Exactly 30 years after the release of Forrest Gump, Tom Hanks and Robin Wright are back together — alongside director Robert Zemeckis — for Here, a single-shot film that takes place entirely in one room and follows multiple generations of families.
Hanks and Wright play a couple in the project, as their relationship is tracked throughout the years. At the AFI Fest premiere in Los Angeles on Friday, Hanks said working together now is the “same exact process” as it was in the ’90s.
“We’ve been having the same conversation again and again; we’ve run into each other every now and again. I will say that on the very first day when we first sat down with our scripts to start busting it up, there was a kind of like, ‘Can you believe this? How did this happen?’” Hanks told The Hollywood Reporter of reuniting with Wright. “But that was then, this is now, and we know better, so we just pick up with the ease, the luxury of knowing each other backward and forward and great, great trust and affection.”
The actor added that when he first signed on, he didn’t know Wright would be his co-star; Zemeckis later started floating the idea, and “I said, ‘Well wouldn’t that be great.’ Then you have are we available? Can it work out? All this other stuff happens,” Hanks continued. “But we have a thing when it comes down to working together, ‘Yes of course,’ that’s the only thing you say.”
Zemeckis echoed that he didn’t have a grand plan for a Forrest Gump reunion from the start but was “very, very fortunate” that both stars said yes. To track the actors over the story’s decades, the team worked with AI studio Metaphysic on a tool called Metaphysic Live, which created face swaps and de-aging effects on top of actors’ performances in real-time.
“It was vital to tell the story — we couldn’t make the movie five years ago, so it was very, very fortunate that this tool arrived right when we needed it,” Zemeckis said, explaining it was basically “digital makeup.” It also allowed the cast to see themselves 20 or 30 years younger while filming the scene — rather than waiting for visual effects to be added later — as the filmmaker added, “They look at it and they go, ‘Oh, I’ve got to be a little bit more spry, I have to move a little quicker, I have to raise my voice a little bit.’ It was important for them to see it.”
Here hits theaters on Nov. 1.
