The filmmaker behind Forrest Gump has revealed that filming didn’t go as smoothly as he’d hoped, recalling the moment a studio executive screamed at him for going over budget.
Robert Zemeckis is known for films such as Romancing the Stone, the Back to the Future trilogy, Who Framed Roger Rabbit and of course, Forrest Gump. The now-iconic film was marred with delays and was even dropped by its production company in its early stages, but it was thanks to a dedicated few that Gump’s story finally made it to the silver screen.
While Zemeckis has made a name for himself as a successful director, during an episode of the WTF With Mark Macron Podcast titled “Episode 1584 – Robert Zemeckis,” he revealed that movie studios haven’t always understood his vision.
He explained that during the filming of Forrest Gump, a studio executive pushed to have the Monument Valley scene shot in Griffith Park, California, instead of on location in Arizona. Despite this, the now-iconic moment was ultimately filmed at the 13th-mile marker on Route 163 in Monument Valley, where Forrest famously stops running and delivers the unforgettable line, “Put the past behind you.”
However, this was only thanks to the determination of both Zemeckis and Hanks.
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Newsweek emailed a spokesperson for Zemeckis for comment on Monday.
“The studio, they didn’t know, they didn’t know what we were making and we were going a lot over budget and we were hiding out overages so they got, they got really angry,” the filmmaker explained.
“So at one point, when we finally got the movie back to L.A., we still had to do the scene where Tom is running in Monument Valley and they were so angry at us. I mean the guy who was running the studio at the time, he was screaming, he said: ‘You realize what problems you’re causing me in New York? You realize what problem—I said, ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘Shoot the goddamn thing in Griffin Park.'”
Zemeckis explained that he and Steve Starkey, one of the film’s producers, managed to find extra funds and were determined to film in Monument Valley for one day. However, since it was December, there was a chance it would snow.
The studio said they wouldn’t pay the insurance bond and said Zemeckis and Hanks would have to put the bond up for the insurance themselves. Thankfully, Hanks agreed to it and the duo provided $1.5 million out of their pocket so that the scene could be filmed as they had envisioned it.
“So we paid for our own weather insurance and then they couldn’t, then they had to say, ‘Yes, go do it.’…It was a beautiful day,” Zemeckis said.
This isn’t the only issue that the cast and crew faced when filming the classic movie. Forrest Gump originally had a modest budget of $55 million, but before production could get underway, Paramount Studios decided to slash that by $10 million.
At the time, Sherry Lansing who had become the CEO of Paramount, claimed the film was too expensive to make and suggested cutting scenes set in Forrest’s shrimp boat and during the Vietnam War.
When Hanks and Zemeckis complained that she shouldn’t try to make the changes, Lansing threatened to shut the movie down. It was thanks to the director and actor contributing part of their fee to the production that this didn’t happen, with both providing almost all of the $10 million that had been cut.
