News of the World’s Helena Zengel on What Surprised Her About Filming a Shootout with Tom Hanks

Jan 07 2021

Interview Travel Family Art Texas Film News Filming Surprise Director View Theater Affair

With director Paul Greengrass’ News of the World now playing in select theaters and arriving on PVOD in mid-January, I recently participated in a group interview with Helena Zengel about making the Western. If you haven’t seen the trailers, News of the World is based on the novel by Paulette Jiles and is set a few years after the end of the Civil War in Texas. The film is about Captain Jefferson Kyle Kid (Tom Hanks), a veteran who goes from town-to-town reading stories from newspapers. While traveling, he meets an abandoned 10-year-old girl named Johanna (Zengel), who was being escorted to Indian Affairs as she had previously been captured and raised among the Kiowa people after her family was slaughtered six years earlier. After trying to deliver the girl to local authorities, he decides to take her under his wing and return her to her only surviving relatives, which is hundreds of miles into the unforgiving wilderness.