For Oscar-winning writer-director Robert Zemeckis, the decision to make Here came out of something that has fascinated humans for generations: the invisible stories that haunt the spaces around us. “I was staying in a house several hundred years old,” he says. “I was looking at those stone walls and thinking how many lives had passed through the same place where I was sitting. I imagined all the people who were vibrant and excited and dealing with life, with its terror and its happiness and its sadness and sickness and health. Those windows and walls have been there for a long time, and different lives have passed through that door.”
Reuniting the director, writer and stars of Forrest Gump, Here is an original film about multiple families and a special place they inhabit, directed by Robert Zemeckis from a screenplay by Eric Roth & Zemeckis, based on the graphic novel by Richard McGuire.
Told much in the style of the acclaimed graphic novel by Richard McGuire on which it is based, Tom Hanks and Robin Wright star in a tale of love, loss, laughter and life, all of which happen right Here.
Here tells the story of the generations of people who live out their lives in one spot on Earth. Stretching from prehistory to the present day, the film is an odyssey of all the love and loss that can unfold in a single place.
“Here is almost a time travel movie,” says producer Jack Rapke. “Time is moving, but the space we’re in is constant. Styles change, couches get threadbare, new people come in and change everything, but the geometry and geography of that room never changes. There’s a blend of very different storylines about life lived to its fullest, or perhaps lives that weren’t quite lived to their fullest.”
For Tom Hanks, Here is about the countless choices and crossroads that make up a human life. “Everybody always says, ‘oh, life’s too short,’” Hanks says. “No, it’s not! Life is long! It goes on for a really long time, and with that comes a constant refocusing of reference points. Everything you give up is based on one moment. Everything that you say out of anger or love is always based on this one individual moment, and eventually those individual moments become this kind of primordial soup of where you came from. And the only thing you can be is who you are at the next moment that comes along.”
“We all know we’re not going to be here forever,” says Oscar-winning writer Eric Roth. “But while we’re here, what are the moments that matter? As we picked and chose what we were going to take from the book, we thought about all the things in life that seem fleeting at the time, but in retrospect, are actually everything to us.”
A Mosaic Of Stories
At the center of the film’s mosaic of stories is the relationship between Richard Young, played by Hanks, and his wife, Margaret, played by Robin Wright. “Richard and Margaret are brought together because they fall in love,” says Zemeckis. “They go through a lot of the trials and tribulations that life throws at you, but they really do love each other. It’s that love that keeps them together through all the life issues they have to deal with.”
Richard dreams of being an artist, but when he becomes a teenage father, he feels pressured to create a stable life for himself instead of pursuing his passion. “Richard grows up in a house where the threat of money, the threat of not having money, is the lifeblood of what goes on,” says Hanks. “His parents grew up in a very volatile, dangerous kind of daily existence. That’s not the case for the generation that was born after World War II.” That generational divide between Al and Richard has given Hanks a personal connection to Richard’s character. “I was always forced through this prism of being worried about money, terrorized about money,” he says. “That’s the difference between a happy-go-lucky, joy-filled life and one of constant burden.”
For Hanks, Zemeckis, Roth, and Wright, Here is a joyful reunion: it’s the first time the four have worked together since Zemeckis’s 1994 groundbreaking, Oscar-winning film Forrest Gump. “We all know each other so well,” says Hanks. “Any time we had a meeting or a conversation, there is a ‘no ego’ rule of law that says that any suggestion is to be listened to. One of the things Bob always says is, ‘what do you think of this?’ and we start mixing it up, which is a huge advantage in coming into it. The long gestalt communication that we have is surprisingly void of past references. We didn’t sit around and talk about, well, we did this on blank, or the four or five movies that I’ve made with Bob. They’re gone, baby, gone.”
“I’ve been looking to do a movie with Tom and Robin and Eric forever because I just love working with them,” says Zemeckis. “And any time you get a chance to work with people who you enjoy working with and who are fantastically talented, you do it.”
Wright plays Richard’s wife Margaret, who moves in with Richard and his parents while Richard tries to figure out how to support his growing family. “Margaret and Richard meet in high school and just hit it off,” says Wright. “And then all of a sudden she’s pregnant. She dreams of becoming a lawyer, and she lives in an era in which women are starting to get more opportunities, but she has to move her whole life in with Richard and his family. She’s in pain, and she starts to resent Richard for keeping her in a home that doesn’t feel like hers. She’s also internally angry with her mother-in-law Rose for just being a housewife and giving up her voice.”
“You can ask, why are these people together?” says Hanks. “Are they opposites or do they complement each other? Is their happiness true happiness, or is it a chimera? Is their relationship something they actually deserved, or is it something that just happened to them? The beauty of Richard and Margaret is that they accept that once there’s this fabulous other creature involved—their child—it’s going to end up being the definition of their lives.”
But Hanks and Wright’s characters are only two pieces of the puzzle. Paul Bettany plays Richard’s father, the troubled WWII veteran Al. “We first meet Al when he’s 22,” says Bettany. “He was six years old during the Great Depression, so he’s terrified of poverty and very focused on keeping a roof over his family’s head. The stress of that, coupled with undiagnosed PTSD, leads to him self-medicating with alcohol. He’s perhaps not the greatest father or husband that has ever been, but I feel such love for him because he’s just desperate to do the right thing. He’s trapped in a very rigid gender role where he believes the beginning and end of his commitment is to provide, and I think that’s as suffocating for him as it is for his wife and children. But he adores his family. They’re everything to him.”
At the same time, Al doesn’t know how to give Richard the support he needs as a young father. “It’s sort of heartbreaking,” Bettany says, “because his reaction to the news that Margaret is pregnant is to say to Richard, ‘I wanted something more for you.’ But he does it in a way that suggests that some version of life stopped for him when he himself had children.”
Kelly Reilly plays Rose, Al’s wife and Richard’s mother. “I come from a line of women who were centrally stay-at-home mothers and homemakers,” says Reilly. “There was a beautiful pride in caring for their families and being the heart of the home. In previous generations, career opportunities or ambitions outside of the home were not as easily attainable for women as they are now. As we know, these have been hard-fought by the women who came before us, but I truly love Rose’s devotion to her role as a wife and mother; I didn’t want to judge it as incomplete. She gives it everything, and it brings her so much joy.
Hanks found it intriguing to explore the dynamic of three generations sharing one roof. “In all those scenes, what isn’t said is as important as what is said,” he explains. “There are moments of silence that really do speak volumes about what goes on in that house. Do you ignore what just happened, or do you have to comment on it? Do you have to fix it, or do you get up and leave the room? These are the dynamics that go into any family that is inhabiting the same space. There are pressures and blessings that have to be navigated, enjoyed, and dealt with.”
Along with Richard and his family, Here tells many other stories, including that of Pauline, a fretful 1908 wife and mother played by Michelle Dockery. “Pauline’s husband is a pilot,” Dockery says. “She’s not happy about his flying interests, because it’s such a dangerous hobby. She’s quite an anxious person, and she’s really terrified of something bad happening all the time. She likes to be in control. But no matter what, you can’t predict what’s going to happen.”
Along with the film’s human cast, there’s another major character in Here: the house itself
“One of the things we’ve said a lot is that the room is our primary character,” says producer Jeremy Johns. “There’s the primary cast, of course. But the room has played such a big role.”
“You, as an audience member, are like the walls,” says producer Derek Hogue. “You’re present, seeing the story unfold in this space. When the characters have a bad day at the job, getting fired, going to graduation—normally the story would fall on those beats. But in our movie, you get to see the aftermath of life beating up every character. You see it from a different perspective, with different energy.”
To create that living, breathing space—along with the epic story of the generations who pass through it—the filmmakers relied on a variety of filmmaking techniques.
Portraying the cast members at different ages, from teenagers to grandparents
Zemeckis knew he would have to think carefully about how to portray the cast members at different ages, from teenagers to grandparents. To create a seamless and believable sense of aging, the filmmakers worked with VFX studio Metaphysic, which used thousands of archival images of Hanks and other cast members to create digital makeup for the actors.
“Bob has historically always pushed the cutting edge of technology,” says Hogue. “This technology essentially learns what a person looked like at a particular age. Then you feed it some new footage and say, ‘make that person look like they’re this age,’ and it will effectively close its eyes and imagine what that person looks like. It’s finally pushed us through the uncanny valley and into something that is believable and looks beautiful. In some ways, it’s more flexible and usable than traditional face replacement, because it enables the actors’ microexpressions to come through. That was one of the things that Bob always hated about prosthetics—it’s hard for the actor to move and emote the way they naturally would.”
“When you’re doing a story that’s as complicated as this one, where you’re in different windows of time overlapping each other, that would be a very difficult thing to do with different actors playing the same character,” says Zemeckis. “This tool allows really great actors like Tom Hanks or Robin Wright to perform their characters as young people, so the audience doesn’t have to take the leap of looking at a completely different person and saying, ‘oh, that was him when he was young.’”
Dual monitors on set showed the cast and crew what each actor looked like, in real time, with and without their digital makeup. “On one monitor, we had raw footage,” says VFX supervisor Kevin Baillie. “On the other monitor, we had very young faces swapped onto the actors, and the monitors were both running as if they were being filmed through a live-action camera in real time. So Bob could watch young Tom and Robin perform live on set, as he was directing them.”
That setup helped each cast member make sure their movements and mannerisms matched the ages they were playing. “It’s one thing to put a 25-year-old face on Tom Hanks with a 60-year-old’s posture,” says Rapke. “It’s another if Tom can adjust his posture so that it matches the face. It was amazing how the actors could make adjustments based on what they were seeing on the monitors.”
“Regardless of how successful the digital makeup is, if the performance it’s being put onto isn’t entirely believable, it’s not going to work,” says Baillie. “Having real-time feedback that the actors could work with was crucial in making the movie successfully.”
Zemeckis also wanted to honor the innovative storytelling in the original graphic novel. “Richard McGuire’s book is fascinating, because the novel takes place in one visual position on Earth and the world changes around it,” Zemeckis says. “McGuire does it graphically by having these panels painted over the same view. There are different panels in different times, and sometimes they’re larger, sometimes they’re smaller, and sometimes they overlap as the years change. In translating the story to film, we used that same visual look to capture the feeling of different stories overlapping and speaking to each other across time.”
Because the drama of the film all unfolds in one place, Zemeckis employed a unique style of filming, using just one camera angle to capture a wide view of the characters’ lives. “It took an entire lifetime of movie-making to know how to tell this story,” says Zemeckis. “When you do a movie that takes place from one camera position through centuries of time, every single scene has to work within that frame. It sounds really simple, but to make every single scene work for every character in every different time period, it becomes the most complicated set that you can imagine.”
“We actually developed a new lens at Panavision under the guidance of the genius Dan Sasaki,” says director of photography Don Burgess. “We were searching for this particular look. We were just searching for depth of field. We were searching for the perfect angle of the camera and the perfect height, so that Bob could block his actors and structure the scenes, and we could tell the story from minimal focus to infinity.”
However, since the camera couldn’t be moved or adjusted, factors like the actors’ height differences required some creative blocking. “I had a little trench I walked in,” laughs Bettany, who measures 6’3”. “The Paul Bettany Trench. All of these pieces would come out, and it was like Tetris fitting them back in. Sometimes there were people beneath the camera swapping it out for when different people were walking. So as I get closer to the camera, I stay in shot because actually I’m walking down a slope.”
The filmmakers also used LED technology to make the set feel richer and more immersive. “Nowadays, we use something called virtual production, where the visual effects process is actually brought on set,” says Baillie. “In this film, everything that you see out the window of the room is actually projected on a big computer screen, effectively, using a high-performance video game engine to create the neighborhood outside. So visual effects now is no longer just what’s in post-production. It’s actually happening during the shoot as well.”
“When we first started, we thought, well, the obvious thing we’re going to do is just put a blue screen outside the window, because we have so many seasons and times,” says Zemeckis. “But the LED screen is magnificent because you can just change the light in real time. You can say, ‘I’d like the sun to be a little lower,’ and they just dial it in and the shadows become longer outside your window. You don’t have to wait weeks for post-production to see how it all comes together.”
“The LED makes the lighting feel real,” says Burgess. “What really sells it and makes it believable is the way the light from the LED hits the coffee table, the reflections in the mirror, a painted wall, the floor.”
Production designer Ashley Lamont used extensive research to design every aspect of the film’s many historical environments, both inside the house and on the LED. “Even in the prehistoric scenes, Bob and Ashley were very careful about making sure there was some language in the frame at all times that signaled that we are in the same place but in a different time,” says Hogue. “Whether that was a rock or the colonial house out the window, you always know where you are. There’s something connecting you and showing you that this is the same place.”
“You really have to art direct every single aspect of that set,” says Lamont. “Every single shot is a oner, and you can’t tweak anything, so you have to love it.”
Along with the set, the costumes had to both convey the essence of each character and anchor the audience in each time period. “This film is a saga made up of individual moments,” says Zemeckis. “So when Eric and I were writing the script, we had to hone in on the ‘red dot’ of each scene and make sure that came through. Costumes had to do the same thing. The costume has to present who the character is in each time period. We needed someone who is as brilliant as our costume designer Joanna Johnston to be able to understand that and pull that off. You can imagine when you’ve got so many characters, so many different costume changes, and you’re manipulating them through so many different time periods, and they all have to work in the wide shots and closer shots. That was very important.”
All of those technical decisions, from bleeding-edge technology to classic practical effects, combine to tell a story both intimate and epic in scope. “We’re sitting here, right now, on a sphere that rotates once every 24 hours and is moving at 1,000 miles an hour, but we don’t feel it,” muses producer Bill Block. “This movie evokes a similar feeling. Heraclitus said that no man ever steps in the same river twice, because he’s not the same man and it’s not the same river. That notion of flux, impermanence, mutability—that’s what this story is about.”
ROBERT ZEMECKIS (Director/Co-Writer) won an Academy Award®, a Golden Globe and a Director’s Guild of America Award for Best Director for the hugely successful and popular motion picture Forrest Gump. The film’s numerous honors also included a Best Picture Oscar and, for Tom Hanks, a Best Actor Oscar®.
Early in his career, Zemeckis co-wrote with Bob Gale and directed Back to the Future, which was the top-grossing release of 1985 and for which Zemeckis shared Oscar® and Golden Globe nominations for Best Original Screenplay. He then went on to helm the sequels Back to the Future Part II and Part III, completing one of the most successful film franchises in motion picture history.
Zemeckis has continued to bring an impressive number of popular films to the screen including the comedies Used Cars and I Wanna Hold Your Hand, the romantic adventure Romancing the Stone starring Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner, and the macabre comedy hit Death Becomes Her starring Meryl Streep, Bruce Willis and Goldie Hawn.
He also directed Who Framed Roger Rabbit, cleverly blending live action and animation in a feature film, resulting in a worldwide box office smash hit. Zemeckis then re-teamed with Hanks, directing and producing the unique contemporary drama Cast Away, which opened to critical and audience acclaim.
He directed and produced Contact, starring Jodie Foster and Matthew McConaughey, based on the best-selling novel by Carl Sagan. He also co-wrote and directed the motion-capture film The Polar Express starring Tom Hanks as a charming train conductor taking children on a magical adventure to the North Pole.
Zemeckis produced and directed his second motion-caption film, Beowulf, which starred Anthony Hopkins and Angelina Jolie, based on one of the oldest surviving pieces of Anglo-Saxon literature, written before the 10th Century A.D. He released another advanced motion-capture film, A Christmas Carol, based on the celebrated and beloved classic Charles Dickens story, which he both wrote and directed for The Walt Disney Studios.
Zemeckis returned to live action direct with the critically-acclaimed dramatic feature Flight for Paramount Pictures, starring Denzel Washington. Under the direction of Zemeckis, Washington received an Academy Award© nomination for his role.
For The Walk, he directed Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Ben Kingsley in the story of French high-wire artist Philippe Petit’s historic 1974 attempt to cross the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City.
He directed the romantic thriller Allied, starring Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard, telling the compelling story of the relationship between a Canadian Intelligence Officer and a French Resistance Fighter against the backdrop of WWII in 1942 North Africa.
Along with Caroline Thompson, Zemeckis wrote the screenplay for Welcome to Marwen, which he directed for Universal Pictures. The film starred Steve Carell as real life artist Mark Hogancamp, who created a miniature WWI-era village as a way to recover from a violent assault. He then directed The Witches for Warner Bros. Studios.
Zemeckis produced such films as The Frighteners, Monster House, and Last Holiday, and as a producer brought the true life story of The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio starring Julianne Moore and Woody Harrelson to the big screen. Along with Bob Gale, he wrote Trespass. He and Gale also wrote 1941, which began a long-time association with Steven Spielberg.
Zemeckis helmed Pinocchio, which he co-wrote for The Walt Disney Studios. He was nominated for Outstanding Producer of Televised or Streamed Motion Pictures by the Producers Guild of America.
In 1988 Zemeckis, Jack Rapke and Steve Starkey partnered to form ImageMovers, a production company dedicated to telling character-driven stories across many genres for film and television incorporating both cutting-edge and innovative digital technology.
For the small screen, his directing credits include episodes of Spielberg’s “Amazing Stories” and HBO’s “Tales from the Crypt.” He served as EP on “Medal of Honor” for Netflix, “Blue Book” for The History Channel, and “Manifest” for NBC and Warner Bros.
In March, 2001 the USC School of Cinema-Television celebrated the opening of the Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts. This state-of-the-art center is the country’s first and only fully digital training center and houses the latest in non-linear production and post-production equipment as well as stages, a 50-seat screening room, and USC student-run television station Trojan Vision.
Here will close out the 2024 60th Anniversary edition of the Chicago Film Festival, where Zemeckis will receive the Festival’s Founder’s Legacy Award.
Academy Award® winner ERIC ROTH (Co-Writer) Eric Roth attended the University of California at Santa Barbara, Columbia University, and UCLA. His first produced screenplay was Robert Mulligan’s The Nickel Ride, which premiered at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival.
Among the movies Mr. Roth has written include The Drowning Pool with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward; Suspect starring Cher, Dennis Quaid and Liam Neeson; Mr. Jones starring Richard Gere; and Rhapsody in August for the legendary director Akira Kurosawa. He wrote the Academy Award® for Best Picture-winning Forrest Gump, for which he won the Oscar® and the Writers Guild Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. Other films include The Horse Whisperer directed by and starring Robert Redford; The Insider, for which he was nominated along with Michael Mann for Best Adapted Screenplay; Ali, directed by Michael Mann and starring Will Smith; Munich directed by Steven Spielberg, for which he was nominated along with Tony Kushner for Best Adapted Screenplay; The Good Shepherd directed by Robert De Niro and starring Matt Damon; The Curious Case of Benjamin Button directed by David Fincher and starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, for which Roth was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay; Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close directed by Stephen Daldry and starring Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock, which was nominated for Best Picture; and A Star is Born starring Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga, for which he was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay along with Bradley Cooper and Will Fetters. Roth produced David Fincher’s Mank starring Gary Oldman and Amanda Seyfried, which was nominated in 2021 for Best Picture. In 2022 he was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay along with Denis Villeneuve and Jon Spaihts for Dune, directed by Denis Villeneuve and starring Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya. He wrote with Martin Scorsese Killers of the Flower Moon, directed by Mr. Scorsese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro and Lily Gladstone, which was nominated in 2024 for a Best Picture Academy Award® as well as for a BAFTA Award for Best Film, a Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture and Best Screenplay, and a WGA Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.
In television, Roth was the executive producer of five-time Emmy Award-nominated Best Drama “House of Cards” for Netflix, “Berlin Station” for Paramount Television and Epix, and 2018 Emmy Award-nominated Outstanding Limited Series “The Alienist” for Paramount Television and TNT. He is executive producing with Billy Crystal the show “Before” for Apple TV+.
Roth won the prestigious Laurel Award for Screen in 2012, the Writers Guild of America West’s lifetime achievement award. He lives in Los Angeles and has 7 children and 6 grandchildren.
RICHARD McGUIRE (Author) is a regular contributor to The New Yorker. His comics have appeared in The New York Times, McSweeney’s, Le Monde, and Libération. He has written and directed two omnibus feature films: Loulou et Autre Loups (Loulou and Other Wolves, 2003), and Peur(s) du Noir (Fear[s] of the Dark, 2007). He designed and manufactured his own line of toys, and is the founder and bass player of the band Liquid Liquid. Here was based on his six-page comic that appeared in RAW magazine in 1989 and was quickly acknowledged as a transformative work that expanded the possibilities of the comics medium.
