Tom Hanks has revealed how the simplicity of 'Finch' appealed to him.

The 65-year-old actor stars in the new post-apocalyptic drama as dying engineer Finch Weinberg, a man who tries to create a humanoid companion to look after his dog Goodyear when he passes away, and Hanks was delighted with the "very basic premise".

Tom told SFX magazine: "You didn't have to project anything onto it other than a very, very basic premise: a guy had a dog and it's very dangerous to be outside.

"(My thought) was just literally, 'Okay, this is not a sequel. It's original and yet familiar at the same time.'' "

The 'Forrest Gump' actor continued: "I thought it covered a whole bunch of different horizons, part of it because it was a road trip, but really because it was a love story between a guy and his dog."

Finch's robot companion is played by Caleb Landry Jones and Tom was impressed by director Miguel Sapochnik's decision to have an actor develop the cyborg as a character.

The Oscar-winning star explained: "I'm used to certain ways of doing this. One of them is to have nothing but a puppet. Another one is to have somebody that comes on and mimics me in order to get to the place where it is.

"Miguel always said, 'We are going to have a great actor playing Jeff. He will come up with a characterisation that is not so much based on you, but is going to be based on this boy-child droid that he has to learn at its own pace, at its own speed.'

"It ended up becoming this thing that was much fresher."