Typically even A-listers must movie vital film moments by the seat of their pants.
That was apparently the case for Tom Hanks when director Ron Howard and his crew moved manufacturing of “The Da Vinci Code” (2006) into the Louvre and Hanks discovered no time to alter between scenes contained in the famed Paris museum.
Howard instructed the story throughout a panel Friday on the MegaCon conference in Orlando, Florida.
“Tom Hanks didn’t have time to go back to his dressing room to change for the next scene,” he instructed the group, including: “And so I was giving him these notes on what the next scene was going to be and he was changing his pants in front of the ‘Mona Lisa.’”
“I said, ‘Wait a minute. This is a moment we have to remember,’” Howard continued. “‘OK, We’ve been under the water with the mermaid [in 1984’s ‘Splash’], we’ve been weightless with the ‘Apollo 13,’ and now you’re pantsless with the ‘Mona Lisa.’”
Whereas Howard’s story produced audible laughter, clearly, manufacturing wasn’t simple.
“[We] had to be super careful in the Louvre,” Howard mentioned Friday. “You couldn’t even let the lights shine directly on the masterpieces, they had to bounce off the floor and be soft light, but we had three nights in a row [in the Louvre]. We were on a very, very tight schedule.”
Howard mentioned it was the frantic tempo that in the end led Hanks to alter swiftly on the spot.
JEAN-PIERRE MULLER/AFP/Getty Photos
“The Da Vinci Code” was launched at a time when even less-anticipated movies loved theatrical home windows of a number of months and, with an enormous fandom behind Brown’s novels and an A-list forged together with Hanks and Ian McKellen, the film grossed $760 million worldwide.
Howard and Hanks in the end reunited for 2 sequels, 2009’s “Angels & Demons” and 2016’s “Inferno,” and whereas the trilogy wasn’t significantly acclaimed, Howard’s cheeky anecdote might need simply solved a real-life puzzle — the thriller of the Mona Lisa smile.
