The first look for Here, the highly anticipated film reuniting Tom Hanks and Robin Wright with Forrest Gump director Robert Zemeckis and screenwriter Eric Roth, has been revealed.
Hanks and Wright appear several decades younger as the film, which is based on Richard McGuire’s 2014 graphic novel of the same name, takes place entirely in one living room over 100 years, with the camera fixed in one position for the entire 104-minute film.
Hanks and Wright play Richard and Margaret, the couple that lives in the house from the 1960s to the present day, thanks to makeup and digital de-ageing technology.
In an interview, Zemeckis explains what drew him to the film and why the single camera approach intrigued him.
“The single perspective never changes, but everything around it does,” he told Vanity Fair.
“It’s actually never been done before. There are similar scenes in very early silent movies, before the language of montage was invented. But other than that, yeah, it was a risky venture.”
Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman used similar technology on Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci, which wasn’t particularly well received by everyone. On whether that is a concern, Zemeckis said he’s referred to as someone who uses visual effects in all his films, but they only exist to support the story.
“I’ve always been, for some reason, labelled as this visual effects guy. But those were always there to serve as the character arc,” Zemeckis said.
“There’s always been a restlessness in trying. I’ve always thought that our job as filmmakers is to show the audience things that they don’t see in real life.”
Zemeckis also added that the technology can only go so far and the actors and their character work make the performances believable.
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“It only works because the performances are so good,” he said.
“Both Tom and Robin understood instantly that, ‘Okay, we have to go back and channel what we were like 50 years ago or 40 years ago, and we have to bring that energy, that kind of posture, and even raise our voices higher. That kind of thing.”
While the film will primarily focuses on Hanks and Wright’s characters, it will also show the previous inhabitants of the house: Paul Bettany and Kelly Reilly, who play Hanks’ parents, Michelle Dockery and Gwilym Lee who play the home’s first residents, David Fynn and Ophelia Lovibond, who live there in the 1920s, and Nicholas Pinnock and Nikki Amuka-Bird, who live in the home after Hanks and Wright, with their housekeeper, played by Anya Marco Harris.
