There’s no point beating around the bush. I am talking to the director Robert Zemeckis, who won an Oscar in 1995 for Forrest Gump, about his new film Here, which opened in the US in November to some of the toughest reviews of his career. “It’s a film so soulless I questioned the point of it,” ranted Screen Rant. The New York Observer called it a “meandering bore”, while trade paper Variety homed in on the film’s “disappointingly generic” portrait of its characters. It seems life isn’t always like a box of chocolates, to misquote Gump.
Here’s box office was dented by the reviews in America, scraping around $12m (£9.75m). But is Zemeckis stung by the critics? “Well, sometimes you learn from the criticism and you understand what the criticism is,” he replies with a shrug, “and sometimes the criticism is completely unfounded, and then they’re criticising something that is absolutely perfect but they just don’t like it. So you have to just dismiss that and not even worry about it. I mean, everybody does the best that they can with the tools that they have. And criticism... is its own thing.”
