russia to lose a war, we had never gone head to head again the Soviet Union. When we went head to head with the Communists, we lost every time; we lost in Vietnam, fought them to a [draw] in Korea, and he wanted a victory. But we couldn’t do it with our own boys; we weren’t about to invade East Germany. He saw it as an opportunity to defeat the most feared military force of aggression in the world, that’s what he wanted to do! And doing so, saving the people from Afghanistan, and he did."

On what Charlie Wilson is up to now:

"He just received a heart transplant, so he is lying down right now. [laughs] He is just being Charlie Wilson for a living, you know. He is retired. For a while he was like almost all politician, a lobbyist for Pakistan back when what; when you could trust Pakistan, back when some other people were president of Pakistan? He is 75 [or] 76 years old, he and his wife are doing a lot of traveling. He gets invited to speak to a lot of places. Even before the book came out, he was invited to speak a lot of places and now it’ll probably be a little more because he is Charlie’s Wilson and everybody’s asking him what is it like to have Tom Hanks playing him in a movie; so he’s going to have to answer that question. I just said, "Just please, please, don’t keep saying you wish Kevin Costner had played you. Give me some credit even though I’m not nearly tall enough in order to play you here."

On what he was looking for in director Mike Nichols:

"Mike is Mike; he is everything from Catch 22 to Closer, Angels in America - Mike is a filmmaker that seams to be bent on, in my mind anyway, not capturing the issue but capturing human behavior that goes into it. That’s what I saw as what it was all about. The political world, the historical aspect of it, the motivations - those were important but the influx, the injection of human behavior, the reason that Gus does what does, Charlie does what he does, Joanne feels the way she does, the other guys getting involved, the reason why the Charlie’s angels work for Charlie in his office... That’s the stuff that is Mike’s bread and butter, that’s the stuff that delights him; tiny small, little, almost unconnected details that in the end result is the way people actually behave. There were other people who wanted to do it and, you know, quite frankly didn’t get it, not the way we wanted to do. If they had owned the book, they could have done it. We listened to people and they had other ideas, we wanted to tell the story of the book that’s titled Charlie Wilson's War."

Inside Charlie Wilson's War and More with Tom Hanks Page 2