Did you read the biography of Mike Nichols that came out last year?
No, why do you ask?
There’s an anecdote in there about “Charlie Wilson’s War” that I wanted to ask you about. Apparently you and Aaron Sorkin didn’t want to show Charlie Wilson using cocaine because you thought it made the character unsympathetic. It made me wonder about what you believe audiences do or don’t want to see Tom Hanks doing up there onscreen.
Let me tell you a story. The original “King Kong.” They’re on Skull Island. They’re going to try to save Fay Wray. They’re on a log across a ravine. King Kong picks up the log and knocks a bunch of guys off and they fall down into the ravine and break some of these viny things across the bottom. That’s all you see in the movie. In the first cut, though, those viny things were spider webs and out of a cave crawled the biggest spider you ever saw. What the filmmakers discovered was that after seeing those big spiders, the audience was not afraid of King Kong. So they cut it.

There is that thing that can happen in a movie where, if you show the giant spider, it might blow your real story out of the water. But it was never in the script to show Charlie Wilson snorting coke. I could walk you through different disagreements I had: On “Saving Private Ryan,” Steven Spielberg said, “I don’t think I want to see John Miller fire his gun and kill Germans.” I told him: “I’m sorry, Steven. You’re not going to get me all the way over here and turn me into some other guy just because you don’t want Tom Hanks to kill soldiers.” We had this same moment in “Forrest Gump.” There’s the scene with the ambush in Vietnam, and Bob Zemeckis originally wanted Forrest to be confused and run away. I said, “Bob, why am I playing a soldier who is really good at his basic training without then showing me slapping in my clip and firing a set of rounds?” Anyway, with Charlie Wilson, not snorting coke was not spiders in “King Kong.” I would have done it. I didn’t care. Those kinds of choices are in every single movie.