Sometimes even A-listers have to film important movie moments by the seat of their pants.
That was apparently the case for Tom Hanks when director Ron Howard and his crew moved production of The Da Vinci Code into the Louvre, and Tom found no time to change between scenes inside the famed Paris museum.
Ron told the tale during a panel last week at the MegaCon convention in Orlando, Florida.
“Tom Hanks didn’t have time to go back to his dressing room to change for the next scene,” he told the crowd, adding: “And so, I was giving him these notes on what the next scene was going to be and he was changing his pants in front of the ‘Mona Lisa.’”
“I said, ‘Wait a minute. This is a moment we have to remember’,” the filmmaker continued. “‘OK, We’ve been under the water with the mermaid [in 1984’s Splash], we’ve been weightless with the Apollo 13, and now you’re pantsless with the Mona Lisa’.”
While Ron’s story produced audible laughter, clearly, production on the 2006 movie wasn’t easy.
“[We] had to be super careful in the Louvre,” he admitted. “You couldn’t even let the lights shine directly on the masterpieces, they had to bounce off the floor and be soft light, but we had three nights in a row [in the Louvre]. We were on a very, very tight schedule.”
Ron said it was the frantic pace that ultimately led Tom to change swiftly on the spot.
The Da Vinci Code was released at a time when even less-anticipated films enjoyed theatrical windows of several months and, with a giant fandom behind Dan Brown’s novels and an A-list cast including Tom Hanks and Ian McKellen, the movie grossed $760 million worldwide.
Ron Howard and Tom Hanks ultimately reunited for two sequels, 2009’s Angels And Demons and 2016’s Inferno, and while the trilogy wasn’t particularly acclaimed, this cheeky anecdote might have just solved a real-life puzzle — the mystery of the Mona Lisa smile.