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Watching a man create a new domestic life in the thick of unforgiving isolation. The journey-ineffectually stabbing at coconuts, gathering palms for a makeshift shelter, trying to master the elements-would be the progression of the story. That’s where the structure of the film begin to crystallize in his mind. “Let me tell you, stingray is not going to start appearing on menus at fusion restaurants anytime soon.”Įventually, though, the smell of cooking bacon and the sound of the Grateful Dead wafting over from the survivalists’ camp five sand dunes away would force him to relent and ask for help creating a fire.

When he woke the next morning, he sharpened a stick and started spearing stingrays which he would then eat raw since he had not yet managed to start a fire. Trying and failing to get to the sweet nectar of the coconut in order to sustain himself, flaking rocks to use as tools, drilling holes with seashells Broyles went to bed hungry, thirsty, and freezing cold that first night. It’s connection in the world and disconnection from everything.” “I thought, Wow, this is perfect, because the motto on the FedEx truck at the time was ‘The World on Time.’ And that’s the theme of the movie. A later conversation led to the idea of using a FedEx employee, as Hanks’s character would later become. Tom Hanks and Broyles were working on Apollo 13 together when Hanks mentioned his idea for a reimagining of Robinson Crusoe. The genesis of Cast Away is rather simple. Tom Hanks in Cast Away Fox Cast Away started with Tom Hanks, FedEx and brutal, real-life survivalism Either way, you have to come down and climb another one.”) But the gentle reminder that his trek up the 23,000-foot Aconcagua in the Andes in 1986 had him fearing for his life makes you realize his philosophy is rooted in lived experience. (“Sometimes you climb the wrong mountain and sometimes you climb the right mountain. One would be forgiven if they initially believed he spoke only in folksy Southern witticisms. What are you made of? What does crisis bring out in you? Those are the questions he asks of himself and his characters. The Oscar-nominee wouldn’t even write his first Hollywood script until the age of 40.īroyles believes that success and failure are two halves of the same truth, both immeasurably illuminating for each individual.

Brief political aspirations in the 1970s wound up going nowhere before a successful career in print media, including the founding of Texas Monthly and a stop at Newsweek, enabled him to scratch his way through adulthood. But years later, that nurse was the inspiration for China Beach, which was the first thing I ever did in film, and the light was actually the Apollo 13 mission.”īroyles would survive the war and return unmoored from everything he believed his life would be, much like Tom Hanks’s Chuck Nolan in Cast Away. “This was the moment of my deepest failure. Leaving the hospital later, he would look up at the night sky and see a light streaking across the horizon. Visiting a triage center with a nurse caring for wounded teenagers after his unit had been attacked, Broyles fainted. Plucked from his trajectory as a twentysomething and dumped in a rice paddy at the epicenter of a war zone, his transition was about as smooth as sandpaper. But his sterling strategy to capture the American Dream was cast aside once he was drafted into the Marine Corps for Vietnam. The 76-year-old Houston, Texas, native with a stout chin and a warm smile had studied his way into Oxford and was on a path to traditional success as a young man. Subscribe to Observer’s Keeping Watch Newsletterīroyles’s background is littered with false starts, disruptions and flat-out defeats.