Forrest Gump: these cult scenes of the film were very difficult to shoot for Tom Hanks

The filming of Forrest Gump is far from having been a walk in the park for Tom Hanks and several scenes have also been real challenges for the American actor. Explanations.

Forrest Gump is one of the most cult films of the last decades and certainly of the filmography of Tom Hanks. The feature film has also been rewarded with no less than seven Oscars, including Best Actor for Hanks, the second of his career.

Nevertheless, making such a masterpiece is far from having been easy for the American actor, as he recently confided during from a panel at the New Yorker Live. Tom Hanks then revealed how exhausting it was to shoot the sequence during which Forrest crosses the United States running, but also how it had impacted the filming of another emblematic scene.

Tom Hanks exhausted from filming Forrest Gump’s run across the US

“I was so tired because we had just shot for 27 days straight. Remember when Forrest ran across the country? Well, there was only one way to get those scenes back then. You had to fly to each place, put on the costume, run for an hour and a half, then come back, fly back to New Hampshire for example and start all over again”says Hanks.

Obviously, such a cadence had a strong impact on the actor, as he explained to the panel audience: “So I’m tired. I don’t know what’s going on. The scenes on the bench have an ocean of dialogue and we shoot them in a day and a half”. That’s when Hanks felt compelled to confide his doubts to Robert Zemeckis, director of Forrest Gump.

“I told Bob [Zemeckis, ndlr], ‘Bob, my head is fragile, exhausted. We have to do all these scenarios with different people and each of them has a page and a half of dialogue. I will never be able to remember all of this”reveals the American actor during the panel.

When Forrest Gump play it sitcom

That’s when Zemeckis’ ingenuity came into play. To avoid putting too much pressure on his first role, the director decided to shoot the sequence from the bench using several angles using four different cameras. A technique borrowed from sitcoms which, until a certain time, were filmed using several cameras. This was particularly the case ofI Love Lucyan example also given by Zemeckis during his interview with the actor.

As a result, Tom Hanks could have cardboard serving as teleprompters. If at the start the interpreter of Forrest Gump was not frankly delighted by this option, the trick worked and the result is a real success, especially in view of the success of the film.