Of all the first world countries, the United States of America is at the very bottom of vacation time accrued by its workers. Where French or German workers might start out with a whopping seven weeks of vacation in a year, Americans are unlikely to receive anything more than three. Noses to the grindstone, we work more hours on average than any other developed country. To combat the repetitive nature of corporate America and the dreary reality of working with the same people and concepts day after day, many people fantasize about getting away, be it to another state or country, or, more popularly, to a remote tropical island (generally believed to contain numerous cases of imported drinks and scantily clad models). Conceiving of a variation on this escapist notion himself while working on Apollo 13, actor Tom Hanks began to wonder how this concept might translate to the silver screen. Ultimately getting to the reality behind the fantasy some six years later, Cast Away hit theaters and earned a mighty $230 million.

It was Hanks who ultimately conceived of the project. However, nothing fell into place or even moved forward until he decided to approach William Broyles Jr, the screenwriter of Apollo 13, with the idea. Having worked well together on one project, the two rationalized that a second project would go just as swimmingly; and they were correct (Broyles was the only screenwriter ever attached to the project, a seeming anomaly in today’s film world).

Throughout the course of the next several years, Hanks and Broyles began to fine-tune their ideas, while simultaneously working on other movies.

Surprisingly, Cast Away was originally conceived of as a comedy; Hanks felt that there was a plethora of humorous situations that could befall a single cast-away on a tropical island. But as time passed, both Hanks and Broyles agreed that the material was better suited to a dramatic interpretation. This decided, the two began to specifically focus on the creation of characteristics for their lead, Chuck Noland.

In order to gain the most drastic contrast between Noland’s life in the business world and life on the barren island, his character was written to be a white-collar executive whose life revolves completely and totally around the concept of time. Every second and every minute of the day were made to be important to Noland, so that, once alone on the island, he would be forced to deal not only with survival, but adapting to a life without any sort of time constraints as well.

"[Chuck’s] life would be run by time and connections," Broyles says. The idea was simply to take "this man who’s so connected and disconnect him from everything."

To best illustrate Noland’s professional life as a man focused on time, Hanks and Broyles made him a Federal Express (FedEx) executive.

"As a FedEx worker, [Chuck] would be dedicated to connecting people all over the world," Broyles says. "His life would be [dictated] by [the clock]."

With product placement running roughshod throughout the film world (have you seen Josie and the Pussycats?), most people simply assumed that FedEx, and summarily Wilson Sporting Goods, earned their places in the Cast Away script by paying for them. Quite the opposite was true though.

"It has become common for corporations to pay huge sums to have their products featured in movies," FedEx spokeswoman Darlene Faquin said. "But we didn’t pay anything [for Cast Away]." Strange as it may seem, Faquin continued, "It was the writer’s idea to focus on FedEx’s efficiency. They came to us."

Once the general outline and character points of Cast Away’s script were finished, another question instantly sprang to mind: what now? With Noland stuck on the island, what would be his next move?

In a courageous move to understand, first hand, what life would be like should one be stranded on a deserted, tropical island, Broyles contacted three primitive living experts–anthropologists who study and sometimes practice the processes and methodologies that early man utilized to survive–and embarked on a voluntary cast away experience in Mexico, on a deserted beach on the Sea of Cortez (Hanks was conveniently busy elsewhere at the time). With no food, water, or tools outside of those he could find or make, Broyles was quickly initiated into the hard knock life of being a cast-away.

As ex-boy scouts and primitive living experts know, there are four basic elements necessary to human survival: food, water, shelter and fire. According to Cast Away’s technical advisor, Dave Holladay, should one find himself stranded on a tropical island, like Noland or Broyles, shelter is the most immediate concern of the four elements. Shelter will allow a person to get out of the sun, give him a place to rest and stay dry. Once adequate shelter can be made or found, obtaining fresh water becomes the next most important item on the agenda (drinking salt water causes far more problems than it solves). When these two urgent needs are met, then come the tasks of finding food and making fire (the latter two needs are veritable luxury items though when compared to the first two; a person can survive for weeks without food or fire, but only for two or three days at the most without water or shelter).

Thrust onto the deserted, rocky Mexican beach, Broyles enlisted the help of the three primitive living experts ‘cast-away’ with him. After constructing a shelter made of palm fronds (which later turned out to be teeming with scorpions), and scoring some drinking water, Broyles settled down for the long (seven day) haul.

Broyles’ outward bound research ultimately turned out to be quite critical to the creation of the Cast Away script. Numerous events that transpired on that quiet Mexican beach quickly found their way into the screenplay.

The comedic routine involving Noland’s attempts to crack open a coconut? "That happened to me," Broyles laughed. And like Noland’s on-screen misadventures, it took Broyles a long time to finally crack the coconut open (after breaking a rock on the coconut, Broyles managed to, essentially, chisel the fruit open). Viewed as an all-purpose tool (coconuts provide a source of water and food, while doubling as containers) by the primitive living experts, Broyles admits that life on a deserted island, minus coconuts, would be even more inhospitable than normal. Enter coconuts into the script.

Broyles’ experiences trying to make fire proved to be even more fruitless than his attempts to open a coconut. "It took me more than a day and a half to make fire,"Broyles said, shaking his head. "There’s a reason Prometheus is a great myth."

After gouging out sizable chunks of flesh and gathering numerous blisters on the palms of his hands, the primitive living experts stepped in and gave Broyles enough pointers to enable him to get a blaze started.

However, the most unusual occurrence that made its way into the script was when Broyles stumbled across a Wilson volleyball that had floated in from the sea.

Having successfully met the first four elements of survival, Broyles realized that there was another important need that had to be met, that of companionship. Humans are distinctly social animals, and when separated from all other human contact for long stretches of time, the mind can begin to play tricks on a person.

Fire can initially serve as a companion–in the film, Noland doesn’t really say anything until he has made fire… and then he proceeds to sing The Doors’ "Light My Fire". However, this sense of companionship between man and burning wood doesn’t often last that long.

Kicking the volleyball, nicknamed Wilson because of its name brand, around on the beach, Broyles knew that he had, albeit inadvertently, stumbled onto a key element for the Cast Away script.

"I think Wilson was crucial to Chuck’s survival," Hanks said. And this is true.

Providing an outlet for Noland’s innermost thoughts and feelings, Broyles actually wrote lines of dialogue for Wilson in the script (on-location, stand-ins read the lines back to Hanks to give him the feeling that he was carrying on a conversation with a real person).

However, while Broyles envisioned the volleyball to be "serious and sympathetic", ultimately, Hanks turned Wilson into "an old man" who was constantly nagging and provoking Noland.

"He’s mischievous and he’s an instigator," Hanks commented on the matter.

With the script shaping up, the next addition to the project was director Robert Zemeckis. Hanks and Zemeckis had kept in touch with one another since their work together on 1994’s Oscar winner, Forrest Gump. Zemeckis knew that Hanks and Broyles had been slaving over the Cast Away script for a number of years, and finally became attached to the project himself after suggesting a credible resolution (which you see in the final cut of the film) to Noland’s island saga.

With Zemeckis on board and the script essentially finished, Hanks, Zemeckis and Broyles began to pitch their idea to the studios.

To the untrained observer, it would seem that any Hanks/Zemeckis project would be a downright safe bet for a given studio. However, there were so many unusual elements in the production of Cast Away (principal photography would take well over 18 months to complete, all aspects of the production would halt for nearly a year as Hanks took the time off to lose approximately 50 pounds and grow out his hair, and the script would feature nearly 90 minutes of screen time with no dialogue and only one actor on screen) that even these three veritable 1,000 pound gorillas had troubled convincing the executives that the end would justify the very expensive means.

After landing joint funding from Dreamworks and 20th Century Fox, production on Cast Away began in Moscow in January of 1999.

Wanting to introduce the audience to Noland’s character in a dynamic setting, Zemeckis and Co. chose to do so in the Russian capitol, Moscow, in the middle of the winter. There was no real logic behind this move–it was done to show that Noland was a man of the world, so, any other large metropolitan city on the planet would have done just as well–but the producers ultimately chose to work in Moscow in the cold, dead of winter.

One group of people who were genuinely happy to see the Cast Away production go to Moscow were the Russians. Bending over backwards to let Zemeckis and his cinematographer Don Burgess film where ever they wanted, Red Square was shut down for the better portion of a week (and the production’s cars and FedEx trucks were allowed to drive on the square) while Noland and his new Russian comrades did a ‘package sort’ in the shadow of Lenin’s tomb.

And while other portions of Cast Away were filmed in Memphis at the FedEx international headquarters and on lots in southern California (the stunning shots of Hanks climbing the deserted island’s rocky peak were actually shot in a Los Angeles parking lot, with computer graphics added in post production), the majority of principal photography took place on a semi-remote island in Fiji, called Monu-riki.

After a world-wide search to find a choice deserted island, one that would reflect hardship as opposed to paradise ("We needed more of a rocky nub of an island," Hanks says), Cast Away’s location scouts found Monu-riki, known for its dramatic peak, pristine beach and small coconut grove (and nearly hour boat ride to the production hotel).

In order to gain the consent of the Fijian family who owned the island, Zemeckis and other members of the production team familiarized themselves with Fijian customs, met with the island’s owners and participated in a formal Fijian ceremony.

Once permission to film was given, a village of huts was constructed on the island. Each production team, be it sound, f/x, or lighting, got its own hut(s) in which to store their necessary equipment.

With some 75-100 different sized boats bringing production crew members and equipment to the island each day, the size of the shoot was enormous. Matching the light and position of the tides in each camera set-up and take was a tedious chore. Finally though, in April of 1999, Hanks’ ‘fat’ scenes had all been shot and the cast and crew went on hiatus; an extreme rarity today, Cast Away was shot completely in chronological order.

One of the biggest worries of the studio about this break in filming was how Zemeckis was going to be assured that his Cast Away crew would return a year later; wouldn’t most of them have landed other jobs in the mean time? So, in order to keep his crew together during this year-long hiatus from Cast Away, Zemeckis shot another movie, What Lies Beneath, starring Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer. When production on What Lies Beneath was finished nearly a year later, and Hanks had jettisoned some 50 pounds and turned into a bearded and long-haired cast away, Zemeckis and his roving band of crew members trekked from Maine and the northeast back to Monu-riki to film Noland’s descent into loneliness and his escape attempt from the island.

An ambitious project from start to finish, Cast Away was released to theatres in December of 2000, nearly two years after production had begun in Moscow. It was an immediate critical and box office success. Available now on video and DVD, Cast Away stands out as being one of the best films of the last several years. This was one risk well worth taking. (JC)