Director Robert Zemeckis is used to conjuring the impossible.
In “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” he had flesh-and-blood actors like Bob Hoskins convincingly interact with animated characters; with “Forrest Gump” he had the title character (essayed by Tom Hanks) meet famous historical figures; “What Lies Beneath” imagined what would happen if Alfred Hitchcock had access to cutting-edge visual effects. He made three entire movies exclusively using performance capture technology. And on and on and on.
His latest film “Here,” which is now playing in theaters, offered a different sort of challenge – the entire movie is told from a fixed vantagepoint, through various eras. The camera never moves. It begins in prehistoric times, eventually settling into a handful of suburban living rooms throughout the years. The one we chiefly focus on is the home of Hanks and Robin Wright, both “Forrest Gump” alums, who begin in the 1960s and travel through modern day. Throughout, though, we flash to different periods – a Native American village, a colonist with ties to American history, an aeronautics enthusiast, a family dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. And, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, the guy who invented the reclining Laz-E-Boy chair.
To accomplish this feat, Zemeckis utilized a real-time, generative AI process in order to make the actors appear younger (or older) and traditional visual effects techniques when various “panels” spring to life, highlighting other timelines. These panels operate much the way panels in a comic book would, which makes sense given that the movie was based on an acclaimed graphic novel, also called “Here,” by American author and illustrator Richard McGuire.
But Zemeckis bristles at the idea that he is drawn to projects because of these challenges. “I say this in every interview that I give, and it’s just the weirdest thing, and I don’t know how to say it other than just to say it, which is, I don’t care about new technologies for filmmaking. I’m only ever interested in the story and the characters in the story and then that’s what draws me to the project,” Zemeckis told TheWrap.
“But then I do think that movies are supposed to be a mass entertainment medium and that our job as filmmakers are to entertain the audience. And one of the things that I think that is wonderfully entertaining about going to the movies is that you can see things that you can’t see in real life, whether it’s going to a different time or different world or whatever. That’s what’s movies do. And so, having said that, one of the things that I think is what I’m supposed to do as a filmmaker is to say, How can we present this moment a way that the audience maybe has never seen before? Because then that will be, in my mind, something that’s entertaining.”
When he approaches a new project, he gathers his crew and then starts to think about how he’s going to bring the story to life. “That’s the way on every movie, they’ll present to me some new technology and say, ‘Hey that might work.’ That’s the process,” Zemeckis said.
It’s Zemeckis’ creative restlessness that leads him to these new technologies. “One of the things that I always loved about movies is that they are a technological art form,” Zemeckis said. He never lingers too long in one genre or subject matter. And he’s only made two sequels in his career (“Back to the Future Part II” and “Back to the Future Part III”), mostly because he knew that the studio, Universal, would make it without him if he didn’t commit.
“I’ve always had a desire to not ever make the same movie over and over again. And I feel very fortunate that I could always because that just is more interesting, it makes me want to get up every morning because I don’t have a comp, to use a Hollywood term,” Zemeckis said. “Different stories, different characters, different genres.” Zemeckis said he hasn’t done a musical but that he’d like to adapt “Back to the Future: the Musical.”
Zemeckis describes the de-aging of his movie star leads as “digital make-up.” The process, he said, was “glitchy” and “imperfect,” “because none of it was refined yet.” But it still helped immensely – “you could do a take and then you could step off of the set and look at the monitor and look at it played back.” “It was great to see it because the actors were able to immediately adjust their performance based on seeing what they looked like at whatever age we were shooting – whether we’re shooting them at 85 or 18, they were able to see what they needed to do to make the illusion work,” Zemeckis explained.
The set itself was its own kind of magic trick. “When you have a fixed view, the camera isn’t going to tilt up or down or boom up and down to keep the actor in frame,” Zemeckis said. Since they had a bunch of actors with different heights, they used Hanks as the “benchmark.” For shorter actors, the set utilized “very subtle ramps for them to raise themselves as they got closer to camera.” For taller actors, Zemeckis had them stand in a trench. “Those ramps and trenches were doing what, on a typical movie, you’d do with a dolly and boom,” Zemeckis said.
When asked if there was an element of “Here” that he thought would be easier than it ended up being, or something that he thought would be a walk in the park but ended up being quite difficult, Zemeckis said he would “tell a story that’ll illustrate the whole thing for you.”
“Eric [Roth, screenwriter of ‘Forrest Gump’] and I wrote the script based on Richard McGuire’s graphic novel. We wrote the script and we got it cast, greenlit and then I gathered my crew, and said, ‘OK, so we’re going do this movie. And it says one fixed view of the world and it’s all going to be done on a sound stage. Everyone kind of nodded and said, ‘Oh, well, that won’t be very difficult,’” Zemeckis explained. “But it turned out to be the hardest movie any of us have ever made.”
Zemeckis said that “once you to commit to the language of the movie,” every department had to commit to that language. His cinematographer Don Burgess had to make sure every single scene work “perfectly in this perspective.” Every bit of set dressing has to be “right where it needs to be, not just for one scene but for every scene.” “Everything has to be exactly where it has to be to accommodate the entire movie,” Zemeckis said.
Not only that but they had to know exactly what was going on outside on the street – not just in the Hanks/Wright section but for every scene. It took the team three months just to decide on what lens would look best. He chose a lens that would shoot in a taller 1.85:1 aspect ratio. “I don’t think I could have made this movie as a novice filmmaker,” Zemeckis contends. “I had to have a lot of movies under my belt to know what the pitfalls are, to see the curveballs coming at us.”
The ”panels” that were part of each scene would be a profound tool when it came to telling the story, a tool that they would play around with in editing. Initially the panels were used as “where you start a scene or where you end a scene,” Zemeckis said. These moments were not a part of Zemeckis and Roth’s script “because it would just make the reader’s head explode.” “It was refined throughout,” Zemeckis. “Those panels start to draw the audience over to the next scene that’s about to come up and then they start to overlap.” For instance, a moment where the Beatles first appear on Ed Sullivan’s show becomes a holdover, lasting over into the next scene of Wright and Hanks getting married. (The moment is also a subtle Easter egg, referencing Zemeckis’ first feature, “I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” about a group of youngsters who attempt to crash Sullivan’s show.)
Editing “Here” was another huge, somewhat unexpected challenge. “It was a very difficult movie to edit, because you wouldn’t think it would be. You say, ‘Oh, well, aren’t you going to just cut the slates off and assemble everything?’ Well, right? No, that can’t happen,” Zemeckis said. “The timing of those panels and the pacing of them and all that stuff became a very elaborate chore.”
What’s particularly fascinating about “Here” is that it was made by a filmmaker who is known for his active camerawork, particularly when the camera was assisted with computer graphics. Nobody shoots a camera down a tiny hole, zings it up a wall or whips it around a hallway quite like Zemeckis. There are still videos being posted to YouTube about the magic trick of the mirror shot from “Contact.” And although that can’t happen with “Here,” Zemeckis said that the experience from those earlier films made him perfectly equipped to handle the restrictions of “Here.”
“If you look at all those scenes I did in ‘What Lies Beneath’ and ‘Contact,’ those scenes that are done in one shot, knowing and having so much information about what I didn’t have to work with gave me enough to contemplate what I would need to make it work,” Zemeckis, who called himself a “moving camera aficionado,” said. Without those earlier, complicated shots, he wouldn’t have been able to visualize his current, most complicated shot.
In other words: it’s all been leading up to “Here.”
