“When I read Richard McGuire’s graphic novel for the first time, I was immediately impressed by it and saw what was very close to the movie I made. I could see clearly how this could translate,” Here‘s legendary director Robert Zemeckis explains. ‘However, I didn’t know whether it would work until we did it, and then, of course, I was very aware that it was a minefield all the way through. I was avoiding those pitfalls as best I could, but I could see it as a compelling movie right from that moment.”
The drama spans decades of events on a single spot of land, from its original Native American inhabitants in a glade through the days of Benjamin Franklin up to and beyond the modern day. However, at the heart of Here‘s narrative journey are Richard and Margaret Young, played by Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, and their extended family. Here lands exclusively in theaters on Friday, November 1, 2024.
Here’s What Connects ‘Here’ And ‘Forrest Gump’
The film, which is also produced and co-written by Zemeckis, reunites the director, Hanks, Wright, and co-writer Eric Roth, for the first time since Forrest Gump 30 years ago. However, he doesn’t consider Here to be a companion piece to that film and it is certainly not a sequel.
“When I said to Tom, ‘Hey, take a look at this graphic novel,’ he understood it was going to be really interesting,” the filmmaker recalls. “Two things happened very quickly. One was when Eric and I finished the script. I immediately sent it to Tom, and he said, ‘I love it. I’m in.’ Of course, I thought he was perfect for the Richard character, for all his qualities as an actor. The next day, I called him and said, ‘You know who would be wonderful as Margaret? Robin.’ He said, ‘Oh my god, I agree completely,’ so I sent her the script that day, and she called me two days later and said, ‘I love this. I’m in.'”
“I didn’t feel it when I was writing because I never do, but once I put it on the shelf for about a week or two and then pulled it out and reread it, I could see those two actors as those characters.”
With Here, Zemeckis also reunites with British actress Kelly Reilly, who he last directed in the 2012 drama Flight.
“Again, she was my first choice for that character,” he reveals. She plays Rose, the mother of Hanks’ character. “I love the fact that she embraced it. She was very enthusiastic because it was a departure from many other characters she played. I’m always looking to reunite with actors that I love working with.”
There’s A Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow In ‘Here’
Zemeckis says Roth brought “so much humanity to the subject matter,” but there are several scenes in the graphic novel the director put in the movie verbatim.
“There’s one where that’s a very short moment in the novel where the son is talking to the father, played by Paul Bettany, who’s ill and on the sofa bed,” he says. “Eric and I said, ‘Okay, that’s the center of this family’s story, and we’ll write it from this moment on both sides,’ so that’s what we did.”
While it feels theatrical, Zemeckis, who has also directed all three Back to the Future movies, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Death Becomes Her, and The Polar Express, never considered adapting the graphic novel as a stage play. The snapshots of life over time give an air of a piece of a theatre of a sort, namely Carousel of Progress at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida. However, while Here‘s director gets the comparison, he says there’s a fundamental difference between the two.
“That is theatre, but an interesting thing happens there because the audience is on a carousel that goes around these four different prosceniums,” Zemeckis explains. “Our movie doesn’t have a stage, but it has a view of the world that keeps changing. Time keeps passing through, and so does life. The thing that you can’t do in Carousel of Progress, and the thing you can’t do in any theatrical proscenium, is have actors walk into a close-up. That’s only something you can do in cinema.”
(Left to right) Robin Wright and Tom Hanks star in ‘Here.’
Robert Zemeckis Talks De-Ageing Tom Hanks And Robin Wright
Another captivating element of Here is the de-aging of Hanks and Wright to look like younger versions of themselves in their respective roles.
“I know exactly why it works, and that’s because the actors are so good. The actors perform those youthful stages magnificently,” Zemeckis, who is no stranger to using state-of-the-art effects in his movies, enthuses. “We were able to have a technology which evolved to the place where we saw a very rough version of it in real-time, so actors could evaluate what they were doing, and then they could say, ‘Okay, I’m going to adjust this. I’ve got to be more youthful here in my physicality.’ Like all movie effects, the illusion only ever works because the human performance underneath it is what’s making it work.”
Almost the entirety of Here takes place in a location in front of the viewer, but in one scene, audiences briefly get to see what’s going on behind them. There’s a reason the director used that sparingly.
“That predominant view is the ultimate fly-on-the-wall story, which is what the movie is absolutely about,” Zemeckis says. “What’s interesting is that once the audience becomes aware that they’re only going to see what happens in this one view, it becomes very intimate in a strange way. The audience understands, ‘Oh, we’re not going to know what they talk about in the bedroom or the kitchen. We’re only going to know anything about these people when they’re in this one view of this one room in this house, which happens to be a living room.’ That becomes a very powerful intimacy that the audience then has because they focus and lean in to understand what the characters are doing and saying.”
(Left to right) Robert Zemeckis, Tom Hanks and Robin Wright on the set of ‘Here.’
Robert Zemeckis Wants To Give Audiences What They Want
While he’s happy with the end product, Zemeckis is curious to see if audiences turn out for the theatrical experience. He’s confident he is giving them what they want.
“I can only hope that audiences want to see something that is unique, different, well made, entertaining, that contains an emotional component so that a movie can move them,” he muses. “We’ve done our best to create that. I guess we’ll have to wait and see if audiences want to see what they claim they do. We’ll see.”
While Here looks backward and forward in time, Zemeckis is firmly focused on the future. With Forrest Gump turning 30 this year and Back to the Future just months away from its 40th anniversary, milestones for some of the director’s best-loved movies are coming thick and fast. However, there’s another of his projects he’d be interested in having a conversation about.
“I think Tales from the Crypt could come back and be wonderful and fun anytime,” he concludes. “Absolutely. Why not? No one has talked (to me) about bringing back Tales from the Crypt, but it would be a lot of fun.”
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