Mail Bonding

For Ephron, the hard part — once again — was in the cutting room. ''One of the reasons I became a director is that I got tired of people telling me scenes couldn't be as long as I wanted,'' she says. But those long scenes have a price: Michael Palin's character — a tweedy novelist who gives readings at Kathleen's bookshop — had to be chopped completely out of the film in the interest of running time. Other actors lost lines as well, like Greg Kinnear, who plays Kathleen's soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend, and Parker Posey, who has a brief turn as Joe's about-to-be-dumped girlfriend.

The most delicate editing challenges, though, were the scenes of Hanks and Ryan tapping out their e-mails. ''I would send you a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils if I knew your name and address,'' Joe types in one. Sweet, but hardly the sort of gripping footage that burns up the screen. ''Those sections are very carefully short,'' Ephron says. ''One thing we discovered is that each e-mail had a breaking point. No matter how good they were, if they were one line too long, you found yourself getting bored watching them type it.

''But, you know,'' she quickly adds, ''Tom and Meg are such good actors, they can make sitting at a computer look interesting. I mean, you can practically see Tom's brain cells working when he's typing.

''And,'' she says, repeating Mail's official mantra, ''the chemistry between them is amazing.''

''No, it's not like we feel any of that chemistry when we're just sitting there waiting to film a scene,'' Hanks says. ''We just talk to each other the way we've always talked, even back when we did Joe Versus the Volcano. We never talk about the movie or the mechanics of the scene. We just talk about goofy things we've read or seen somewhere.''

''Chemistry is a really weird thing,'' Ryan says. ''Sometimes you feel like you don't have it, but it ends up on the screen anyway. Other times you feel a really strong connection, and it ends up looking flat and dead. So the thing with Tom — I don't think it behooves me to examine it too closely. If I started trying to dissect it, it might go away.''

Ephron nods in agreement. ''In one of my movies there was this unbelievably charming scene,'' she says. ''You look at this couple on the screen and you know that they're absolutely crazy about each other. But the truth is, off camera they weren't speaking to each other at all.''

That's not a problem for Mr. and Mrs. World. In fact, back on the Upper West Side, still waiting to shoot their scene, Hanks and Ryan have moved on to a discourse on which soft drinks come in the most interesting containers. Ryan tells Hanks that she saw a really pretty bottle of iced tea at a deli the other day. Hanks mentions a lovely bottle of mineral water.

Scintillating. But at least they're talking.