11th May 2023, Mumbai: Tom Hanks has revealed that he didn’t initially expect the audience to resonate with his Oscar-winning role in 1994’s Forrest Gump.
“‘Hi [director] Bob [Zemeckis], I have a question. Would anyone be interested in this movie?'” said the ‘A Man Called Otto’ star in York on Tuesday night. told New to People’s The New Yorker about his thoughts while filming the movie at Symphony Space. “‘This guy is sitting on stuff with these stupid shoes and this cuckoo suit with a suitcase full of Curious George books and stuff. We’re here.’ Am I doing something meaningful to someone?’ Hanks said wondering.
Hanks said Zemeckis called the movie a “minefield. ‘We may be sowing the seeds of our own destruction,`” he said Zemeckis told him “`Any footstep we take can be a Bouncing Betty that’ll blow our n— right off.'” At the time, Zemeckis had already directed “Back to the Future,” “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” and “Romancing the Stone” before making “Forrest Gump.” He would later direct Hanks again in “Cast Away,” “The Polar Express,” last year`s “Pinocchio” and the upcoming “Here.”
Hanks added that Zemeckis taught him to have “faith” in what they`re shooting and worry about the rest later. “Bob Zemeckis – God bless him, I’ve worked with him more than once – landed on the absolute truth of anybody who has gone forward and said, `We are going to commit something to film today, and eventually we’ll cut this into something.` You do not know if it is going to work out. You can only have faith.”
In 1994, “Forrest Gump” producer Wendy Finerman told the New York Times the movie took nearly a decade to get done and at first no one was interested. “Actors, directors, agents, studio people were just not interested in the project,” Finerman said, adding that it was “partly because of ‘Rain Man,'” which came out in 1988. “People would ask me what I was working on, and I’d say, ‘Forrest Gump,’ and they’d get that glazed look. I knew they were thinking ‘When is she going to give up?’ 1994.
The film ended up winning six Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actor for Hanks and Zemeckis, and Best Director.
Last year, the 66-year-old actor won an Oscar for ‘Forrest Gump’ against criticism that it sparked a wave of ‘Boomer nostalgia’ for shortlisted films like ‘Pulp Fiction’ and ‘The Shawshank Redemption’. defended.
“The problem with Forrest Gump is that it made a billion dollars,” Hanks told The New York Times in 2022. “If we had made the movie, Bob [Zemeckis] and I would have been geniuses.” Bad problem? No, but there are books about the greatest movies of all time, but no Forrest Gump.”
Written by: Khushboo Singh