The iconic scenes had initially been intended as ‘fodder’
Tom Hanks has revealed that he wasn’t sure whether anyone would care for the now-iconic bus bench scenes in Forrest Gump.
Forrest sitting on that bench has become one of the cinema’s most recognisable images, and of course the bus bench scenes also gave us the immortal ‘life is like a box of chocolates’ line.
But Hanks has admitted neither he nor director Bob Zemeckis were sure whether the scenes would be of any of use when they filmed them, saying that they were initially shot as “fodder.”
Speaking to CinemaBlend, he said: “I will tell you, in Forrest Gump, all the stuff that we shot on the park bench in Savannah, Georgia, we were just shooting fodder for a possible narrative piece of it.
“And I said to Bob [Zemeckis], ‘Is anyone going to care about this nut sitting on a [bench]? What is this? No one knows what’s in this [box] I mean.'”
“We ended up shooting, it was probably like, you know, 13 pages of dialogue that we had to shoot in a day and a half.”
He continued: “It was written on cue cards, [and] I didn’t need the cue cards after a while because you get into it.”
Revealing what Zemeckis thought about the scenes, Hanks added: “But Bob says, ‘I don’t know, it’s a minefield, Tom, it’s a minefield. You never know what people are gonna take away from it!’ And it ends up being, you know, that thing.”
The rest is history, with Forrest Gump becoming a huge commercial and critical success.
The film earned $678.2m at the worldwide box office, more than 12 times its budget of $55m, and was nominated for 13 Oscars.
It went on to win six Academy Awards, including Best Picture and awards for Hanks and Zemeckis for Best Actor and Best Director respectively.
Hanks is currently starring as Colonel Tom Parker in the biopic, Elvis.
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