Tom Hanks is arguably the best loved and most sucessful actor of the last 20 years. After a very sucessful spell of producing, this month he returns playing lead in The Ladykillers, a Coen brothers remake of the 1955 Ealing classic, which he has just finished promoting at the Cannes Film Festival...

Did the Coen Brothers surprise you at all?

I thought they would be much more animated than they were, they are actually these quiet, retiring guys. I must say they are no different now than the first time I met them. They don't erupt, they don't sink, they don't do anything, they are straight as a highway. And it was like that from the first time we met to talk about Ladykillers. It was like "So how do you want to do this?" and we just started talking and got on with it. I mean, you think they are bizarre, you know? [laughs] You think they wear capes, they have obtuse taste, but they are not like that at all. Ethan always paces around and says "Hey man, let's try this..." and Joel is always saying "Well, what we are trying to do is..." and that's it, it never changes.

Have you seen the original Ladykillers yet?

No. I haven't seen it. In fact out of all of that [Ealing] school, I've only seen Kind Hearts And Coronets, and if someone had come and said "Would you like to do an updated version of Kind Hearts And Coronets?" I wouldn't have done it. Just because I would have had no organic way of approaching it. What am I going to do? Do it exactly the same? Make some strange obtuse changes?

So it was a conscious decision not to see the original?

Yeah. And being completely oblivious to the original made it possible for me to see it as simply a Coen brothers movie. I knew it existed, of course. But like the way you know that certain Charlie Chaplin films existed. I don't know the particulars of it, I've seen a couple of stills from it and that's it. Like for example when The Brothers came and said "What would you think about having some teeth?" If I'd seen the original, I would have said "No, no you can't, because Alec Guinness did teeth..." But I had no concept of teeth or no teeth.

Your character uses some remarkably flowery language. Where did the accent come from?

Well, they wrote him as this kind of petrified southern gentleman, but, you know, without a doubt, a guy with only two suits and a watch that probably doesn't even work [laughs]. And there's this verbosity of this Edgar Allan Poe-like dialogue which required going to some place that was almost old school. Actually, I think everything he says is a lie. There's a grain of truth, but when he says he's on sabbatical from the university where he teaches, I think he's been on sabbatical for about 17 years, ever since he got stuck in an inappropriate sexual situation with one of his students! So you have to start building on that, and it had to be from Mississippi and that just dictates a lot of work you have to do. And the way he talks, if there was one thing that I said it was "OK, I have to do this because it will be demanding of me.." because of the way he talks in that he never hesitates, he is never lost for words, and you just riff so much here. The thing has to be like gas from a pump - once it starts going, it just has to roll along. And the Brothers agreed, they were "Oh yeah, that's the way that we saw it too..."

Is it fun, building a character like that - physically as well as emotionally?

Yeah, it was fun because we had a lot of time. If I'd read it and three weeks later we were shooting it would have been a disaster, but they were busy doing Intolerable Cruelty at the time so I had as much as a year, I can't remember exactly. So it sat there and simmered in the pot. But yeah, that's the reason I'm an actor.

Is it fair to compare your The Ladykillers to the original?

I think it's fair in the same way that every season somebody does a Hamlet and it's compared to the Hamlet of the last season, and sometimes it's better and sometimes it's just different. And you can't deny that it's based on an original and a lot of movies are like that.

But with the Coen brothers doing it, you know it's going to be a very different film...

That's right. And that's exactly how it came to me. It was "The Coens are interested in doing The Ladykillers.." "The Coens? Oh OK, say that I'm dropping by...."

Were they on your list of directors to work with?

The Coen brothers have been these guys, like John Cassavetes or Woody Allen - every time a movie comes out you want to see the latest Coen Brothers movie, whether you understand it or not [laughs].

You were joking the other day that sometimes you found their films a little hard to understand...

There have been some movies, yeah [laughs]. Look, I was with Barton Fink right up to him standing in that flaming hallway and then I wasn't sure what was going on anymore. But they are responsible for movies where I cannot predict what is going to happen next. I don't know how they did it. I watched O Brother, Where Art Thou? and it felt like I was on fire there, it just went so many different places. And Fargo is one of the best movies ever made. So is Blood Simple and so is Raising Arizona, so these guys are capable of putting together a narrative that is a complete surprise, that is totally unpredictable, and also they exist in completely... they are part of the radar but they are under the radar.

Is it easier to play nice guys or villains?

It's easier to play knuckle heads and that's what this guy is - he's just a knuckle head. Really, there is no difference: every role requires the same amount of make believe and faith in the process and I don't say yes to something unless I have an instinctive knowledge of what it is I am going to have to do in order to get there. In this case there was a huge amount of verbiage that went on and massive amounts of check list stuff - you know, he's going to have to have a dialect, he's going to have to be able to rattle this stuff off. But nice guys, bad guys? I try to play somebody who just believes in what they are saying more than anything else. I play people with confidence, whether they are trying to kill an old lady or not, they still are convinced they are doing the right thing and this is the only way to get things done.

But do you sometimes sit at home and think, OK, next time I have to do something different?

No, I don't understand how to work that way. It would be artificial, trying to steer your career in a certain way and that would be very inorganic and it would probably make for a crappy movie. I don't know how to do it other than believing 100% in what we are talking. Even in Road To Perdition or something like that, it can't be "Hey, it's time to go off and completely change the image..." If you try to go off and completely change the image, then you could do anything - play a woman, play Superman, do stuff like that. There's just nothing to be had from it.