FORREST GUMP (1994) | Behind The Scenes of Tom Hanks Movie

okay everybody ready here we go now tom yeah you got to be real out of breath uh-huh working on the water is always hard it looks so easy but there's nothing harder than trying to make a movie anywhere near boats or water because everything moves and everything's floating and the sun's moving and the wind and the currents and all those things so we had this whole flotilla of boats and barges well bob comes up with these things ways of doing it was beyond my comprehension i never think you'd take a barge out there and drop you know leave it there and then steer it around with this tugboat it was it looked to me like one of the most complicated i didn't think it was going to work but there's no other way to control everything that bob had to control because you're out there with multiple cameras and vista vision and all that stuff but it was uh i mean it was summertime it was a south carolina the water was warm and it was a beautiful uh all the shrimp you could eat not that you'd want to after a while it's like what and then run back to the wheel then run back and like kind of do some steering and run back and talk to them and back all right i got a feeling they're over there laugh take a left okay ah no no left i said left jesus okay good which one left now [Music] [Music] [Applause] what the hell are you doing take a left i said left we're out there that's where we're going to find that shrimp my boy that's where we'll find him i love bob he knows his stuff funny is and one day they were rigging me up in the in the thing up there and and i turned to bob and i said you know because i have a lot of different rigs with my legs and different things i turned to bob and i said [Music] how many rigs can one man withstand and he goes oh this is nothing meryl streep had to act with a blue sock over her head i much uh prefer to be on location than shooting in hollywood what a cute little church isn't this a great little church you're very focused on the work you're in a in a strange place so you don't really have a lot of distractions hey leslie how old is this church didn't we find out pre-civil war because there's the blood of the injured soldiers under the floor here get to experience local color of where you are and and there's a lot of times that that spills into the movie the tape starts singing this lord look me up and let me stand [Music] [Music] and let's roll sound and playback [Music] [Applause] [Music] it was pretty powerful stuff standing in the midst of all them singing along they're a huge commodity they're a massively talented group of people that do a lot of dates [Applause] [Music] hey [Applause] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] cut good very nice when we arrived at oak alley there wasn't a home but that was a set that we built but we took a look at this and it was so much more iconic of the south than any town or any other fixture that you could imagine i mean these hundred year or older oak trees that were draping this road leading to this former home and so we designed this beautiful stately boarding house when i brought sally field out there for the first time she took a look and said my what a beautiful place and i said yeah we just finished building it and she said i mean this place isn't real that's showbiz for you i thought it had been there for a zillion years myself but evidently the house that was there right on that spot it had burnt down and no one had built it back and so they built it back there's a hole in the dialogue no there's a hole in i i don't get i see this is great and you put it down and you see the flag and you gotta get i gotta get you gotta get moving out soon you gotta get out all right i will okay i'll get out so whatever so you can meet me to her sooner all right okay all right great thanks get your chin that's good though so good very nice all right moving on well i don't know what do you guys think that's good great now you know what's good um tom is it you yeah you know you kind of go i got a pain here you know because then i'll see you oh i don't see that action okay yeah but even though i guess it's got to be the other place doesn't it i don't see that at all yeah just that that's good if you just do that yeah um you guys want to relax or stay there i i thought did we put this log here or was it always here and there are 100 years 100 years ago oh cause i think it's loaded with any numbers of it wasn't there a week ago just like the house you guys wanna and action sally aren't you going to eat forest mama what's it mean when you got a pain but you didn't get hurt the pain where yeah something broke oh you come back safe to me do you hear me cut okay very nice let's go home very nice beautiful yeah live up to this well i thought it'd be inspiring yeah great stuff good sally thank you that was fun yeah that's our first mama together yeah it's so is when we based ourselves in beaufort south carolina we discovered that there were a lot of outlying islands in the area that all had features that resembled different um terrain in vietnam when we were staging a gigantic scene where forrest was saving bubba was on fripp island which is the furthest outlying island in this island chain michael let's get on there again so we can get this set okay tom what has to happen is forrest has to go back and and find his his second best good friend and that's bubba don't fall down in the scene and the last time he goes in to keep looking for bubba he knows that they're going to palm the whole thing yeah they might have a minute baby so technically i had to carry michael t which is no easy feat so they they helped me out with some complicated rigging and monofilament lines and body harnesses and things like that tom hanks is a nut man time is crazy time is quiet and then all of a sudden he'll just blah just break out and just start doing this the shtick the name of that movie is peter peter the brother pain be very careful hey camera speed speed c speed speed four camera common mark clear set action the first time we went through i mean tom was running and it looked like you know bubba was sort of floating on his own like this sort of light feathery sack oh he's way high yeah it's all screwed up wait a minute he's like he's like two and a half feet too high yeah and then the next time we added a little more weight and then tom was barely able to even run because he had so much weight that he was you know carrying but we got it right eventually [Music] that's the one let's blow it so we need to check the gates yeah right now so we can't he wants to switch he's really aware of the ground a lot of people here i just want everybody to be able to count for everybody when the moment came that it actually uh went up in flames uh just uh just with me just a few steps in front of it a very very c i had i had to be very i couldn't miss step once otherwise i would have been killed uh because the gas flames were just a few feet actually the the napalm went off and i was asleep in my trailer actually after a long lunch but the way it looks is very very dicey stuff and i don't think i'm going to do my own stunts after after this movie is over i think i'll let somebody else do it for yes sir through this tree opening well that's great let's just let's just wedge but let's just let's just have the point in front of forest and bubba and we're wedging out but it's just not as wide as you would it's a wedge that's a little more narrow right thing that we never ever wanted to do in any of this movie was just do that kind of uh tabloid pastiche version of whatever it is because you don't want to get in a position where you know you're doing something that is just so incredibly wrong that it just it wouldn't happen uh that you're just so far off the base of any realism that you're kind of like you're doing some cheesy world war ii movie on the back lot at mgm you know we didn't want to do that we had captain dale dye who was probably the premier uh vietnam advisor we're gonna make a wedge folks alpha's here bravo is here i'm playing a lieutenant in a platoon i don't come from a military background at all i wasn't in the service so what we did was we went out to the jungle we lived out there for three days which is short by comparison to some of the other films that dale has done platoon i think he took them out to the philippines for three weeks uh pointless zorro right when zoro moves you'll see that's about all you'll see i'll go get my wife yes yeah go go take him i'll grab my line the script called for a whole variety of different rains in vietnam that were listed off almost in the same way that bubba listed off all the ways you cook shrimp you know doing rain that you know is running parallel to the ground is like nearly impossible i mean how do you get enough wind power to drive this rain just literally horizontal to the ground he was telling me about it oh it's gonna be it's coming great we got his jet engine and i tried to imagine what that would be like and i thought well it's probably like an engine of a jet stuck on what like a trailer well sure enough that's exactly what it is they just kind of pointed it at us fired it up and and blew kerosene exhaust on us it's not pleasant i'll tell you that right now but man that wind does blow [Music] you gotta do it again [Music] well for some reason what was that ritter doing on was there a ritter on tom that whole time yes well nothing um playback ian maybe we should do let's do one let's do one more and just stay right on time whatever he has to do [Music] [Music] ready [Music] you felt at that time yes and then eventually we'll never come back here again right well it was always part of the script that forest was relating the story to strangers on this on this bus bench the screenplay actually was scripted in very few places but i talked with tom about it early on i said after we establish this character about midway through production i think we should go and we should shoot you performing all of the what would end up in the film being narration uh on camera usually you know you just take it for granted that the vast majority of the movie is going to be voice over and you'll be doing it later and bob's idea to shoot it he said oh i think we got to shoot it all we got to be there we already got we are we really got to shoot it so i thought he's cr why i mean we're just going to have to redo it but if we don't have to redo it then we have it there in real time in the real place and and you know and it plays out in real scenes that's better now what are we doing with these cue cards where are they going to be for tom um let's just have one i always knew that we'd start off with those cards and by the time we'd rehearsed it enough i'd know it at a pot but it was just reams and reams and rings and reins and pages of dialogue but they were all so connected with images that we had already filmed or images that we had talked about so much that i hardly even needed them by the time the cameras were rolling i didn't even look at it hang on everyone it's not okay ready to go and background action and action tom when i was born my mama named before skunk hold on and action when i was born my mama named me forest because of a hero okay because of some general and action when i was born my mama named me forrest because of some general who was a hero in the civil war mama said we was ken to general's family some ways and he was a great man she said except he started up the ku klux klan grand exalted pish-pass or whatever they called himself anyways just one time they were they was out running around in their sheets in their underwear hanging everyone in sight general's horse tripped at something the general fell into a bunch of mud they must have mistaken the general for somebody else because the confusion all was dark out and seeing how he was covering mud they hung him too anyway that's how i got my name forrest gump and cut hey now where do you want where did what how the looks where do you want them i mean you know um what's on your mind you want to like totally conversational where i'm going all over like that or do you want me to like lock into it you know or just find it because i mean that was just everywhere i don't have to be everywhere i think it should be two places i think it should be what i think it should be yeah out there is the reminiscing angle which is that and then the conversation can i go this side of this course okay i was like just kind of especially late in the schedule the way it was it was just oh it's the last thing i thought i would want to do by the time we got to doing it it was the most fun that i had on the movie because you literally get to spin this kind of yarn so it's not just me recording the information but me relaying the story which is a big big difference that day on if i was going anywhere i was running [Applause] back and forth valentino as great an actor as tom hanks is he's a really good ping-pong player but he's not as good as what forrest has to become more power tom so we did that using movie magic you have the actors mime playing ping-pong and then you put the ball in later optically and cut [Music] again [Music] in typical movie fashion we hire the greatest ping-pong player in the world to be his opponent of course this guy's never played without a ball before he's out he's out he's a like a world-class ping-pong player and of course to ask him to pretend to play ping-pong is what the heart is he had such a tough time if valentino when i crank it up if he gets out of sync i want you just to be still until he gets in okay and then pick that up back okay okay and then because what you couldn't do you can't have both characters swinging at the same time so we had to have a metronome so that each character would know when to strike the ball and then we kept speeding it up and speeding it up and it was it was it wasn't that easy i tell you it was exhausting playing that ping pong game it was just she's it was very tough i'd rather actually play ping pong with a regular ball that was that was tough work see it though bob hey lisa here with more on tom hanks now the actor is no stranger to winning awards for his acting abilities and he along with spencer tracy remain the only two actors to have won back to back oscars hank's been for philadelphia in 1993 and forrest gump in 94. at the age of 45 he also became the youngest ever to receive the american film institute's life achievement award on june 12 2002. now do you like my t-shirt you get one for yourself and the link in the description

Channel: FilmIsNow Movie Bloopers & Extras

Views: 2,180,636

Keywords: Behind the Scenes of Forrest Gump, Making Of Forrest Gump, Forrest Gump, Forrest Gump 1994, making of, on-set, B-Roll, Behind the Scenes, green screen, Making of Documentary, drama movie, Tom Hanks, Robin Wright, Gary Sinise, Rebecca Williams, Sally Field, Michael Conner Humphreys, vietnam war, war hero, based on book, based on novel, Forrest Gump character, Robert Zemeckis movie, Winston Groom novel, FilmIsNow Extra

Id: 0s21LSWxH9w

Length: 25min 28sec (1528 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 13 2022