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 "You give me the right amount of verbiage and just enough
time to do the right amount of research, and I can convince you
that I may be the smartest guy in the room," the actor said with
a laugh to reporters on Thursday.
"The gift that Dan Brown gave me as an actor is to play a guy
who's always curious, who's always opinionated and who's always
searching for an answer."
Hanks joined cast members including Felicity Jones and Irrfan
Khan, director Ron Howard and author Brown at a news conference
for the film in Florence's Palazzo Vecchio.
Hanks and Howard previously brought Brown's "Da Vinci Code" and
"Angels and Demons" to life in hit blockbuster films.
Sony Pictures' "Inferno," due in theaters on Oct. 28, follows
Langdon as he wakes up in Florence with amnesia and has to
decipher clues to stop a plague being released by an elusive
billionaire who tries to tackle overpopulation.
Hanks said the film's take on overpopulation suggests "we are
creating our own version of Dante's inferno here in the real
world."
He added that there were places in the world where "the
environment is hellacious and the people are held in slavery and
there is any numbers of degrees of misery that are in fact
created by ourselves one way or another."
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Much of the film showcases Florence's historic buildings and
piazzas, as Langdon speeds through the city's rich history, solving
riddles related to Florentine poet Dante Alighieri's famed 14th
century saga "Divine Comedy," about a man's journey through
'Inferno,' or hell.
Brown said framing Dante as prophecy and not as history made the
story relevant to a modern audience, drawing threads between
overpopulation and real world issues such as immigration or lack of
natural resources.
Director Howard said he was inspired by the powerful imagery of
Dante's "Inferno" and how it has resonated through centuries and
generations.
"I felt that he was giving us the vocabulary of every horror movie
we've ever seen and admired and you begin to look at it not only on
a kind of philosophical level but also as a cultural, a huge
cultural and political shift," Howard said.
(Reporting by Reuters TV in Italy; Writing by Piya Sinha-Roy;
Editing by Lisa Shumaker)
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