Hanks admits he hadn’t seen a lot of Lane’s work before teaming up with her in Untraceable. But he now proclaims himself a real fan after starring alongside her in the film. “It’s always really nice when you meet someone and they’re the most pleasant person that you have possibly imagined,” said Hanks. “She’s so friendly and so funny and self-deprecating, and was just a fun person to work with when you’re both admittedly saying, ‘I have no idea what any of this computer junk means, so you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. And hopefully we’ll both look like geniuses in the end.’ So it was fun.”
It’s tough for Hanks to answer specific questions about his character in Untraceable without giving away key plot points. However it wouldn’t be giving away any spoilers to describe his part as the film’s comic relief. Hanks really latched onto that aspect of his character during the research process. “The thing that I ended up realizing once I got up to Portland and started meeting with like FBI agents that actually do this stuff for real – they go online and pose as minors and collect evidence against pedophiles and go and arrest them, the kind of guys that see graphic images, like really disturbing images, every day - once I realized that humor was one of the ways that they combated that and sort of stayed sane… The two FBI agents that we had met actually ragged on each other quite a bit and made fun of each other, and used humor as a way to sort of interact when they’re dealing with truly horrific, graphic stuff, trying to catch these truly evil people. That made me go, ‘Oh, okay. It’s not that he’s the funny guy. That’s their relationship.’ And so they’re partners. That’s really it.”
“The best description I’m going to have for my character is he’s Jennifer Marsh’s partner and the two of them work together and they try and catch the bad guys, for lack of a better phrase,” offered Hanks. “That, to me, was the little thing that I needed to make this a little bit more of a well-rounded guy, as opposed to just a cookie cutter thing that it could very well have been. Hopefully I rounded out some of the edges a little bit, I hope.”
Hanks says prepping for the role wasn’t as much about getting the technology down as it was about figuring out how to get into the mindset of playing an FBI agent immersed in the world of cybercrime. “I sort of knew that if they needed shots of someone typing fast they would probably get a hand double. At one point they asked me, ‘How many words can you type per minute?,’ and I said, ‘Has that question really been asked since like 1964?’ But, that sort of stuff I wasn’t so much interested in because I know how to text message and iChat and those kinds of things,” explained Hanks. “I’m just smart enough to know how to do that stuff. I was much more interested in sort of the more FBI oriented things of, ‘Okay, if you see an extremely graphic image of an adult and a minor that is illegal,’ – and some of these images will forever be burned in my brain – ‘ and you have to look at this, what do you look for, because it’s appalling? But what do you do to find out how to catch these guys because I want you to catch this guy?’”
“One of the things that my FBI agent said is, ‘Well, I’ve never been out of the United States before but I was told that in Europe and Asia they have different power sockets.’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ I was shocked that he’d never been out of the country before. But there were different power sockets in this photo so he said, ‘So I therefore know that this photo was not taken in North America. If it’s a photo that was taken in North America, we have that much more of a chance of being able to find the guy.’ So it’s those little kinds of things that I thought were really interesting. Those were the sorts of things that, to me, I couldn’t really use it in the film, but it gave me a little bit more of an idea of how he’s able to look at these images, because they were truly horrific, with humor. And then at the end of the day for that man to be able to go back to his wife and two kids…he’s been able to handle it pretty well.”
Hanks’ attitude toward surfing the internet didn’t change much after completing Untraceable. He says he’s always been extremely cautious online and never even made a purchase online until a year ago. Hanks doesn’t like to give away a lot of information while on the internet. Describing himself as sort of paranoid about online activities, Hanks revealed, “I’m one of those people who has the blocked email. Like, if I don’t have your email, you’re not going to send me an email. I’m going to block you.”
Untraceable did open his eyes to the more disturbing aspects of internet usage. “What shocked me more than anything else was just how easily accessible this stuff was,” admitted Hanks. “I mean, using common things – I don’t want to say any names - but using a certain chat type thing, or using a certain search engine, or using a certain type of file sharing device. Stuff that I thought was extremely sort of, ‘Oh, well you would that for music or whatever.’ You can find illegal stuff on that stuff. I mean, not just illegal stuff like you can’t burn that song, but extremely graphic photos of children. That sort of stuff. I don’t mean to sound like Michael Jackson, but you know, that sort of stuff I was shocked at just how easy it was because for me, it takes me 20 minutes to find out how old Tom Brady is but yet I now know how I could get that stuff very quickly. That was more disturbing, more than anything else.”
