Julia Roberts and Tom Hanks in "Larry Crowne."

LOS ANGELES -- In Larry Crowne, there are no purple aliens, green neon-spewing rings, marauding alien droids or mutants who can bend spoons with their minds. And the closest star-director-co-writer Tom Hanks has come to resembling Thor was when he adopted a miniature mullet for The Da Vinci Code.

So how does this gentle comedy -- about a middle-aged man who, after being laid off, enrolls in college and falls for his disenchanted professor (Julia Roberts) -- compete in the thick of the effects-driven summer moviegoing season?

"Forgive me, I haven't the slightest f------ idea," Hanks admits to journalists at a Beverly Hills hotel. "It's going to be interesting."

Not that, as he points out, there's an ideal time to release a low-key film like this in the current climate.

"It's not the summer anymore, it's year-round," he says of the blizzard of movies based on comics, video games and action figures.

The two-time Oscar winner has starred in his fair share of blockbusters, of course, from Forrest Gump to Cast Away to Apollo 13 to the aforementioned Dan Brown adaptation and its sequel, Angels and Demons. But these days there appears to be little room in Hollywood for anything else.

"The nature of the movies is different than it was five years ago. And they're all driven by the possibilities of CGI, which means you can make anything on screen that you can possibly desire. That's a great brand of freedom for a filmmaker. But when you are going to try to have people talk in a room and actually reflect life as we know it and have people recognize themselves and their own street and their own house, then you're aiming for the high country and it's a much bigger gamble."

Yet he's hopeful audiences will find Larry Crowne when it opens Friday. Despite the attention paid to marketing and release dates and counter-programming, he believes quality still sells.

"At the end of the day it's got to be a good movie, it's got to be a funny movie, it's got to make people think, 'I couldn't have spent my time any better.' And by the way, that thing about the guy who wore a suit and the planet exploded and he's still got the girl by traveling through time? That movie sucked. I'm not saying any movie sucked, but you know what I'm talking about."

Larry Crowne marks only the second film Hanks has directed, following 1996's That Thing You Do. He conceived the story and then penned the script with Winnipeg's Nia Vardalos, whose 2002 breakout smash hit My Big Fat Greek Wedding was produced by Hanks and his wife, Rita Wilson. In addition to Roberts, the cast includes Wilmer Valderrama, Gugu Mbatha Raw, Cedric the Entertainer and Taraji P. Henson.

Given the economy, there's no question the film is topical. Yet Hanks actually came up with the idea before the Great Recession struck.

"I wanted to examine the theme of reinvention. And not just reinvention by fate dictating it, but by your own proactive place in how you move on to whatever the next chapter of your life is going to be. It really began (with) 'I lose my job, I go to college and my teacher is Julia Roberts -- what would happen?' Then you just go back and continually fill out the reasons he goes to college in the first place and what those issues are. I think it's fascinating whenever you're going to talk about an individual's adventure. And in this case, it's the adventure of what he's going to do for the rest of his life.

"It's not a mid-life crisis. It's a mid-life disaster. A mid-life crisis is when you wake up and say, 'I have everything but I'm still unhappy.' That doesn't happen to Larry. Larry thinks it's the greatest day in the world and then he gets fired and loses all of his community. As well, he possibly loses his house. That was something we started with and then just built on it. It was an idea that never left."

From the outset, though, Hanks wanted to reflect reality -- and avoid "the usual contrivances of a movie like this where you have an evil father in law who doesn't want his daughter to marry him or a boss who's trying to blah blah blah or whatever."

Instead, by crafting a story with characters that felt authentic, he attempted to make the kind of movie "that I myself am attracted to as an audience-going guy. And I think it's a delicate balance."

Just as delicate a balance? How to make a movie based on the subject of a bad economy and layoffs while still being upbeat.

"The best version is going to be a documentary that really examines what's going on. The second best version of that, I think, would be a movie that is, at the end of the day, extremely depressing and/or serious. Or so hard-hitting that it offers up no hope. But we are competing in a marketplace in which the thing we might have going for us is the true battle against cynicism. That's what Larry Crowne is about -- more than anything."

So even though Hanks' everyman loses his job, it ultimately leads to other opportunities he would have never otherwise had.

"(He can say), 'The best thing that ever happened to me was getting fired from my job.' And that actually does happen in the real world "¦ And if you do that well enough, enough people will respond to it."

Interestingly, while Larry Crowne gets a second chance after he pursues a higher education, Hanks himself is a drop-out.

"I left college after the third year because I began to work in the field I was studying. Someone offered me a job as an actor and I was studying theatre at the time. College isn't necessarily for everyone."

And although he hasn't been unemployed for decades, he says all actors face dark, dire periods.

"There's a time when you're living in a rented house in the valley that you cannot afford. You have been fired from the job that you had. And it's been 13 months since you've actually worked in the city and the phone is still not ringing and you wonder if, in fact, you're going to take a job at the Der Wienerschnitzel on Laurel Canyon. When you have that moment, it never quite goes away."

Hanks, Wilson pair up on set, too

 It's good advice not to mix business and pleasure. Even better advice not to mix business and marriage.

That said, there are exceptions. Take Tom Hanks and his wife of 23 years, Rita Wilson. They've acted together as well as produced films, including My Big Fat Greek Wedding.

"My wife and I met making a movie," he says, referring to 1985's Volunteers. "It's not just a job, it's what we do naturally, whether we work together or not."

So it's no surprise Wilson has a small role in Larry Crowne, which Hanks co-wrote and directed. "I gave the script to Rita and said, 'Okay, Julia Roberts playing one part, the other part is Gugu (Mbatha Raw), so who do you want to be? So she figured it out and went to town on it. And it's just a blast. We're amazed we get paid to do it."

They weren't the only married couple on set. Co-writer Nia Vardalos is married to Ian Gomez (Cougar Town) who also has a supporting role.

"I would like to say this about all the married people working on the set, it was just a joy," says Roberts, who has three children with her husband, Daniel Moder. "It was a great environment to work in, for me, to leave my family behind and coming to be with all these people."

On-screen, the portrayal of marriage isn't quite so joyful. Hanks' character, for one, is divorced. And Roberts' college professor is constantly bickering with her porn-surfing husband (Bryan Cranston).

"This particular scenario Tom drew for me was fun to play," says Roberts.

Hanks and Roberts last starred together in 2007's Charlie Wilson's War.

 

More Artists