"Hello." "My name's Forrest." "Forrest Gump." "Do you want a chocolate?" "I could eat about a million and a half of these." "My mama always said life was like a box of chocolates." "You never know what you're going to get." "Those must be comfortable shoes." "I bet you could walk all day in shoes like that and not feel a thing." " I wish I had shoes like that." " My feet hurt." "Mama always said there's an awful lot you can tell about a person by their shoes." "Where they're going, where they've been." "I've worn lots of shoes." "I bet if I think about it real hard," "I could remember my first pair of shoes." "Mama said they'd take me anywhere." "She said they was my magic shoes." "All right, Forrest, open your eyes now." "Let's take a little walk around." "How do those feel?" "His legs are strong, Mrs Gump, as strong as I've ever seen." "But his back's as crooked as a politician." "But we're going to straighten him right up, aren't we, Forrest?" "When I was a baby, Mama named me after the great Civil War hero" "General Nathan Bedford Forrest." "She said we was related to him in some way." "What he did was he started up this club called the Ku Klux Klan." "They'd all dress up in their robes and their bed sheets and act like a bunch of ghosts or spooks or something." "They'd even put bed sheets on their horses and ride around." "And anyway, that's how I got my name, Forrest Gump." "Mama said the Forrest part was to remind me that sometimes we all do things that, well, just don't make no sense." "This way." "Hold on." "All right." "What are y'all staring at?" "Haven't you ever seen a little boy with braces on his legs before?" "Don't ever let anybody tell you they're better than you, Forrest." "If God wanted everybody to be the same, he'd have given us all braces on our legs." "Mama always had a way of explaining things so I could understand them." "We lived about a quarter mile off Route 17, about a half mile from the town of Greenbow, Alabama." "That's in the county of Greenbow." "Our house had been in Mama's family since her grandpa's grandpa's grandpa had come across the ocean about a thousand years ago." "Since it was just me and Mama and we had all these empty rooms," "Mama decided to let those rooms out, mostly to people passing through, like from Mobile, Montgomery, places like that." "That's how me and Mama got money." "Mama was a real smart lady." "Remember what I told you, Forrest." "You're no different than anybody else is." "Did you hear what I said, Forrest?" "You're the same as everybody else." "You are no different." "Your boy's different, Mrs Gump." "His I.Q. Is 75." "Well, we're all different, Mr Hancock." "She wanted me to have the finest education, so she took me to the Greenbow County Central School." "I met the principal and all." "I want to show you something, Mrs Gump." "Now, this is normal." "Forrest is right here." "The state requires a minimum I.Q. Of 80 to attend public school." "Mrs Gump, he's going to have to go to a special school." " He'll be just fine." " What does normal mean anyway?" "He might be a bit on the slow side, but my boy Forrest will get the same opportunities as everyone else." "He's not going to some special school to learn how to retread tyres." "We're talking about five little points here." "There must be something can be done." "We're a progressive school system." "We don't want to see anybody left behind." "Is there a Mr Gump, Mrs Gump?" "He's on vacation." "Your mama sure does care about your schooling, son." "You don't say much, do you?" ""Finally, he had to try." "It looked easy, but..." ""Oh, what happened." "First they..."" " Mama, what's vacation mean?" " Vacation?" "Where daddy went?" "Vacation's when you go somewhere..." "and you don't ever come back." "Anyway, I guess you could say me and Mama was on our own." "But we didn't mind." "Our house was never empty." "There was always folks coming and going." " Supper!" "It's supper, everyone!" " That sure looks special." "Sometimes, we had so many people staying with us that every room was filled, with travellers, you know, folks living out of their suitcases and hat cases and sample cases." "Forrest Gump, it's suppertime!" "Forrest?" "One time, a young man was staying with us, and he had a guitar case." "Forrest, I told you not to bother this nice young man." "No, that's all right, ma'am." "I was showing him a thing or two on the guitar." "All right." "Supper's ready if y'all want to eat." "Yeah, that sounds good." "Thank you, ma'am." "Say, show me that crazy little walk you did there." "Slow it down some." "I liked that guitar." "It sounded good." "I started moving around to the music, swinging my hips." "This one night, me and Mama was out shopping, and we walked by Benson's furniture and appliance store, and guess what?" "This is not for children's eyes." "Some years later, that handsome young man who they called The King, well, he sung too many songs." "Had himself a heart attack or something." "It must be hard being a king." "It's funny how you remember some things, but some things you can't." " You do your very best now, Forrest." " I sure will, Mama." "I remember the bus ride on the first day of school very well." "Are you coming along?" "Mama said not to take rides from strangers." "This is the bus to school." " I'm Forrest, Forrest Gump." " I'm Dorothy Harris." "Well, now we ain't strangers anymore." "This seat's taken." "It's taken." "You can't sit here." "You know, it's funny what a young man recollects, 'cause I don't remember being born." "I don't recall what I got for my first Christmas, and I don't know when I went on my first outdoor picnic, but I do remember the first time I heard the sweetest voice in the wide world." "You can sit here if you want." "I had never seen anything so beautiful in my life." "She was like an angel." "Well, are you going to sit down or aren't you?" "What's wrong with your legs?" "Nothing at all, thank you." "My legs are just fine and dandy." "I just sat next to her on that bus and had a conversation all the way to school." "My back's crooked like a question mark." "Next to Mama, no one ever talked to me or asked me questions." "Are you stupid or something?" "Mama says, "Stupid is as stupid does."" " I'm Jenny." " I'm Forrest, Forrest Gump." "From that day on, we was always together." "Jenny and me was like peas and carrots." "She taught me how to climb." "Come on, Forrest, you can do it." "I showed her how to dangle." "She helped me learn how to read, and I showed her how to swing." "Sometimes, we'd just sit out and wait for the stars." " Mama's going to worry about me." " Just stay a little longer." "For some reason, Jenny never wanted to go home." "OK, Jenny, I'll stay." "She was my most special friend." "My only friend." "My Mama always told me that miracles happen every day." "Some people don't think so, but they do." "Hey, dummy!" "Are you retarded, or just plain stupid?" " Look, I'm Forrest Gimp." " Just run away, Forrest." "Run, Forrest!" "Run away!" "Hurry!" " Get the bikes!" " Let's get him!" "Come on!" "Look out, dummy!" "We're going to get you!" "Run, Forrest, run!" "Run, Forrest!" "Come back here, you!" "Run, Forrest!" "Run!" "You wouldn't believe it if I told you, but I can run like the wind blows." "From that day on, if I was going somewhere, I was running." "That boy sure is a running fool." "Remember how I told you that Jenny never seemed to want to go home?" "She lived in a house that was as old as Alabama." "Her mama had gone to heaven when she was five, and her daddy was some kind of a farmer." "Jenny?" "He was a very loving man." "He was always kissing and touching her and her sisters." "And then this one time, Jenny wasn't on the bus to go to school." "Jenny, why didn't you come to school today?" "Daddy's taking a nap." "Come on!" "Jenny, where'd you run to?" "You better get back here, girl!" "Where you at?" "Jenny!" "Jenny, where you at?" "Pray with me, Forrest." "Pray with me." "Dear God, make me a bird so I can fly far, far, far away from here." "Dear God, make me a bird so I can fly far..." "Mama always said God is mysterious." "He didn't turn Jenny into a bird that day." "Instead, he had the police say" "Jenny didn't have to stay in that house no more." "She was to live with her grandma, just over on Creekmore Avenue, which made me happy, 'cause she was so close." "Some nights, Jenny'd sneak out and come on over to my house, just 'cause she said she was scared." "Scared of what, I don't know." "But I think it was her grandma's dog." "He was a mean dog." "Anyway, Jenny and me was best friends all the way up through high school." " Hey, stupid!" " Quit it!" "Run, Forrest, run!" " Didn't you hear me, stupid?" " Run, Forrest!" "Get in the truck!" "Come on!" "He's getting away!" "Move it!" "Run, Forrest!" "Run!" "Run, Forrest!" "Now, it used to be I ran to get where I was going." "I never thought it would take me anywhere." "Who in the hell is that?" "That is Forrest Gump, coach." "Just a local idiot." "And can you believe it?" "I got to go to college, too." " Forrest, move it!" "Run!" " OK!" " Run!" " Run, you stupid son of a bitch!" "Run, son of a bitch, run!" "Go!" "Run!" "He must be the stupidest son of a bitch alive, but he sure is fast." "Now, maybe it's just me, but college was very confusing times." "Federal troops, enforcing a court order, integrated the University of Alabama today." "Two Negroes were admitted, but only after Governor George Wallace had carried out his symbolic threat to stand in the schoolhouse door." "Earl, what's going on?" "Coons are trying to get into school." "Coons?" "When racoons tried getting on our back porch," "Mama just chased them off with a broom." "Not racoons, you idiot." "Niggers." "They want to go to school with us." "With us?" "They do?" "Shortly after Governor Wallace had carried out his promise to block the doorway," "President Kennedy ordered the Secretary of Defence to use military force." "Here, by videotape, is the encounter by General Graham, commander of the national guard, and Governor Wallace." "Because these national guardsmen are here today as federal soldiers for Alabama, and they live within our borders." "They are our brothers." "We are winning in this fight, because we are awakening the American people to the dangers that we have spoken about so many times, so evident today, a trend toward military dictatorship in this country." "And so, at day's end, the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa had been desegregated, and students Jimmy Hood and Vivian Malone had been signed up for summer classes." "Ma'am, you dropped your book." "Ma'am." "Governor Wallace did what he promised." "By being on the Tuscaloosa campus, he kept the mob from gathering..." " Say, wasn't that Gump?" " Naw, that couldn't be." "It sure as hell was." "A few years later, that angry little man at the schoolhouse door thought it'd be a good idea and ran for President." "But somebody thought that it wasn't." "But he didn't die." " My bus is here." " Is it the number nine?" " No, it's the number four." " It was nice talking to you." "I remember when that happened, when Wallace got shot." "I was in college." "Did you go to a girls college or a girls and boys together college?" "It was coed." "Jenny went to a college I couldn't go to." "It was a college just for girls." "But I'd go and visit her every chance I got." "That hurts." "Forrest, stop it!" "Stop it!" "What are you doing?" " He was hurting you." " No, he wasn't!" "Get over there!" " Billy, I'm sorry." " Just keep away from me." "Don't be such a..." "Don't go." "Billy, wait a second." "He doesn't know any better." "Forrest, why'd you do that?" "I brought you some chocolate." "I'm sorry." "I'll go back to my college now." "Look at you." "Come on." "Come on." "Is this your own room?" "Do you ever dream, Forrest, about who you're going to be?" "Who I'm going to be?" "Aren't I going to be me?" "You'll always be you, just another kind of you." "You know?" "I want to be famous." "I want to be a singer like Joan Baez." "I just want to be on an empty stage with my guitar, my voice." "Just me." "And I want to reach people on a personal level." "I want to be able to say things, just one to one." "Have you ever been with a girl, Forrest?" "I sit next to them in my home economics class all the time." "I'm sorry." " It's OK." " Sorry." "It's all right." " It's OK." " I'm dizzy." "I'll bet that never happened in home ec." "No." "I think I ruined your roommate's bathrobe." "I don't care." "I don't like her anyway." "College ran by real fast 'cause I played so much football." "They even put me on a thing called the All-America team where you get to meet the President of the United States." "President Kennedy met with the collegiate All-American football team at the Oval Office today." "The really good thing about meeting the President of the United States is the food." "They put you in this little room with just about anything you'd want to eat or drink." "But since, number one, I wasn't hungry, but thirsty, and number two, they was free, I must have drank about 15 Dr Peppers." "How does it feel to be an All-American?" "It's an honour, sir." "How does it feel to be an All-American?" "Very good, sir." "How does it feel to be an All-American?" "Very good, sir." " Congratulations." "How do you feel?" " I got to pee." "I believe he said he had to pee." "Some time later, for no particular reason, somebody shot that nice young President when he was in his car." "And a few years after that, somebody shot his little brother, too, only he was in a hotel kitchen." "Must be hard being brothers." "I wouldn't know." "Now can you believe it?" "After only five years of playing football, I got a college degree." "Congratulations, son." "Mama was so proud." "Forrest, I'm so proud of you." "I'll hold this for you." "Congratulations, son." "Have you given any thought to your future?" "Thought?" "Hello." "I'm Forrest." "Forrest Gump." "Nobody gives a horse's shit who you are, pus ball!" "You're not even a lowlife, scum-sucking maggot!" "Get your maggoty ass on the bus!" "You're in the army now!" " Seat's taken." " Taken." "At first it seemed like I made a mistake." "It was only my induction day, and I was getting yelled at." "Sit down if you want to." "I didn't know who I might meet or what they might ask." "You ever been on a real shrimp boat?" "No." "But I been on a real big boat." "I'm talking about a shrimp catching boat." "I been working on shrimp boats all my life." "I started out on my uncle's boat when I was about maybe nine." "I was just looking into buying my own boat and got drafted." "My given name is Benjamin Buford Blue." "People call me Bubba, just like one of them old redneck boys." "Can you believe that?" "My name's Forrest Gump." "People call me Forrest Gump." "So Bubba was from Bayou La Batre, Alabama, and his mama cooked shrimp." "And her mama before her cooked shrimp, and her mama before her mama cooked shrimp, too." "Bubba's family knew everything there was to know about the shrimping business." "I know everything there is to know about the shrimping business." "I'm going into the shrimping business myself after I get out of the army." "Gump!" "What's your sole purpose in this army?" "To do whatever you tell me, drill sergeant!" "God damn it, Gump, you're a goddamn genius." "That's the most outstanding answer I've ever heard." "You must have a goddamn I.Q. Of 160." "You are goddamn gifted, Private Gump." "Listen up, people!" "For some reason, I fit in the army like one of them round pegs." "It's not really hard." "You just make your bed neat, remember to stand up straight, and always answer every question with "Yes, drill sergeant."" " Is that clear?" " Yes, drill sergeant!" "What you do is drag your nets along the bottom." "On a good day, you can catch over a hundred pounds of shrimp." "Everything goes all right, two men shrimping ten hours, less what you spends on gas..." " Done, drill sergeant!" " Gump!" "Why did you put that weapon together so quickly?" "You told me to, drill sergeant." "Jesus H. Christ." "This is a new company record." "If it wasn't a waste of a fine enlisted man," "I'd recommend you for O.C.S., Private Gump." "You're going to be a general someday!" "Now disassemble your weapon and continue!" "Anyway, like I was saying, shrimp is the fruit of the sea." "You can barbecue it, boil it, broil it, bake it, sauté it." "There's shrimp kabobs, shrimp creole, shrimp gumbo, pan fried, deep fried, stir fried." "There's pineapple shrimp and lemon shrimp, coconut shrimp, pepper shrimp, shrimp soup, shrimp stew, shrimp salad, shrimp in potatoes, shrimp burger, shrimp sandwich." "That's about it." "Night-time in the army is a lonely time." "We'd lay there in our bunks, and I'd miss my mama, and I'd miss Jenny." "Gump, get a load of the tits on her." "Turns out Jenny had gotten into some trouble over some photos of her in her college sweater." "And she was thrown out of school." "But that wasn't a bad thing, 'cause a man who owns a theatre in Memphis, Tennessee, saw those photos and offered Jenny a job singing in a show." "The first chance I got, I took the bus up to Memphis to see her perform in that show." "That was Amber, Amber Flame." "Give her a big hand." "And now, for your listening and viewing pleasure, direct from Hollywood, California, our very own beatnik beauty." "Let's give a big round of applause to the luscious Bobbie Dylon." "Her dream had come true." "She was a folk singer." " Come on baby, shake it up now!" " Somebody get her a harmonica." " This ain't Captain Kangaroo!" " I got something here for you." "God damn it!" "Hey, you stupid jerk!" "I'm singing a song here." "Paulie, get out here!" "Shut up!" "Forrest!" "What are you doing here?" "What are you doing?" "What are you doing, Forrest?" "Let me down!" "You can't keep doing this, Forrest." "You can't keep trying to rescue me." " They was trying to grab you." " A lot of people try to grab me." "You can't keep doing this all the time." "I can't help it." "I love you." "You don't know what love is." "You remember that time we prayed, Forrest?" "We prayed for God to turn me into a bird so I could fly far away?" "Yes, I do." "You think I could fly off this bridge?" "What do you mean, Jenny?" "Nothing." "I gotta get out of here." " Wait, Jenny." " Forrest, you stay away from me, OK?" "Just stay away from me, please." " Can I have a ride?" " Where are you going?" " I don't care." " Get in the truck." "So bye-bye, Jenny." "They sending me to Vietnam." "It's this whole other country." "Just hang on a minute." "Listen, you promise me something, OK?" "Just if you're ever in trouble, don't be brave." " You just run, OK?" "Just run away." " OK." "I'll write you all the time." "And just like that, she was gone." "You come back safe to me." "Do you hear?" "They told us that Vietnam was going to be very different from the United States of America." "Except for all the beer cans and barbecues, it was." "I'll bet there's shrimp all in these waters." "They tell me these Vietnams is good shrimp." "After we win this war and we take over everything, we can get American shrimpers out here and shrimp these waters." "Just shrimp all the time, man." " You must be my FNGs." " Morning, sir." "Get your hands down." "Do not salute me." "There are goddamn snipers all around this area who'd love to grease an officer." "I'm Lieutenant Dan Taylor." "Welcome to Fort Platoon." " What's wrong with your lip?" " I was born with big gums, sir." "Well, you better tuck that in." "Gonna get that caught on a trip wire." "Where are you boys from in the world?" " Alabama, sir!" " You twins?" "No." "We are not relations, sir." "Look, it's pretty basic here." "You stick with me and learn from the guys who've been in country a while, you'll be all right." "There is one item of G.I. Gear that can be the difference between life and death." "Socks." "Cushioned sole, O.D. Green." "Try and keep your feet dry." "When we're out humping', change your socks whenever we stop." "The Mekong will eat a grunt's feet right off his legs." "Sergeant Sims." "God damn it, where's that sling rope I said to order?" " I put in the requisitions." " Well, call those sons of bitches..." "Lieutenant Dan knew his stuff." "I felt real lucky he was my lieutenant." "He was from a long, great military tradition." "Somebody in his family had fought and died in every single American war." "God damn it, kick some ass." "Get on it!" "I guess you could say he had a lot to live up to." "So, you boys from Arkansas?" "Well, I been through there." "Little Rock's a fine town." "Now, shake down your gear." "See the platoon sergeant." "Draw what you need for the field." "If you boys are hungry, we got steaks burning right over here." "Two standing orders in this platoon." "One, take good care of your feet." "Two, try not to do anything stupid, like getting yourself killed." "I sure hope I don't let him down." "I got to see a lot of countryside." "We would take these real long walks." "And we were always lookin' for this guy named Charlie." " Hold it up!" " Hold up, boys!" "It wasn't always fun." "Lieutenant Dan was always getting these funny feelings about a rock or a trail or the road, so he'd tell us to get down, shut up." "Get down!" "Shut up!" "So we did." "I don't know much about anything, but I think some of America's best young men served in this war." "There was Dallas from Phoenix." "Cleveland, he was from Detroit." "Hey, Tex." "What the hell's going on?" "And Tex was..." "Well, I don't remember where Tex come from." "Ah, nothing." "Fourth platoon, on your feet." "Y'all got 10 clicks to go to that river." "Move out." " One, two, hup!" " Step it up!" "Look alive out there." "The good thing about Vietnam is there was always someplace to go." "Fire in the hole!" "Gump, check out that hole." "And there was always something to do." "Mount 'em up!" "Spread out!" "Cover his back!" "One day it started raining, and it didn't quit for four months." "We've been through every kind of rain there is." "Little bitty stinging rain and big old fat rain, rain that flew in sideways, and sometimes rain even seemed to come straight up from underneath." "Shoot, it even rained at night." " Hey, Forrest." " Hey, Bubba." "I'm going to lean up against you." "You lean up against me." "This way we don't have to sleep with our heads in the mud." "You know why we're a good partnership, Forrest?" "'Cause we be watching out for one another, like brothers and stuff." "Hey, Forrest, something I been thinking about." "I got a very important question to ask you." "How would you like to go into the shrimping business with me?" " OK." " Man, I tell you what." "I got it all figured out, too." "So many pounds of shrimp will pay off the boat." "So many pounds for gas." "We'll live right on the boat." "We ain't got to pay no rent." "We can just work it together, split everything right down the middle." "Man, I'm telling you, 50-50." "Hey, Forrest, all the shrimp you can eat." "That's a fine idea." "Bubba did have a fine idea." "I even wrote Jenny and told her all about it." "I sent her letters." "Not every day, but almost." "I told her what I was doing and asked her what she was doing, and told her how I thought about her always." "And how I was looking forward to getting a letter from her just as soon as she had the time." "I'd always let her know that I was OK." "Then I'd sign each letter "Love, Forrest Gump."" "This one day, we was out walking like always, and then, just like that, somebody turned off the rain, and the sun come out." "Ambush!" "Take cover!" " Get that pig up here, God damn it!" " Forrest, are you OK?" "Strong Arm, Strong Arm!" " We've got a man down." " Strong Arm, this is Leg Lima 6!" "Roger, Strong Arm!" "We have incoming from the treeline at Point Blue plus two!" "A.K. S and rockets!" "We're getting it hard!" " Misfire!" "Misfire!" " God damn it!" "Get that pig unfucked and put it in the treeline!" "They got us down, hard and hurt." "We're going to move back to the blue line." "Pull back!" "Pull back!" " Forrest!" "Run, Forrest!" " Pull back!" " Run!" "Run, man!" "Run!" " Pull back, Gump!" "Run, God damn it!" "Run!" "I ran and ran just like Jenny told me to." "I ran so far so fast that soon I was all by myself, which was a bad thing." "Bubba was my best good friend." "I had to make sure he was OK." "Where the hell are you?" "And on my way back to find Bubba, there was a boy laying on the ground." "Tex." "OK." "I couldn't let him lay there all alone, scared the way he was, so I grabbed him up and run him out of there." "Every time I went back looking for Bubba, somebody else was saying, "Help me, Forrest, help me!"" "OK." "Here." "Here." "No sweat, man." "Lay back." "You'll be OK." "I started to get scared that I might never find Bubba." "I know my position is danger close!" "We got Charlie all over this area." "I got to have those fast movers in here now." "Over." "Lieutenant Dan, Coleman's dead!" "I know he's dead!" "My whole goddamn platoon is wiped out!" "God damn it!" "What are you doing?" "You leave me here!" "Get away." "Just leave me here!" "Get out!" "God, I said leave me here, God damn it!" "Leg Lima six, this is strong-arm." "Be advised your fast movers are inbound." "Over." "Then it felt like something just jumped up and bit me." "Something bit me!" "Goddamn son of a bitch!" "I can't leave the platoon." "I told you to leave me there, Gump." "Forget about me." "Get yourself out!" "Did you hear what I said?" "Gump, damn it, put me down." "Get your ass out of here." "I didn't ask you to pull me out of there, God damn you!" " Where do you think you're going?" " To get Bubba." "I got an air strike inbound right now." "They're going to nape the whole area." "Stay here!" "That's an order." "I gotta find Bubba!" "I'm OK, Forrest." "I'm OK." " Bubba, no." " I'll be all right." "Come on." "Come on." "Come on." "I'm OK, Forrest." "I'm OK." "I'm fine." "Top smoke." "Get it up there." "If I'd have known this was going to be the last time me and Bubba was gonna talk, I'd of thought of something better to say." " Hey, Bubba." " Hey, Forrest." " Forrest, why did this happen?" " You got shot." "Then Bubba said something I won't ever forget." "I want to go home." "Bubba was my best good friend." "And even I know that ain't something you can find just around the corner." "Bubba was going to be a shrimping boat captain, but instead, he died right there by that river in Vietnam." "That's all I have to say about that." "It was a bullet, wasn't it?" " A bullet?" " That jumped up and bit you." "Yes, sir." "Bit me directly in the but-tocks." "They said it was a million dollar wound, but..." "The army must keep that money, 'cause I still ain't seen a nickel of that million dollars." "The only good thing about being wounded in the but-tocks is the ice cream." "They gave me all the ice cream I could eat." "And guess what?" "A good friend of mine was in the bed right next door." "Lieutenant Dan, I got you some ice cream." "Lieutenant Dan, ice cream!" "It's time for your bath, Lieutenant." "Harper!" "Cooper." "Larson." "Webster." "Gump." " Gump!" " I'm Forrest Gump." "Kyle." "Nichols." "McMill." "Johnson." "Gump, how can you watch that stupid shit?" "Turn it off." "You are tuned to the American Forces Vietnam Network." "This is Channel 6, Saigon." "Good catch, Gump." "You know how to play this?" "Come on." "Let me show you." "The secret to this game is no matter what happens, never, ever take your eye off the ball." "All right." "For some reason, ping-pong came very natural to me." "See?" "Any idiot can play." "So I started playing it all the time." "I played ping-pong even when I didn't have anyone to play ping-pong with." "The hospital's people said it made me look like a duck in water, whatever that means." "Even Lieutenant Dan would come and watch me play." "I played ping-pong so much, I even played it in my sleep." "Now, you listen to me." "We all have a destiny." "Nothing just happens." "It's all part of a plan!" "I should have died out there with my men, but now, I'm nothing but a goddamn cripple, a legless freak!" "Look." "Look!" "Look at me!" "You see that?" "Do you know what it's like not to be able to use your legs?" "Yes, sir, I do." "Did you hear what I said?" "You cheated me!" "I had a destiny." "I was supposed to die in the field with honour!" "That was my destiny, and you cheated me out of it!" "You understand what I'm saying, Gump?" "This wasn't supposed to happen, not to me." "I had a destiny." "I was Lieutenant Dan Taylor." "You're still Lieutenant Dan." "Look at me." "What am I going to do now?" "What am I going to do now?" "PFC Gump?" " Yes, sir!" " As you were." "Son, you been awarded the Medal of Honour." "Guess what, Lieutenant Dan?" "They want to give me a med..." "Ma'am, what did they do with Lieutenant Dan?" "They sent him home." "Two weeks later, I left Vietnam." "The ceremony was kicked off with a candid speech by the President regarding the need for further escalation of the war in Vietnam." "President Johnson awarded four medals of honour to men from each..." "America owes you a debt of gratitude, son." "I understand you were wounded." "Where were you hit?" "In the but-tocks, sir." "Well, that must be a sight." "I'd kinda like to see that." "God damn, son!" "After that, Mama went to the hotel to lay down, so I went out for a walk to see our capital." "Hilary!" "I got the vets." "What do you want to do with them?" "It's a good thing Mama was resting, 'cause the streets was awful crowded with people lookin' at all the statues and monuments, and some of them people were loud and pushy." "OK, follow me!" "Move it out!" "Everywhere I went, I had to stand in line." "Come on." "Go!" "You're a good man for doing this." "Good." "OK." "There was this man giving a little talk." "And for some reason, he was wearing an American flag for a shirt." "And he liked to say the "F" Word a lot." ""F" This and "F" That." "And every time he said the "F" Word, people, for some reason, cheered." "Come on, man." "Come up here, man." "Come on." "Come on." "Yeah, you!" "Come on." "Move, move!" "Go on." "Let's get up there." "Tell us a little bit about the war, man." " The war in Vietnam?" " The war in Viet-fuckin'-nam!" "Well..." "There was only one thing I could say about the war in Vietnam." "There's only one thing I can say about the war in Vietnam." "In Vietnam..." "What the hell are you do..." "I'll beat your head in, you goddamn oinker!" "Jesus Christ!" "What did they do with this?" "Can't hear you!" "Can't hear anything!" "This..." "This one!" "Give me that!" "Speak up!" "That's it." "And that's all I have to say about that." "That's so right on, man." "You said it all." " What's your name, man?" " My name is Forrest." "Forrest Gump." " Forrest Gump." " Gump!" "It was the happiest moment of my life." "Jenny and me were just like peas and carrots again." "She showed me around and introduced me to some of her new friends." "Shut that blind, man!" "And get your white ass away from that window." "Don't you know we in a war here?" " He's cool." "He's one of us." " Let me tell you about us." "Our purpose here is to protect our black leaders from the racial onslaught of the pig who wishes to brutalise our black leaders, rape our women, and destroy our black communities." " Who's the baby killer?" " This is my friend I told you about." "This is Forrest Gump." "Forrest, this is Wesley." "Wesley and I lived together in Berkeley, and he's the president of the Berkeley chapter of SDS." "We are here to offer protection and help for all those who need our help, because we, the Black Panthers, are against the war in Vietnam." "We are against any war where black soldiers are sent to the front line to die for a country that hates them." "We are against any war where black soldiers go to fight and come to be brutalised and killed in their own communities." "We are against all these racist and imperial acts..." "Forrest!" "Stop it!" "Stop it!" "I shouldn't have brought you here." "I should have known it was going to be some bullshit hassle!" "He should not be hitting you, Jenny." "Come on, Forrest." "Sorry I had a fight in the middle of your Black Panther party." "He doesn't mean it when he does things like this." "I would never hurt you, Jenny." " I know you wouldn't, Forrest." " I wanted to be your boyfriend." "That uniform is a trip, Forrest." "You look handsome in it." "You do." " You know what?" " What?" "I'm glad we were here together in our nation's capital." "Me, too, Forrest." "We walked around all night, Jenny and me, just talkin'." "She told me about all the travelling she'd done and how she discovered ways to expand her mind and learn how to live in harmony, which must be out west somewhere, 'cause she made it all the way to California." "Hey." "Anybody want to go to San Francisco?" " I'll go." " Far out!" "It was a very special night for the two of us." "I didn't want it to end." " Wish you wouldn't go, Jenny." " I have to, Forrest." "Jenny?" "Things got a little out of hand." "It's just this war and that lying son of a bitch Johnson and..." "I would never hurt you." "You know that." "Know what I think?" "I think you should go home to Greenbow, Alabama!" "Forrest, we have very different lives, you know." "I want you to have this." "Forrest, I can't keep this." "I got it just by doing what you told me to do." " Why are you so good to me?" " You're my girl." "I'll always be your girl." "And just like that, she was gone out of my life again." "It's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." "I thought I was going back to Vietnam, but instead they decided the best way for me to fight the communists was to play ping-pong, so I was in the Special Services, travelling around the country, cheering up wounded veterans and showing 'em how to play ping-pong." "I was so good, the Army decided I should be on the All-American ping-pong team." "We were the first Americans to visit the land of China in a million years or something." "Somebody said world peace was in our hands, but all I did was play ping-pong." "When I got home, I was a national celebrity, famouser even than Captain Kangaroo." "Here he is, Forrest Gump." "Right here." " Forrest Gump, John Lennon." " Welcome home." "Can you tell us, what was China like?" "In the land of China, people hardly got nothin' at all." "No possessions?" "And in China, they never go to church." " No religion, too?" " Hard to imagine." "Well, it's easy if you try, Dick." "Some years later, that nice young man from England was on his way home to see his little boy and was signing some autographs." "For no particular reason at all, somebody shot him." "They gave you The Congressional Medal of Honour." "Now, that's Lieutenant Dan." "Lieutenant Dan!" "They gave you the Congressional Medal of Honour." "Yes, sir." "They surely did." "They gave you, an imbecile, a moron who goes on television and makes a fool out of himself in front of the whole damn country, the Congressional Medal of Honour." "Yes, sir." "Well, that's just perfect!" "Well, I just got one thing to say to that." "Goddamn bless America." "Lieutenant Dan!" "Lieutenant Dan said he was living in a hotel." "Because he didn't have no legs, he spent his time exercising his arms." "Take a right." "Take a right!" "Come on, already!" "What do you do here in New York, Lieutenant Dan?" "I'm living off the government tit." "Are you blind?" "I'm walking here!" "Get out!" "Come on." "Go, go, go!" "I stayed with Lieutenant Dan and celebrated the holidays." "You have a great year, and hurry home." "God bless you." "Have you found Jesus yet, Gump?" "I didn't know I was supposed to be looking for him, sir." "That's all these cripples at the VA, that's all they ever talk about." "Jesus this and Jesus that." "Have I found Jesus?" "They even had a priest come and talk to me." "He said God is listening, but I have to help myself." "Now, if I accept Jesus into my heart," "I'll get to walk beside him in the kingdom of heaven." "Did you hear what I said?" "Walk beside him in the kingdom of heaven." "Well, kiss my crippled ass." "God is listening?" "What a crock of shit." "I'm going to heaven, Lieutenant Dan." "Well..." "Before you go, why don't you get your ass down to the corner" " and get us more ripple?" " Yes, sir." "We're at approximately 45th street in New York City at One Astor Plaza." "This is the site of the old Astor Hotel..." " What the hell is in Bayou La Batre?" " Shrimping boats." "Shrimping boats?" "Who gives a shit about shrimping boats?" "I got to buy me one soon as I have some money." "I promised Bubba in Vietnam that as soon as the war was over, we'd be partners." "He'd be the captain and I'd be his first mate." "But now that he's dead, I got to be the captain." "A shrimp boat captain." "Yes, sir." "A promise is a promise, Lieutenant Dan." "Now hear this!" "Private Gump here is gonna be a shrimp boat captain." "Tell you what, Gilligan." "The day you are a shrimp boat captain," "I will come and be your first mate." "If you're ever a shrimp boat captain, that's the day I'm an astronaut!" "Danny, what are you complaining about?" "How you doing?" " Mr Hot Wheels." "Who's your friend?" " My name is Forrest." "Forrest Gump." "This is Cunning Carla and Long-limbs Lenore." "So where you been, babycakes?" "Haven't seen you around lately." "You should have been here for Christmas, 'cause Tommy bought a free round and gave everybody a turkey sandwich." "Well, I had company." "We was just there!" "That's Times Square." "Don't you just love New Year's?" "You can start all over." "Everybody gets a second chance." "It's funny, but in the middle of all that fun," "I began to think about Jenny, wondering how she was spending her New Year's night out in California." "Nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one!" "Happy New Year!" "Happy New Year, Lieutenant Dan!" "What are you, stupid or something?" "What's your problem?" "What's his problem?" "Did you lose your packet in the war or something?" " Is your friend stupid or something?" " What did you say?" "I said is your friend stupid or something?" " Don't call him stupid!" " Hey, don't push her!" "You shut up!" "Don't you ever call him stupid!" "Why you so upset?" "Get your goddamn clothes and get the hell out of here!" "You should be in a sideshow." "You're so pathetic!" "Get out of here!" " You retard!" " Loser." "You freak!" "Oh, no." "I'm sorry I ruined your New Year's Eve party, Lieutenant Dan." "She tastes like cigarettes." "I guess Lieutenant Dan figured there's some things you can't change." "He didn't want to be called crippled like I didn't want to be called stupid." "Happy New Year, Gump." "The U.S. Ping-pong team met with President Nixon today..." "Wouldn't you know it?" "A few months later, they invited me and the ping-pong team to visit the White House." "So I went, again." "And I met the President of the United States again." "Only this time, they didn't get us rooms in a real fancy hotel." "Are you enjoying yourself in our nation's capital, young man?" " Where are you staying?" " It's called the Hotel Ebbott." "Oh, no." "I know a much nicer hotel." "It's brand-new." "Very modern." "I'll have my people take care of it." " Security." " Yeah." "Sir..." "You might want to send a maintenance man to that office across the way." "The lights are off and they must be looking for a fuse box, 'cause them flashlights, they're keeping me awake." " OK, sir." "I'll check it out." " Thank you." "Good night." "Therefore, I shall resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow." "Vice President Ford will be sworn in as President at that hour in this office." " Forrest Gump." " Yes, sir!" "As you were." "I have your discharge papers." "Service is up, son." "Does this mean I can't play ping-pong no more?" "For the Army, it does." "And just like that, my service in the United States Army was over." "So I went home." " I'm home, Mama." " I know." "I know." "Louise, he's here." "When I got home, I had no idea, but Mama'd had all sorts of visitors." "We've had all sorts of visitors." "Everybody wants you to use their ping-pong stuff." "One man even left a check for $25,000 if you'd be agreeable to saying you like using their paddle." "I only like using my own paddle." " Hi, Miss Louise." " Hey, Forrest." "I know that, but it's $25,000, Forrest." "I thought maybe you could hold it for a while, see if it grows on you." "That Mama, she sure was right." "It's funny how things work out." "I didn't stay home for long because I'd made a promise to Bubba, and I always try to keep my promise, so I went on down to Bayou La Batre to meet Bubba's family." "Are you crazy or just plain stupid?" " Stupid is as stupid does, Mrs Blue." " I guess." "And, of course, I paid my respect to Bubba himself." "Hey, Bubba." "It's me, Forrest Gump." "I remember everything you said, and I got it all figured out." "I'm taking $24,562.47 that I got, that's left after a new haircut and a new suit and I took Mama out to a real fancy dinner, and I bought a bus ticket, and three Dr Peppers." "Tell me something." "Are you stupid or something?" "Stupid is as stupid does, sir." "That's what's left after me saying," ""When I was in China on the All-America ping-pong team," ""I just loved playing ping-pong" ""with my Flex-o-lite ping-pong paddle,"" "which everybody knows isn't true, but Mama said it was just a little white lie, it wasn't hurting nobody." "So anyway, I'm putting all that on gas, ropes, and new nets and a brand-new shrimping boat." "Bubba told me everything he knew about shrimping, but you know what I found out?" "Shrimping is tough." "I only caught five." "A couple more, you can have yourself a cocktail." "You ever think about naming this old boat?" "It's bad luck to have a boat without a name." "I'd never named a boat before, but there was only one I could think of, the most beautiful name in the wide world." "I hadn't heard from Jenny in a long while, but I thought about her a lot." "I hoped whatever she was doing made her happy." "I thought about Jenny all the time." "Lieutenant Dan, what are you doing here?" "Well, thought I'd try out my sea legs." "Well, you ain't got no legs, Lieutenant Dan." "Yes, I know that." "You wrote me a letter, you idiot." "Well, well." "Captain Forrest Gump." "I had to see this for myself." "And I told you if you were ever a shrimp boat captain, that I'd be your first mate." "Well, here I am." " I'm a man of my word." " OK." "But don't you be thinking that I'm going to be calling you "Sir."" "No, sir." "That's my boat." "I have a feeling if we head due east, we'll find some shrimp." "So take a left." " Take a left!" " Which way?" "Over there!" "They're over there!" " Get on the wheel and take a left." " OK." "Gump, what are you doing?" "Take a left!" "Left!" "That's where we're going to find those shrimp, my boy!" "That's where we'll find them." " Still no shrimp, Lieutenant Dan." " OK, so I was wrong." "How are we going to find them?" "Maybe you should just pray for shrimp." "So I went to church every Sunday." "Sometimes Lieutenant Dan came too, though he left the praying up to me." " No shrimp." " Where the hell's this God of yours?" "It's funny Lieutenant Dan said that, 'cause right then God showed up." "You'll never sink this boat!" "Now, me, I was scared, but Lieutenant Dan, he was mad." "Come on!" "You call this a storm?" "Come on, you son of a bitch!" "It's time for a showdown!" "You and me!" "I'm right here!" "Come and get me!" "You'll never sink this boat!" "Hurricane Carmen came through here yesterday, destroying nearly everything in its path." "And as in other towns up and down the coast," "Bayou La Batre's entire shrimping industry has fallen victim to Carmen and has been left in utter ruin." "This reporter has learned, in fact, only one shrimping boat actually survived the storm." "Louise." "Louise, there's Forrest." "After that, shrimping was easy." "Since people still needed them shrimps for shrimp cocktails and barbecues and all, and we were the only boat left standing," "Bubba-Gump shrimp's what they got." "We got a whole bunch of boats." "Twelve Jennys, big old warehouse." "We even have hats that say "Bubba-Gump" on them." "Bubba-Gump Shrimp." "A household name." "Hold on there, boy." "Are you telling me you're the owner of the Bubba-Gump Shrimp Corporation?" "Yes." "We got more money than Davy Crockett." "Boy, I heard some whoppers in my time, but that tops them all." "We were sitting next to a millionaire." "Well, I thought it was a very lovely story, and you tell it so well, with such enthusiasm." "Would you like to see what Lieutenant Dan looks like?" "Yes, I would." "That's him right there." "Let me tell you something about Lieutenant Dan." "I never thanked you for saving my life." "He never actually said so, but I think he made his peace with God." "For the second time in 17 days," "President Ford escaped possible assassination today." " Base to Jenny 1." "Base to Jenny 1." " Jenny 1." "Go, Margo." "Forrest has a phone call." "Well, you'll have to tell them to call him back." " He is indisposed at the moment." " His mama's sick." " Where's Mama?" " She's upstairs." "Hi, Forrest." " I'll see you tomorrow." " All right." "Sure got you straightened out, didn't we, boy?" " What's the matter, Mama?" " I'm dying, Forrest." "Come on in, sit down over here." " Why are you dying, Mama?" " It's my time." "It's just my time." "Now, don't you be afraid, sweetheart." "Death is just a part of life." "Something we're all destined to do." "I didn't know it, but I was destined to be your mama." " I did the best I could." " You did good." "Well, I happen to believe you make your own destiny." "You have to do the best with what God gave you." "What's my destiny, Mama?" "You're going to have to figure that out for yourself." "Life is a box of chocolates, Forrest." "You never know what you're going to get." "Mama always had a way of explaining things so I could understand them." "I will miss you, Forrest." "She had got the cancer and died on a Tuesday." "I bought her a new hat with little flowers on it." "And that's all I have to say about that." "Didn't you say you were waiting for the number seven bus?" "There'll be another one along shortly." "Now, because I had been a football star and war hero and national celebrity and a shrimping boat captain and a college graduate, the city fathers of Greenbow, Alabama, decided to get together and offered me a fine job." "So I never went back to work for Lieutenant Dan, though he did take care of my Bubba-Gump money." "He got me invested in some kind of fruit company." "I got a call from him saying we don't have to worry about money no more, and I said, "That's good." "One less thing."" "Now Mama said there's only so much fortune a man really needs, and the rest is just for showing off." "So I gave a whole bunch of it to the Foursquare Gospel Church." "And I gave a whole bunch to the Bayou La Batre fishing hospital." "And even though Bubba was dead and Lieutenant Dan said I was nuts," "I gave Bubba's mama Bubba's share." "You know what?" "She didn't have to work in nobody's kitchen no more." "That smells wonderful." "And 'cause I was a gozillionaire and I liked doing it so much," "I cut that grass for free." "But at night-time when there was nothing to do and the house was all empty, I'd always think of Jenny." "And then, she was there." " Hello, Forrest." " Hello, Jenny." "Jenny came back and stayed with me." "Maybe it was because she had nowhere else to go, or maybe it was because she was so tired, 'cause she went to bed and slept and slept, like she hadn't slept in years." "It was wonderful having her home." "Every day we'd take a walk, and I'd jabber on like a monkey in a tree, and she'd listen about ping-ponging and shrimping and Mama making a trip up to heaven." "I did all the talking." "Jenny most of the time was real quiet." "How could you do this?" "Sometimes I guess there just aren't enough rocks." "I never really knew why she came back, but I didn't care." "It was like olden times." "We was like peas and carrots again." "Every day, I'd pick pretty flowers and put them in her room for her, and she gave me the best gift anyone could ever get in the wide world." "They're just for running." "And she even showed me how to dance." "Well, we was like family, Jenny and me... and it was the happiest time in my life." "You done watching it?" "I'm going to bed." "Will you marry me?" "I'd make a good husband, Jenny." "You would, Forrest." "But you won't marry me." "You don't want to marry me." "Why don't you love me, Jenny?" "I'm not a smart man, but I know what love is." "Forrest, I do love you." " Where are you running off to?" " I'm not running." "That day, for no particular reason, I decided to go for a little run." "So I ran to the end of the road, and when I got there" "I thought maybe I'd run to the end of town." "President Carter, suffering from heat exhaustion..." "And when I got there," "I thought maybe I'd just run across Greenbow County." "Now, thinking since I'd run this far, maybe I'd just run across the great state of Alabama." "And that's what I did." "I ran clear across Alabama." "No particular reason." "I just kept on going." "I ran clear to the ocean." "And when I got there, I figured since I'd gone this far, might as well turn around, just keep on going." "And when I got to another ocean, I figured since I'd gone this far," "I might as well just turn back and keep right on going." "When I got tired, I slept." "When I got hungry, I ate." "When I had to go..." "you know..." "I went." " And so, you just ran." " Yeah." "I'd think a lot about Mama and Bubba and Lieutenant Dan." "But most of all, I thought about Jenny." "I thought about her a lot." "For more than two years, a man named Forrest Gump, a gardener from Greenbow, Alabama, stopping only to sleep, has been running across America." "Charles Cooper reports." "For the fourth time on his journey across America," "Forrest Gump the gardener will cross the Mississippi River again today." " I'll be damned." "Forrest?" " Why are you running?" " Are you doing this for world peace?" " For the homeless?" " Are you running for women's rights?" " The environment?" "They couldn't believe somebody would do all that running for no reason." " Why are you doing this?" " I just felt like running." "I just felt like runnin'." "It's you." "I can't believe it's really you." "For some reason, what I was doing seemed to make sense to people." "It was like an alarm went off in my head." "I said, "Here's a guy that's got his act together." ""Here's somebody who has the answer." I'll follow you anywhere, Mr Gump." "So I got company." "And after that, I got more company." "And then, even more people joined in." "Somebody later told me it gave people hope." "I don't know anything about that, but some of those people asked me if I could help them out." "I was wondering if you might help me." "I'm in the bumper sticker business." "I need a good slogan, and since you've been so inspirational," "I thought you might be able to help me..." "Whoa, man!" "You just ran through a big pile of dog shit!" " It happens." " What, shit?" "Sometimes." "And some years later, I heard that that fella did come up with a bumper sticker slogan and made a lot of money off of it." "Another time, I was running along, somebody who'd lost all his money in the t-shirt business, he wanted to put my face on a t-shirt, but he couldn't draw that well, and he didn't have a camera." "Here, use this one." "Nobody likes that colour anyway." "Have a nice day." "Some years later, I found out that that man did come up with an idea for a t-shirt." "He made a lot of money." "Anyway, like I was saying, I had a lot of company." "Mama always said, "Put the past behind you before you can move on."" "And I think that's what my running was all about." "I had run for three years, two months, 14 days and 16 hours." "Quiet." "Quiet." "He's going to say something." "I'm pretty tired." "Think I'll go home now." "Now what are we supposed to do?" "And just like that, my runnin' days was over." "So I went home to Alabama." "Moments ago, at 2.25 p.m., as President Reagan was leaving the five or six gunshots were fired by an unknown would-be assassin." "The President was shot in the chest..." "I picked up the mail." "And one day, out of the blue clear sky, I got a letter from Jenny wondering if I could come down to Savannah and see her, and that's what I'm doing here." "She saw me on TV, running." "I'm supposed to go on the number nine bus to Richmond Street and get off and go one block left to 1947 Henry Street, apartment 4." "Why, you don't need to take a bus." "Henry Street is just five or six blocks down that way." " Down that way?" " Down that way." "It was nice talking to you." "I hope everything works out for you!" " How you doin'?" "Come in!" "Come in!" " I got your letter." " I was wondering about that." " This your house?" "Yeah." "It's messy right now." "I just got off work." "It's nice." "You got air conditioning." " Thank you." " I ate some." "I kept a scrapbook of your clippings, and everything." "There you are." "And this, I got you running." "I ran a long way." "It's a long time." "And there..." "Listen, Forrest, I don't know how to say this." "I just I want to apologise for anything that I ever did to you 'cause I was messed up for a long time, and..." " Hi." " Hey, you." " This is an old friend from Alabama." " How do you do?" "Next week my schedule changes, so I can..." "No problem." "Got to go." "I'm double-parked." "OK." "Thanks." "This is my very good friend Mr Gump." "Can you say hi?" " Hello, Mr Gump." " Hello." " Can I go watch TV now?" " Yes." "Just keep it low." " You're a mama, Jenny." " I'm a mama." " His name's Forrest." " Like me!" " I named him after his daddy." " He got a daddy named Forrest, too?" "You're his daddy, Forrest." "Forrest, look at me." "Look at me, Forrest." "There's nothing you need to do." "You didn't do anything wrong." "OK?" "Isn't he beautiful?" "He's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen." "But..." "Is he smart?" "Can he..." "He's very smart." "He's one of the smartest in his class." "Yeah, it's OK." "Go talk to him." " What are you watching?" " Bert and Ernie." "Forrest, I'm sick." "What, do you have a cough due to a cold?" "I have some virus, and the doctors, they don't know what it is, and there isn't anything they can do about it." "You could come home with me." "You and little Forrest could come stay at my house in Greenbow." "I'll take care of you if you're sick." "Would you marry me, Forrest?" "OK." "Please take your seats." "Forrest?" "It's time to start." "Hi." "Your tie." "Lieutenant Dan." " Lieutenant Dan." " Hello, Forrest." "You got new legs." "New legs!" "Yeah." "I got new legs." "Custom-made." "Titanium alloy." "It's what they use on the space shuttle." "Magic legs." "This is my fiancée, Susan." " Lieutenant Dan." " Hi, Forrest." " Lieutenant Dan, this is my Jenny." " Hi." "It's nice to meet you finally." "Do you, Forrest, take Jenny to be your wife?" "Do you, Jenny, take Forrest to be your husband?" "And so I pronounce you man and wife." " Hey." " Hi." "Were you scared in Vietnam?" "Yes." "Well, I don't know." "Sometimes it would stop raining long enough for the stars to come out." "And then it was nice." "It was like just before the sun goes to bed down on the bayou." "There was always a million sparkles on the water." "Like that mountain lake." "It was so clear, Jenny, it looked like there were two skies one on top of the other." "And then in the desert, when the sun comes up," "I couldn't tell where heaven stopped and the earth began." "It was so beautiful." "I wish I could've been there with you." "You were." "I love you." "You died on a Saturday morning." "And I had you placed here under our tree." "And I had that house of your father's bulldozed to the ground." "Mama always said that dying' was a part of life." "I sure wish it wasn't." "Little Forrest is doing just fine." "About to start school again soon, and I make his breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day." "I make sure he combs his hair and brushes his teeth every day." "Teaching him how to play ping-pong." "He's really good." "Forrest, you go." "We fish a lot." "And every night, we read a book." "He's so smart, Jenny." "You'd be so proud of him." "I am." "He wrote you a letter." "And he says I can't read it." "I'm not supposed to, so I'll just leave it here for you." "I don't know if mama was right or if it's Lieutenant Dan." "I don't know if we each have a destiny, or if we're all just floating around accidental-like on a breeze." "But I think maybe it's both." "Maybe both is happening at the same time." "But I miss you, Jenny." "If there's anything you need, I won't be far away." "Here's your bus." "OK." "I know this." "I'm gonna share that for show-and-tell because Grandma used to read it to you." "My favourite book." "Here you go." "Don't..." " I want to tell you I love you." " I love you, too, Daddy." "I'll be right here when you get back." "You understand this is the bus to school, don't you?" "Of course, and you're Dorothy Harris, and I'm Forrest Gump." "When I read the very first draft of the screenplay, the Eric Roth screenplay - there were many prior to that done over many years," "I just kept turning the page to see what was gonna happen next." "It was, I mean I had no real desire or compulsion to make a movie about a guy with a low IQ." "It seemed to be the right character and I..." "I kept wanting to know what was gonna happen to this character in this strange story, wanting to know what was gonna happen." "And whenever you get a screenplay and that happens, as crippled as it was very early on, that's always a good sign." "The feather always started the movie in the screenplay." "It wasn't at the end, that we put in later, in later drafts of the script." "But, you know, the feather was always sort of, you know, for me it was this metaphor, for sort of the randomness of life and the destiny of life." "The destiny in that it lands at Forrest's foot and the randomness that it could've landed anywhere, like that other guy's shoulder." "So to me it was always a metaphor for us sort of floating around on a breeze." "And I think it's the true nature of the story of Forrest, is that what's wonderful about the tale we're about to tell is that you don't know what direction it's gonna take until it takes it." "I can't imagine any other actor doing it." "Tom was perfect for this part." "It was something he wanted to do, I trusted him." "He didn't show me anything until the day." "I mean, he wasn't, like, "Let me show you the Forrest I'm gonna do,"" "it wasn't a situation like that, it was all mutual trust." "I knew he would rise to the occasion." "We were very fortunate that Tom actually didn't work..." "For the first couple of weeks of shooting" "I did all the stuff with the little kid." "And I think Tom just did Vietnam or something, and he did some early Forrest stuff, like running up and down that Oak Alley of the house, and that sort of thing." "So we were very blessed in how we scheduled the movie for the character to... for Tom to really get immersed in the character and then when we finally got to the bench in Savannah, which was actually a little more than halfway through the schedule," "you know, Tom said, "This is like taking a warm bath," ""I'm so comfortable in this character."" "He was at a point where he got the character, he narrated the entire movie and I shot every line of narration on film." "Because we were there for, I think, three days, just doing him doing the bench." "And of course those big shots and stuff." "But I knew that if we didn't shoot every line on film it would sound more read than performed." "It would sound narrated, so he performed every line of narration and after that, we just, you know, completely powered through Forrest, he just had it down." "Of course those were all... the heavy scenes we had to do came after we were done, we were on the stages here, not on location." "I think the other thing that happened on this movie as a process was whenever we would try to force something it would never work out." "And we always had to allow the Gump part of it to come through." "And that even happened in the picking of locations because... this location, for instance, takes up two-thirds of the movie, and it just felt like this was where it wanted to be, and yet there was no park bench there and no place to sit," "so we just had to make that work." "Just as when we finally found a place to build Forrest's house, it was a place that Bob could come and finally say," ""This is talking to me."" "We wanted, uh, all of the early parts of Forrest's childhood to almost seem like they were out of a Norman Rockwell illustration." "So we actually took colours, and in fact the outside of the school scene that's coming up was taken literally from a composition of his." "Looking at Sally Field now..." "I recall that..." "Bob saying that for the first, uh... you know, 20 minutes of the movie or so, the whole movie will be riding on the acting prowess of the mother of Forrest Gump." "Not only is that gonna continue until she finally dies in the film but it was really critical to find a very strong actress to carry this film until Tom Hanks came into the picture." "And Sally was certainly, you know, an actress of stature that could carry it." "I always saw Sally in this part, I don't know why." "Wendy Finerman, the producer, suggested her in the first day or week that I signed on to do the movie." "And I was just, like, yeah, wow, Sally, and I sent Sally the script and I was very worried about it because, you know, she has to play ultimately, Tom..." "When you say it it's not really that way," ""Sally, why don't you play Tom Hanks' mother?"" "But that's not what it really is, she ages with make-up and so... she read the script and she was signed on in a second." "She just completely got it." "Now, it's interesting that the character of young Forrest came to us very serendipitously in that this young boy saw an open casting call that was taking place, I believe, in Memphis, Tennessee, and he lived in northern Mississippi," "and his mom encouraged him to go ahead up and try out for the film." "Ellen Lewis, our casting director, brought this tape to Los Angeles and we were all..." "you had a big smile on your face cos you had just seen this unique character that so far you hadn't seen anywhere." "And so we invited a number of boys out for a... a... actually to read in front of the camera, because sometimes children just freeze up and won't be able to perform at all." "So this young boy, Michael Humphreys I think is his name, you know, came out and he didn't have any fear at all." "All he wanted was a peanut butter sandwich off the catering table." "This scene has in it, this is that Rockwell sort of point of view outside the principal's office, but there's an element in this scene I've always loved, which is this chart, because this was Bob's way of showing what Forrest's IQ was." "And what's wonderful about this chart is that if this didn't exist, if Forrest didn't have an IQ that was below normal, you couldn't tell this story." "Bob was able to isolate this boy and this character as a simpleton, you learn, who has an innocence that lets you take him through the events of the movie without having a point of view that would destroy these scenes." "The reason he could have an effect on the world that he did is because of his innocence and because of his simplicity." "And I think the other thing that was fun about this was that even though Forrest was supposed to be stupid, it was stupid is as stupid does." "Because he never did anything stupid." "His heart always took him in the right direction." "It always makes you wonder how a kid like this can have such a great understanding of the humour in this scene." "The way this movie came about was Wendy Finerman saw an idea in this book that she bought back in the '80s." "And whatever that was, that I don't know, but when Eric Roth took the assignment to adapt the book he was the last one in a string of writers," "I don't know how many went before who weren't able to crack it." "He saw that the glue to the story was... the glue to the movie, was this love story." "And so basically, it's Eric Roth's adaption of the book is what made this movie what it is." "That's like the tone, and of course tone is the key thing and that's what you do as the director." "There's no way that you can explain it, other than you just know it, it's like the famous definition of pornography:" "I know it when I see it." "You have to feel it, you're there on the set," ""That's not working, it's got to be like this,"" "or "You're doing that too self-consciously, do it straighter,"" "or "The humour comes from the fact" ""that you don't understand you're being funny."" "So we try to... it's all inspired by the screenplay, definitely." "It's inspired by the screenplay, but what the director does is he has to hold onto it and keep it from falling off." "And the movies that work the best are when you're totally on the razor's edge with that tone, because in a movie like this I could've fallen off the fence and it would've been really corny," "or fallen off the other side and been really grotesque." "So it's like just that fine, fine line, you know, and that of course is..." "It's very nerve-racking when you're doing it." "It's just really hard." "There's something interesting about Elvis." "We worked with Peter Dobson on the Johnny Bago series, and we knew that Peter was an Elvis fan deep down in his heart, and he really knew his moves, and he was perfect to play the young Elvis." "And then Bob also recalled that Kurt Russell had done a... an Elvis movie in his youth, and had probably done the best job of depicting Elvis on film, so Bob recruited Kurt Russell to put the voice in for Elvis in the film." "Now, the sort of lyrical way that this child speaks is his natural way of speaking." "And Tom was searching for a voice for Forrest, and when he heard this young boy speak, it clicked." "And I think he matched that rhythm as the older Forrest." "Now, I knew that this scene was gonna stay in the movie because Bob's son, Tom's daughter, Don Burgess's son and my nephew were all on that bus, and all had speaking lines." "The young Hanna had come from Colorado, I believe." "I think she lived in Aspen." "And she hadn't ever worked in a film before." "It's interesting that she had the same unique, sort of damaged interior in the way she played the character that Robin brought to the role." "Even though she was beautiful." "This tree was just right across the street from the house, which was right across from the farm where Jenny grew up as well as Vietnam." "Yeah, I think that the breakthrough that you had when you found Oak Alley, the place where you set Forrest's house, was that not could we just shoot the sections where his house was, and where we found this beautiful oak tree and Jenny's farm," "but also the whole Vietnam section could be shot just going down a dirt road on the same plantation." "And then also at nearby Beaufort we could stage the other Vietnam scenes and the shrimping and all of a sudden this incredibly unwieldy production started to kind of come together, in such a way that you could shoot it all in one place" "and base the company in one place, but take the viewer all over... all over the South." "I think the other aspect is that... we never did anything with this Oak Alley, we just let it stay as it was over all the years, because this was the deep-rooted part of Forrest that never really changed." "It was his heart, even though everything else changed." "I love the fact that we didn't apply any kind of embellishments or shtick." "And then this sequence is really," "I think, magical, when I think about it." "Just seeing what actually happens with these braces, how Forrest transforms." "A really great movie is a perfect blend of truth and spectacle, and, you know, when you can deliver spectacle on the screen in terms of performance or action or special effects or, you know, recreating ancient Rome," "whatever you're gonna be doing, and at the same time blend a story about human truth, if you look at all your favourite movies those are the ones that work." "That's different than two people in a room talking about their emotional issues and it's completely boring." "So you can't do it without spectacle, well, and you can't just have spectacle." "So when you can blend the two... if you look back in your own library of movies that you like" "I would think you'll find most of them have that combination." "Now that's actually a running double." "After a while Michael Humphreys didn't like to run very much." "We had to give him a little help." "He takes to running as though it were learning." "You know?" "How people say somebody took to learning?" "Right." "And this is a house that we built, and planted the whole field." "The field must have looked like how it looks at the end of the movie when you first arrived on the plantation, without any crop there at all, any greenery." " Right." " This shack was there, wasn't it?" " No." " You built the entire set?" " Yeah." " You had the shape of the shack." "There was the shape of that shack and brought it over there and then added the side to it." "To make the movie," "I think that you have to have a compelling story, and I look for characters who have to go through a character arc, because, as I explained earlier, that's what all those pivotal characters in the movie do." "And I think that's what Western dramatic story-telling is about." "Is about characters who undergo a change, and therefore that character proves the premise of your movie and then you know what your movie's about." "And I think that whether it's done in a melodramatic way, where it's the old gunfighter who hung up his guns but he's got to put 'em on one more time to save the town, you know," "or whether it's a more subtle story about human emotions, it's all about a character who has to, you know, go through some sort of test and undergo some sort of character change." "Those are the stories I find the most compelling." "So that's what I look for, and if you look at all my movies you'll find it in there, even in the comedies, and even in What Lies Beneath, you know, I had to hang that whole movie" "on whether or not Michelle Pfeiffer was going to deny the truth or not." "And to me, at least I know where the movie's gonna go when I have that." "It's interesting, we had a much more elaborate transition from Forrest as a young boy to Forrest grown up as the Tom Hanks character, but..." "Bob decided this was a much more expeditious way of taking the audience right into our story." "And I think he was right." "What I said to the sound team, and to Alan and the editors is that we should use the records as if there was a radio on, because one of the things that did happen," "I don't know if it happens now, but in my generation..." "It's different now because there's such a diversity of music, but in my generation everybody listened to the same music." "You'd go into any 16-year-old's house and he would have the same records as every other 16-year-old, it was just one of those phenomenon." "So we could use that as signposts to history." "When Al and I got together and we said," ""Now, how are we gonna do this blend of score and records?"" "It came down to this wonderful kind of template, which, as Alan said, "I'll underscore all the emotion" ""and the records can play the landscape."" "And that's what we did." "The records play the action, like when Forrest is running, and Alan comes in, you know." "So Vietnam is basically all scored by records, until the guys start dying, then Al starts sneaking in." "And so that's how we did the movie." "When he's running across America it's all records." "The records play the landscape as if it was part of the set design, then Alan played all the emotional underpinning of the characters." "We were just hanging out there," "I just had no idea that any of this would work." "When you get down on yourself, it's about how you look at everything." "You could see it as very melodramatic, all very, even, soap opera-ish and there was no convention, story-telling convention, there were no bad guys, there was no ticking time bomb or anything in the movie" "to keep the plot going, and I wasn't sure." "Now, after the fact, I understand that Forrest was an innocent, so what he said to everyone was always presumed as the truth." "That's what makes his character work, because he's like a baby." "So he has no agenda, so you take what he says at face value, which is what allows the story to work." "All of the sequences that were historic in context required a tremendous amount of research, because we re-enacted these perfectly, which required finding cast members that looked exactly like the people who were in the real-life footage, and recreating portions so it looked like..." "At one time you could be watching the real event and another one a recreation and not be able to tell the difference." "In some cases, we put Forrest into a real event, in others we would re-enact the same event and put Forrest in it, and you wouldn't know which you were watching." "It was very clever and really, really difficult." "You know, I thought it was kind of..." "I thought it was very ironic that... so many presidents in my lifetime were shot at and when you put 'em all together in a two-hour movie it's actually pretty amazing." "Well, not all presidents, but famous people and politicians and whatever." "So I thought that would be kind of a... a humorous way in a black sort of way, in a dark sort of way, to sort of just give us these milestones in modern American history." "One of the things I think that I always enjoyed about the movie also was that being set in the South, that so much of the history of that period really revolved around the South." "And so it was a real journey through our times, specifically our times with a Southern perspective." "The other thing, I think, that when I look out and see these cars," "I realise that these were our times, so that we actually grew up, a lot of us, during these times, so when we were recreating these scenes, or creating the scenes, we were recreating our own adolescences." "I understand why I love this movie." "Even while we were making it I knew I loved it, because I was recreating sections of my own life." "And I really thought that all my friends were gonna love it too, for the same reasons, but I had no idea that somebody who didn't live through these times was gonna find this so fascinating." "But obviously the character transcended the time, and it became, in a sense, a period movie that happened to be our period." "Also, Forrest walked that tightrope right in the middle, where he never got hung up on all the things that we all did." "So that the rights and the wrongs that we might have been defending..." "He didn't have a perspective on them." "Forrest, his heart just led him through." "And once again, if he had had a perspective on them and had an opinion when he got into a situation, then the movie wouldn't have worked." "He couldn't have done the scene with Wallis if he didn't misunderstand it." "And many of the scenes to come." "Bringing his innocence into these scenes is what makes them so effective." "As I watch all these scenes unfold, it's amazing that every single scene is a revelation to Forrest." "Nothing to him..." "He doesn't understand anything in his life... till he experiences it." "But I've never seen someone experience so much, knowing so little." "I think at this part in the movie you still think you're much smarter than him." "And by the end of the movie, he's surpassed you." "No, he has a much greater understanding of mankind and humanity than I think any of us do." "And he knows himself." "Forrest is like a little boy in this scene." "But the great thing that Bob always does in scenes that are extremely sensitive is he takes the mickey off of them by having just a little taste of humour so that you can sort of..." "You know, it takes the pressure off the tenseness of the moment." "Like having the girl witness Forrest with Jenny here in the dorm." "So this is really, technologically, one of the two breakthroughs on Forrest Gump, I think." "Actually taking historic footage and recreating it to tell a story, and manipulating archival footage, and putting new words into the mouths of the historic characters was something, of course, that had never been done before." "I think it sort of opened up a whole new avenue in story-telling." "But the process was that, there's a scene, OK, he's gonna meet Kennedy, and then we had, you know, our two post-production supervisors, who started, a year and a half ahead of production" "or a year ahead, and they just went to all the archives, all over the country, all over, and they had the guideline of the script, of what I needed, and they just came back with miles and miles of film" "which they honed down to what they thought was usable, and then I looked at everything, like when Kennedy's got the football at the very first shot, that was in the Rose Garden, but we found that image of him" "and put him in the Oval Office with our background plate." "So we just looked at everything and then when we found the bits of film we went back, revised the script to try to weave the story into what we had." "And I know the joke of like, Kennedy, he says he has to go pee, that was inspired by finding this piece of footage where he turned around in the Oval Office and looked at the camera," "and so we said, "OK, that's where we could put a joke,"" "and we figured out the whole peeing thing which backed into that." "So it was a very complicated process, constantly changing, going back and forth." "The narration worked like this." "There were obvious pieces of it that were scripted very early on." "They were always in the script." "We recorded all the narration that was scripted ahead of time, before we shot the movie, and I had it with me on a little cassette player that I gave to the script supervisor cos I had to build these pauses into the scene," "You know, "Mama always had a way of explaining things..."" "in between lines of dialogue, so I had to have a rough idea of how Tom was gonna do that, and I had those with me and we tried our best during the shooting to build in those pauses." "Then, like I said, I had Tom perform on film." "See, I was inspired by Amadeus, because Amadeus, what I loved about that movie was until Forrest Gump I thought it was the most beautifully narrated movie because usually when you see a movie that's narrated it's an excuse for bad plotting." "But when I saw Amadeus, what I loved about it is, you would cut to the narrator to react to the scene you just saw." "And I thought, "Now, that works!"" "So I used that in..." "I used that in Forrest Gump." "So I never knew what pieces of Tom I was gonna need on film when he was narrating until I assembled the whole movie, and so I shot it all, which did two things." "It gave me all the pieces and allowed me to have Tom perform the narration, which is how I wanted him to do it." "So we did all that, and then we cut the movie with all that film narration that we had." "And then once we had to really start to fine-cut the movie and hone it all down then Tom went back again and we wrote new narration to link scenes, take things out, tighten things up, you know, weave in and out of scenes." "There's a scene in there where he's talking about Bubba's mama, not having her having to work in anybody's kitchen any more and the joke just wasn't working, and in one of these takes Tom just went off" "and did an off-colour joke on camera, but in the set-up he looked at the other actor and said "You know what?"" "And told this really dirty joke." "So I took the you-know-what out and I dropped it in the movie, and if you look at that really, really..." "If you look at that piece of film closely" "Tom's a little bit out of character there." "So it was a lot of fun to ultimately edit, and so I was able to decide where I was gonna weave back and come back to the narrator, and a lot of times I'd come back to him where, you know," "he's just reacting or is just gonna start telling a story." "And I'd cut back to him and he doesn't say anything, he just sort of is kind of winding up for the next little chapter." "I think it was an inspired choice of a song to choose to have Jenny singing as a naked folk singer here in this..." " Bobbie Dylan." " Bob Dylan." "Her idol was Joan Baez." "I don't know if the audience picked up that Joan Baez poster in the dorm room, that acoustic guitar leaning against the wall." "That's a great shot." "I think when Robin had to learn to do the few songs that she plays in the movie, for some reason or another I was called on to give her guitar instructions." "Now, I think I can play about six or eight chords on the guitar but I can play the chords of the songs she had to play, so I taught her this and how to play the song on the sidewalk." "Like you say, Forrest follows his heart, everywhere he goes." "He can't help himself." "And he always does the right thing, not only as a character but a man, and I think that's the part that was really difficult because there was a lot of questions in and around going to Vietnam" "and the service and not going and fighting the war and what made you a man of that generation." "And Forrest just kind of was able to do all the right things, and right here, I mean, you know and you just feel how much he really, really cares." "This was on a bridge outside Savannah, wasn't it?" " Where we shot this?" " Yeah." "And we put in the lights." " For the club." " The exterior of the club." "The interior was back in Los Angeles." "The Jenny character, I thought, you know, sort of represented the... the unfulfilled hole in the soul part of that American generation of, you know, not being able to find fulfilment in anything other than sex, drugs, rock and roll," "whatever was going on at the time." "And Forrest was sort of this, he represented, you know, the ideal of what, you know, America was supposed to be." "Mom, God and apple pie, right?" "And Jenny was the reciprocal of that in her character, so what you have is that wonderful unity of opposites, so you have two people who are totally polarised in their culture who are romantically attracted." "That's great movie stuff." "I think for those of us who lived through these times, this is where it started to become very personal and kick in, the whole idea of what it meant to go to Vietnam in those days." "Though of course we all have our own feelings about... how we felt about the war, and of course Forrest is going to a place that he doesn't have any idea about at all." "And so we're bringing to the party all of our own understanding and feelings about it" "and again, Forrest in his innocence doesn't have those feelings." "I remember very early on, Bob was talking about that scene with Mama there by the river hugging Forrest and hearing this Creedence Clearwater song and hearing the flapping of those helicopter blades while he heard the song blaring." "And while he was shooting the end of that scene, he could hear 'em kicking in before you came to this shot." "Now, this terrified me when we shot it, because this was actually a tidal flat." "The water would come in and seep into this area and then drain out, and we had to pick the time of day when the water wasn't there." "But what you can't see is that that helicopter isn't quite touching the ground, the pilot was able to bring that helicopter in just above the ground for our huge movie star to step off and come into the scene," "and when we had to do a second take my heart nearly dropped." "But this pilot, who had piloted helicopters in Vietnam hit the mark exactly right every single time he flew that helicopter." "Mykelti Williamson was the actor, he came in at an audition and he read, and read with Tom, and both Mykelti, when they came in and when Gary came in, they both auditioned for the part." "As soon as I saw them I knew they were the guys." "Mykelti came up with the lip." "He did it, he said, "I wanna have this... this big thick..."" "Well, what we call 'em in the movie business is called a plumper." "And so he had one built and he put it in there, and when he showed it to me I thought it was great and then Gary came up with that line, that "You better tuck that thing in" line." "So we put all that stuff in there and it worked great, and Mykelti, when he was designing the character, he always just wanted that kind of lip hanging out in his mouth, open a lot, like that, so that was his." "I can't take credit for that." "We shot these scenes on the last day of shooting." "That's right, and some of the... on that rooftop." "Yeah, we recreated in little sandboxes all the different forefathers of Gary Sinise's character, and shot them all in succession on the rooftop of a hotel on Wilshire Boulevard." "This was one of those movies where you went from thing to thing and they were always different." "It was next to where Jenny was doing her suicide." "That's right." "Lieutenant Dan was so difficult to cast, in a sense, because we had to depict a character who went through an incredible transformation." "He had to be very hard and not in touch with himself and really harsh on our main character, and by the end of the movie develops an incredible understanding and compassion and had to have a lot of likeability." "And so Gary Sinise could embody all the facets of this character." "And he had to be willing to let them take his legs off." "Yeah, that's true." "There were some people who thought we had cast a legless person in that role and thought we had put fake legs on in other scenes." "That's like, that's really a stretch." "As I remember, Dale Dye put these guys through a whole boot camp to get them ready, right?" "Yeah, he did." "As a matter of fact, when we were casting everybody who was to participate in this scene, we warned them before they were gonna be cast that they had to attend this boot camp with this real Lieutenant, Dale Dye, who had served in Vietnam," "and has become one of the leading consultants in army films." "And I gotta tell you, these actors would come back with these harrowing stories of their experience with Dale, because he wanted them to really understand what it was like." "He was firing, he had real guns and he was blowing things up and making them sleep there and trying to scare them and make them understand what it was like to be there." "Some of the actors loved it and others were terrified." "I've actually spoken to Vietnam veterans, and Dale Dye, our consultant on the film, who said that the terrain in South Carolina is the closest to the terrain in Vietnam that's he's ever seen depicted in a motion picture." "And it always makes you feel great when you know you haven't just created a setting that doesn't look like the real thing." "And also, in this area here there were actual water moccasins that had to be cleared out before these guys went in there." "Yeah, I think we put some charges in there..." "To wake 'em up and scare 'em off!" " Didn't we?" "The day we shot?" " That's right." "There was some chain link down so they could walk in there." "Tom was wearing protective garb on his legs in case he got bitten." "They couldn't penetrate and bite him in the leg." "One of the things that you begin to notice here," "I think it's subconscious, but Bob's choice to not ever show the enemy." "Yeah, I remember when we scouted the location where the big battle was gonna take place," "I thought what a brilliant idea, to never actually see the enemy there." "I think it's something that Bob is very aware of, is how to keep the intimacy of the point of view of the scene, since you actually stay with the characters and don't go outside that space that they would be perceiving." "Yeah, I mean, we most recently worked on Cast Away and when he did the plane crash he only allowed the viewer to see that from the point of view of the main character." "And once again, when we witnessed this terrifying gun battle that takes place in Forrest Gump, it's even more terrifying because you don't know what the heck's going on." "And the more you actually know about the situation, the less terrifying it is." "The other aspect is this breaks the rule entirely because these are Forrest telling the story about Jenny but they're not things that he ever actually could know." "So we see those throughout, but that was one way that Jenny stayed alive throughout the film." "Yeah, that was a rule that Bob broke, his own point of view rule, which was never to leave the point of view of his main character, but it was the only way he could figure out" "to keep her going throughout this movie." "And there's only a few times that we leave Forrest and go and pick up Jenny's story." "This one shot, it's all one shot." "We had the famous, infamous Dale Dye as our military consultant." "I asked him, "What happened in Vietnam" ""when you were involved in these firefights?"" "And he said, "It was just mass confusion."" "That's all, the guys are just screaming, stuff's flying..." "And it's just confusion." "And I said, "Well, that's what we have to do."" "And the only other thing I did was..." "I wanted it to only be from Forrest's point of view, so in other words you never cut to the VC lying in wait." "You know, you just see muzzle flashes of their weapons." "It's just all about these guys who've just been... who've just stepped into hell." "So that was the idea, just to make it crazy, and so the sound went along with that." "This was one of those situations where we had this chance." "This is one of the first movies I did that was all digital, so you can have that spectacular low-end frequency stuff come in and all these huge explosions." "It was pretty much just layering, just this wall of sound in the battle sequence, so it just went from this..." "It was one of those things where we were having a little too much fun so it was time to bring in the ugliness and it worked pretty great." "I think here's where the score by Alan starts to bring us into... a level that it just becomes more and more throughout the movie from here on out." "The first time I ever watched the movie from beginning to end," "I had Alan there." "I had Alan there, my editor there, my assistants there and I had Randy Thom, the sound designer, there." "And just this handful of people, we put the movie on." "Cos actually this was the last movie I edited on film, so we actually had film." "So we projected the movie from beginning to end and it was like, Alan went home that night and started writing." "And it was interesting because I put temp music in when I showed the movie to Alan." "Some of his old stuff or other composers' stuff, you know, just to fill the scene out." "But when I ran the movie for Alan, the whole first scene with the feather was silent, and the only music I put in were the records." "When I ran it for Alan I didn't have any temp music in at all." "And he literally came home on the synthesiser and he wrote that opening theme that night." "Because we were going to a preview or something and I said, "I can't think what to put in the beginning of this movie,"" "and he went and wrote it, and we had this kind of scratch track out of the synthesiser that we previewed with on... in our early previews." "That was one of those things where the movie was talking to Al." "It's some of his greatest work that he had in the movie." "He just went away and, I guess, a couple of months after," "I went up to where he lives, up north, and he just started playing me temp cues and it was just sketches on the piano and it was just great." "We didn't change a thing." "This guy is so complex, this Gary Sinise, because he wants to die just so that he can be a part of his own heritage." "He wants to die with dignity." "Well, he had a relative who died in every war." "And he thought that his destiny was to die in the war like his forefathers." "And he didn't want Forrest to interfere with that." "And here's where Forrest is smart and Captain Dan is not, cos he knows how to survive." "I always thought it was sort of like a Hitchcock McGuffin or something, that Forrest was dumb because it's something everybody followed as though it were true, but in fact it actually had no real meaning, in the sense that I think he was actually smart." "But see, his heart was true." "You hear the enemy here." "Now, this was very, very complicated, the strafing by these planes, it had to be shot in two parts." "One where we actually had Forrest, or Tom Hanks, running, carrying Mykelti, and then we cleared everybody out of the set and set off these explosions, here on this island in South Carolina." "And then blended the two parts of the shot together to look like he was running through the scene with the explosions." "Isn't there a rig helping him carry Bubba?" "Yeah, we had an overhead crane that took the weight of Mykelti off of Tom so that he could, in fact, appear as if he was lifting him." "And got it set to a weight that he could hold and it would track with him so he could run carrying Bubba." "Of course, we removed the wire later." "You want a cameraman who understands the story, the style of what it is that you're doing with the camera, and the big controversy that we had at the beginning of the movie is when I said I thought the movie should be made in widescreen," "and everyone said - my producers, my cameraman and my editor - said, "Widescreen?" "This isn't Spartacus." ""This is a story about this guy with a low IQ."" "And when I started talking about it with Don, we started realising it was a widescreen story, because it was about a guy who's running, a guy who kept going across the screen." "The only thing incompatible with the format was the Washington Monument." "And the Washington Monument probably isn't compatible in 185 either, but the movie laid out beautifully in widescreen." "The thing that was great about it being an intimate story in widescreen is that in widescreen you can do close-ups that are over the shoulders at the same time." "So you get the power of having both characters in the same frame and you get real close on the actors." "As Don Burgess said to me, "The thing with widescreen," ""the trade off with widescreen is" ""every shot is really hard to compose." ""It takes a lot of time and effort." ""But when you get it, just about every shot is great."" "And he was absolutely right." "You have to force yourself into really doing the composition beautifully." "In the ping pong scenes, they all look natural, but there's so much of Bob's trickery in them." "And I think this is where his sense of humour comes out." "It's also a testament to Tom's abilities, not just as an actor, but shows his talents in so many different ways." "I love the way he could just pick up ping pong..." "I don't know if he'd played ping pong at all in his life but, well, just after no time at all he was playing like an expert." "I remember we were in the editing room and we were playing with the three songs here, these three Doors songs." "And we tried all kinds of different songs, not thinking we should have three Doors songs." "But we couldn't do any better than the songs Bob initially chose to accompany Forrest becoming this great ping pong player." "Gary understood that character, I mean, he just immersed himself." "He's like the metaphor for the crippled part of America." "You know, the America that got blood on its hands, the Vietnam America." "His character has to confront the, you know, the fact that we were involved in this illegal war of aggression, and all this stuff." "He speaks for America in the scene where he says," ""This wasn't supposed to happen."" "This isn't how it was supposed to ever happen." "His character probably makes the most spiritual transformation, where he has to accept the fate that was dealt to him then go through this period of anger, then go through this period of acceptance, then he has to grieve it," "and then he comes out OK on the other side." "Which is an absolute spiritual journey." "See, I think that's the next point of reference, that this wasn't supposed to happen, and that there was a plan that's gone wrong." " Gone awry." " Yeah." "And I think that's how a lot of us... you know, felt, from that generation." "No matter what side of the war you were on, this is where it starts to become bigger than... just about the Vietnam war or the '60s." "It's interesting that the two elements that he talks about at the end of the film, where we did feel like we had a destiny, but at the same time we were floating like feathers on a breeze," "and just whatever came into our lives at that moment, we allowed that to take us down different paths." "At the same time we had this inherent feeling that there was a purpose, and these two are in conflict and constantly are in the movie." "And tinkering with historical footage... is just an extension of tinkering with history, whether it's written or recorded or whatever." "We didn't suggest that the original footage that we used is no longer intact, but, you know, I made a feature movie which is a fictional entertainment." "Everybody knows that." "I think the ethical question comes mainly to journalists, and you've seen it happen in the last couple of years in political campaigns, where politicians have been grafting themselves into scenes" "with other politicians, or famous people that they wanna be associated with." "That's when the real ethical question comes." "A movie's just a movie." "My favourite story, the one I like to tell, is that this question came up when they invented the printing press." "When they invented printing in the 13th century or whenever it was, and someone probably said, "Great, we can print the Bible,"" "and then somebody said, "Yeah, we can also print lies - great!"" "So, nobody believes what they read in the newspaper, right?" "So, everybody says, "Yeah, well, I'm not gonna believe that" ""just cos somebody wrote it."" "Now you say, "I'm not gonna believe that because that image is moving."" "Just cos an image is moving doesn't mean it's truth any more, and that's sadly what we..." "or maybe it's a good thing." "It's probably good to question everything, but... you can create digitally a flawless perfect moving lie and probably somebody with the money somewhere will do it and it's gonna be a big scandal and everyone'll say," ""Oh, just cos I saw that on the TV news" ""doesn't mean he really said that."" "I had some guys come up while we were filming this scene at the Lincoln Memorial and had gone to school at Columbia University and gone to a march that they thought we were depicting here and they said this looked and felt" "exactly as they remembered it from the time." "Once again, that makes you feel so proud of everything that went in to stage an event like this in a movie." "Of course, historically, this was a demonstration that would've taken place in our movie in 1968, and there was not a demonstration in 1968, it was 1967 and 1969." "Right, so we blended the two events together and created this one big event" " that Forrest attended." " Right." "I remember I went to the similar demonstration in San Francisco, being on the west coast, and this actually resonated quite a bit for me, because it really did feel like, though we were on the east coast," "it felt like a very similar situation." "When I came up from LA to San Francisco and marched to Golden Gate Park." "Any time we do any special effect it's always storyboarded, but the thing with storyboards that you have to be careful with is that you have to have the storyboards, but you have to be able to revise 'em, you can't just insist..." "A lot of directors say, "It's gotta look like this,"" "and you physically can't do that sometimes." "But storyboards are important for communicating an idea to a large amount of people." "Like, we storyboarded Vietnam, we storyboarded anything that had to do with a visual effect, because it's so much easier to say to 15 people," ""It's gonna look something like this,"" "rather than try to explain the shot to people." "When you put a storyboard in front of them they go," ""Now we know what you're saying."" "That's what I use storyboards for." "I never storyboard scenes between two actors or any of the scenes with Tom and Gary in his apartment." "I would never waste an artist's time to draw, you know, coverage, over the shoulders and things like that." "But whenever you have to do something that you have an army of people to work on the shot, it's a good idea to have storyboards." "Being there and seeing these actors pull this stuff off was really a lot of fun, but I'm like one of these weird..." "I don't have a lot of fun when I'm making the movie because it's too much hard work." "The reason that people look at movies and say, "That must've been fun,"" "and you go, "That was really not fun because..." ""the movie's fun to watch but the making of the movie" ""was miserable for a lot of reasons."" "And one was my ultimate vision for everything is ultimately compromised." "That's what you have to do as a film-maker, you have to just turn it over, give up, because in the morning you got this long list of 20 set-ups to do this sequence and get all the coverage you need" "and then by lunch you haven't gotten one single shot yet, and you start crossing them all off, and at the end of the day you've been able to scramble and get four set-ups that you can scrape together and make work." "And it's like, you know, "Damn," you know?" ""I could've really done this better," ""but everybody was too slow and it took too long,"" "and some things it's like somebody didn't realise that..." ""Oh, we didn't put gravel there so the camera truck got stuck,"" "and that cost you an hour, and it's like "Oh, man!"" "There's like all these things that make making movies, for me, not fun." "The fun part for me is in the editing room, because that's where I have the most fun, because it's just me, my film and my editor." "All the actual shooting of the movie is always just surviving, just getting through the day and getting enough in the can so you can make it work somehow." "I'll tell you where the luxury came with this movie is that..." "It's been in all my movies for the last 10 years, 15 years." "You get to a point where you work with such good people, both in the cast and your crew that when you get in the editing room you don't have to do things like edit around bad performances or they're screwing up their lines and things like that," "because you do end up with really good film, and your choices can be based on the artistry of the performance." "You don't have to cut around glitches, so once you get to that point where you work with professionals you end up with pretty good film." "So once again, this is a series of shots that take us through a journey that Jenny went on when Forrest wasn't there." "The camera leaves Forrest and his point of view in order to fill in Jenny's story to the audience." "But it was the only way that Bob thought that he could actually... keep you current with where her character was going in the movie." "I think that's the only time that Forrest actually shows his anger." "Over this person that's actually physically assaulted Jenny." "That's so right." "See, you look at a scene like this, and how, as an art director, are you supposed to comment on putting a bunch of buses around in a giant hippy camp with tons of props in the background" "as though that has any real meaning?" "And yet that's the only thing that makes it different than if you were a tourist in Washington, DC today." "But that's not something that you're really even going to look at." "You absorb it, but it's just trying to be a natural way of saying that you're in this time period with those demonstrators." "And yet it's all just thrown away." "And rightfully so." "And so after all this, what I thought was interesting for me was to be able to not only have the moon landing, but actually to sort of reclaim the American flag by putting it in the background." "That was interesting when we did this scene that we actually had one of the leading, I think, ping pong players from Taiwan, and this was a scene that we shot without a ping pong ball, in fact," "we just went through the motions of hitting the ball then put the ball in later." "This guy, one of the best players in the world, couldn't hit a ball that wasn't there." "Of course, none of us can, but he couldn't even swing at it." "Rick, this scene is true to your heart, because I think you are John Lennon." "Well, I'm a disciple." "And to be involved with a movie that had John in it and to actually see that John got his inspiration from Forrest for the song lmagine." "What's so wonderful is that there's nothing sacred." "There is truly nothing sacred in this movie and everything, the source of meaning for everything, can be tampered with, manipulated and had fun with." "That's one of the charms of the movie - you don't stop at anything, you can't hold anything too close to your heart and think you have the answers of the greatest understanding for anything because there's always some shading of it" "that maybe you didn't look at." "The key to working with the editor is getting an editor you enjoy being with, who you respect." "You have to have mutual respect." "And you can't be in an antagonistic situation with your editor." "That is the worst." "Cos editing is true collaboration, when it really works great." "The whole thing about making movies is collaborating but it really becomes focused in the editing room, where you have to let the editor take your film and try and be open-minded and say," ""The way you put that together isn't the way I intended it," ""but that works."" "Or you say, "No, try it the way I envisioned it."" "My editor works from day one of shooting." "He's editing." "I don't look, but he's there, because there always comes that moment when you got to see something, see how the movie's coming together to see where you are." "My endless conversation with my editor in dailies is" ""Throw that out." "Don't use that." "That won't work."" "It's like, "Cut it all out!"" "That's conversation one, but the other conversation I'm always having with my editor is," ""I'm glad you explained that to me," ""because I didn't understand what I was doing."" "You're shooting and he's wondering, "How does this go together?"" "So you kind of like walk him through it." "And the real editing comes when you have to form the final movie, and that's when you need that sounding board and second "Uh..."" "And you really need somebody who looks at the film objectively." "The director's downfall is having the inability to kill his darlings." "You do this great big remote head shot and you got it all in one and you're so proud and everything's in focus and everybody's great, and the editor says, "It's boring." ""I'm gonna need an insert to cut this thing in half."" "So you got to have somebody who's objective enough to be able to, you know, to help collaborate and make the movie as best as you can." "The cinematography and the way this movie is being shot is..." "I think it's deceptively simple, but I think that it emotionally just felt right, and it created this sort of rhythm of story-telling" "that allows you to actually go from scene to scene and always just feel like you're focussing on the right thing." "Bob moves the camera a lot when he shoots his movies, but he's always moving it towards the focus of the scene." "So that's why it always feels natural, because you're always watching what you want to watch." "He directs your eye to what you should be watching." "And that seems simple, but it's in fact very, very difficult." "I defy anyone to try it." "And Don Burgess gets it so well that it's like a wonderful shorthand to watch between the two of them sometimes, in terms of how they find the honesty of the scene, and where they wanna have the camera to tell the story at that moment." "And it's a real collaboration between the two of them." "You choose a cinematographer by looking at his work and his artistry and how he's able to light, and how he's able to compose, you look at that first." "Then the other thing that you have to do is, again, interview someone and make sure that their personality is someone you're gonna be able to collaborate with." "I love working with Don because he really likes to prepare." "I'll tell you a perfect example of the genius of Don Burgess." "When we built the house and we went out to the location where we were on the river in South Carolina, and Rick Carter, my production designer, had the house kind of with these sticks, like you put up these posts" "just to give us a sense of the shape of the house, the scale of what it was gonna be, and get it with basically stakes and tape, and he showed us where the house was gonna be" "on the river where he wanted it." "So we were there staking this house out like in March of the year that we were gonna shoot, and Don pulled out the GPS and he pulled out the compass," "and he said, "When are we gonna be shooting here?"" "And we said, "At the end of April, first two weeks of September."" "And he said, "I think we should tilt the house 20 degrees like that."" "What that allowed is for the sun to hit the house absolutely perfectly on the weeks that we were there, to make the house look so beautiful." "So that's like a cameraman who's really working and showing up and working on the movie and not just showing up and saying, "Is it day or night today?"" "If your cameraman shows up on the day and says "Is this day or night?" You got the wrong cameraman." "He hasn't read the script." "Of course, just to reinforce the difficulty of shooting a shot with a man who has legs but in the movie doesn't," "Bob had to put obstacles on the set to make it look even more difficult to do such a thing." "But you don't even think about it." "And that's the part that I think is interesting and almost magical, is the suspension of disbelief, that you don't wanna know, and when film spaces create that space where you don't wanna know anything other than what you're watching" "and you're only drawn to the story and characters, that's when movies take on the most magical elements that they have." "I think they touch us most deeply." "But the other things matter, you have to accomplish those in order to create that illusion." "Now, this is, for me, emotionally where I could've gotten hung up in Vietnam and the post-Vietnam syndrome." "But then to be kind of yanked out of it into Watergate and actually get to go to the Watergate Hotel to find the place where you could actually view the break-in." "We were actually able, in that unique place in the movie, to tell a part of history that people have never seen before." "But to walk into that hotel room and say," ""Somebody could've been watching this,"" "and to know the implications later, I love that." "Again, the use of the television and the media to move ahead in time and space." "I think Bob enjoys, in these sequences, moving in and out of the public perception and back to the personal as a way of kind of defining how a lot of us perceive the disparity between what our social lives are" "and what we really think on the inside." "You know there's something about the gothic South that we depict in the movie." "You know, the South is, in a strange way, the most sort of patriotic segment of America, in that it's slow to change." "The South, as far as I was concerned, was something that was always in the script in the place that it always had to be set, and it's where these characters came from." "It was like those are the guys who fought in the war in Vietnam, that's where characters like Jenny left and travelled around the world, and I think what the South does more than anything is it evokes..." "I mean, the one constant that we had in the movie that worked really well emotionally was the idea that characters kept coming home, and the South has that going for it, I think, more than any other region of the nation," "you get this sense that it's constant." "Those oak trees are 150-200 years old, so that was one of the things that was great about the South." "It gives you that sense of coming home to something that doesn't change when the world around does." "But that sort of stays constant." "This sequence always fascinated me." "If you look at it not just for the emotional quality, which is, I think, wonderful, but where we go as we cut away and how we tell this part of the story." "Again, just the staging is very simple." "Later on in the movie we're gonna be by the tree with Jenny but there we were still knowing that we're in the South because of the Spanish Moss and the old oak trees." "One of the great things of working on movies like this is not just taking a trip down memory lane, if you will, or being able to re-examine our recent past, you know, our own lives," "but you get to learn so much about so many unique things in the world." "Like, for example, shrimping." "I didn't know the first thing about shrimping." "And experiences like that, when you make movies, open up to you and present a whole new world, that you really wouldn't have known existed." "Again, here we're now into the full throttle of the cocaine '70s." "I think Don Burgess did a wonderful job here." "If you notice the colour palette that he's dealing with and how you really can almost feel the harshness of the drug and what that's leading this character to experience." "Yeah, I think if I recall, he changed the colour palette to a much cooler blue-green colour palette, and really desaturated, so it made you sort of feel the lack of warmth and, you know, anything of that nature." "You feel like everything's been drained out of her life, just like he did with his colour palette." "You know, it's just amazing how far you can stray from the path but you can still come back home." "And, you know, it's staggering to think how much experimentation and... and wanderlust exists in so many people's lives, certainly in mine and I think a lot of our generation, before they can come back to the things that have the most meaning." "And this movie, certainly through the character of Jenny and the character of Lieutenant Dan takes you into some of the most harrowing experiences that you think are what you should be experiencing." "And you need to experience those... in order to discover what really does have meaning." "I remember when Bob presented us with this dilemma on this day." "We went and scouted this location and he said," ""I'm gonna stage this reunion between Lieutenant Dan and Forrest," ""and he's gonna crawl up onto this pier" ""and it's gonna be exhilarating," ""but what would really be great is if, unbeknownst to Forrest," ""who's jumped off his boat with no one navigating," ""what if it crashes into the pier in the background and it blows up?"" "Now, this was on a Friday and I think we had to shoot it either in a day or two." "So we somehow had to pull that gag together." "You had to get that pier out there and make sure it would detonate on cue." "And also not hurt the boat when it actually crashes into it." "And that the boat would stop in time not to ground itself." " Yeah." " Yeah." "Now, in those days you did that the old-fashioned way." "For real." "I like to compare this whole debate, I guess, about digital effects to the microphone." "You know, nobody says," ""Gosh, there was probably a microphone there the whole time!"" "You know." "There was!" "But nobody talks about it any more." "But a..." "When was it?" "90..." "No, 70 years ago?" "That was what everybody talked about." ""Where do you think the microphone was?" "Was it in the flower pot?"" "Because that was the new tail wagging the dog." "And so there'll be some new thing that everybody's obsessed about and worried about, and the idea that you can change the tie, or not even that, change the inflection of an actor's performance," "or change the way he might, you know, edit... you can probably edit lines in and out of his mouth." "You'll be able do that with your editing package in a few years, and no one will question it because it'll just be another tool." "So the trick to all this stuff is to make it invisible." "To make all technique invisible." "The reason people say you can't see the effects is because we weren't creating alien landscapes, we weren't creating weird creatures." "That's when people say, "That's an effect!"" "But we would change the sky and put birds in, and do things like that, and that just makes the movie better, I think." "But those are you know, it's the same technology used to do creatures." "So, the trick is to take all this digital imagery and make it as invisible of a tool as, you know, the long lens is." "It'll take a force of God to strike Lieutenant Dan down." "This is all or nothing, this is all or nothing." "Here's a good example of saving a lot of money, because that's stock footage." "And now this is back into what we created." "There was a hurricane that blew through there and there were still minor remnants of that that we used as a backdrop to shoot that scene." "This digital thing is gonna happen once it becomes cheaper and once you can move faster, cos time is money." "So it's all about the money." "At the end of the day it doesn't really matter, if this movie, exactly this way, with all these characters, were shot on 8mm, it would be just as compelling." "It wouldn't be technically as beautiful." "So the thing about the format of the image has never been of any consequence, it's all about the script." "It's about the script and story." "The technical stuff is always changing and will always be there as a tool." "Whatever's gonna happen is gonna happen." "The audience will accept..." "They'll tell us what they like to see." "Forrest, obviously, never changes." "He's this guy who just... you know, wanders through life telling the truth as he sees it, and everybody around him has to, you know..." "Everyone's lives around him are touched." "The dynamic starts to disintegrate like a house of cards because he calls everybody on their stuff, so everybody around him changes, and some people are destroyed, like Bubba, they die." "But Forrest just goes through so the two pivotal characters in the movie for me are the Jenny character and the Lieutenant Dan character, and they represent sort of the human growth." "They're like a metaphor for... you know, emotional growth in any human being where you have to go through these stages of different pain to come out better on the other end." "I don't like any improv when the camera's rolling." "I don't like to watch actors on the screen thinking up lines." "When we're working things out, when we're in rehearsal, which are large table readings with the cast, when we're blocking the scene out, if an actor wants to try something and we can make it work or I think it's right," "we'll design it into the scene and write it down." "Because it's not fair to other actors for an actor to start saying lines that, you know..." "It's not fair to anybody who's working because they don't know what to do." "So I like to have everything scripted, but that doesn't mean things can't be changed, and I never would beat up on an actor to say the word specifically, unless it was crucial to the plot or the character." "So if an actor wants to change his words, as long as the intention of the line is correct and it doesn't destroy the moment." "If the actor wants to cut out the key plot word of the movie we're not gonna let him do that, but what a director basically does..." "I don't like to put my actors in psychotherapy." "I think what they want a director to do is tell them how the character is feeling in the scene." "And where they go for that, you don't have to tell them," ""Remember when your dog died and you were six, how sad you were?"" "They don't need to hear that, they just want to know..." ""This is like, you're really sad here."" "And then they go off and they find that." "And then you're like the throttle - not that sad, and you have to just keep their performance in perspective so that they're not gonna be playing the character over the top at the beginning of the movie" "and not save something for the end." "That's what a director does in regard to talking to actors, talk about the characters' feelings." "Now as he starts saying all the things that he's been, you realise somebody must actually have been putting all this together." "And all that documentary footage and everything, that we came in and out of all of this in a very simple manner, and so the editing process here is something that I think is worth noting just because you can't see it." "But really that all comes down to the script, it was so cleverly scripted that the pieces fell together seemingly so naturally." "I think it's something Artie Schmidt in particular brings to the mix, which is having a sense of exactly what the right thing to do is in relationship to the story that Bob is telling so that he's like an anchor." "Robin brought so much to this character that you really could feel the distance she's travelled." "And the authenticity, I think, of her character." "Yeah, there's no doubt that in casting her you really had to find someone who, deep inside of themselves, could show the emotion of a damaged and truly, deeply hurt individual." "And Robin somehow was able to depict that throughout the entire movie." "That somehow beneath the surface of her beauty was this hurt inner self." "And she was the only person that we actually read for the character of Jenny, for the movie." "She came and screen tested with Tom, and everybody came back to a meeting and Bob said, "She's the one."" "Casting that character was over." "I just think she approached it from a very real deep place and she wasn't sentimental about it at all." "This really was what her life had been." "And it really came through, I think." "In a lot of ways Lieutenant Dan and Jenny are similar." "In that they have these very... these destinies that they thought they needed to fulfil." "Lieutenant Dan thought he was more aware of what his destiny was and Jenny was searching for hers, but at the same time they had to explore to the greatest extreme something in order to, you know, heal themselves." "In a way, though, being, I guess, damaged to start off with, trying to just go like the feather was not the answer for her." "And just the way, trying to stick with a preordained destiny was not Lieutenant Dan's answer." "So they were flip-sides of the same coin, I think." "And this part is the healing that could take place at home." "This is them creating a home." "And again Bob's choice of where to be in order to tell this part of the story, when to be intimate and yet when to take a step back and yet maybe you're even more intimate because of that." "I don't know if I have a favourite particular shot." "It's probably something simple and doesn't involve any special effect or anything, but I guess my favourite shots, if I were to answer perfectly honestly, are the ones that are completely invisible." "To me those are the ones that I'm always most proud of." "If you say, "Oh, what a great shot!"" "Then I haven't done my job that well, because you're able to see the shot and that means that I've jarred you out of the experience of seeing the movie, and hung a little flag on the movie" "and said, "Don't forget there's a director!"" "So, you know, the ones that I'm the most proud of and the ones that work the best are the ones that you can't see." "So just like earlier you were talking about where Don and Bob decide to place the camera in telling the story." "And here, at a very intimate moment, the camera starts here with them, but just like in the scene where they're dancing just a little bit earlier, they decide to move the camera outside and let them have this moment, this very intimate moment... together themselves." "Or by themselves." "I actually decided at this section of the movie to have absolute silence, and I think the audience needs it." "They need silence to feel his pain with her, these few moments with Forrest." "The running sequence was the most complicated sequence to incorporate to shooting this movie because we had to create a timeline for Forrest taking this extraordinary run, criss-crossing the country a number of times." "And he went through a whole evolution of his hair and make-up and wardrobe, and found characters along the way that followed him." "We shot these completely out of order." "Whenever we had the opportunity we would shoot a running shot, and you'd just refer to this elaborate booklet that told you what he looked like and who was with him at the time." "The largest challenge in this movie was how many sets we had to open." "We had, I forget the number now." "I think it was in the 70s." "I think the two biggest challenges were... opening a new set every day because that meant you had to go into something new, you had to light it, you had a whole new group of atmosphere people," "a whole new group of costumes, so many different periods of time that the movie wove through." "That was hard, and the other thing that was hard was designing the run at the end." "In terms of beard, continuity... and disintegration of clothes continuity, and where we could shoot and how to put those pieces together, that was an absolute nightmare, because there was no form to that." "And that was something where we just went and shot Forrest and the photo double just running across America, but we couldn't just do it in real time so..." "That to me, I remember, that was really hard to design, because I knew I couldn't switch those shots around later." "I couldn't say, "This shot should go later"" "because his beard would be too short." "It's interesting that all the historic characters in the movie has now turned around on itself and the main character in our movie has become as famous in our story as the characters in the scenes we were re-enacting," "whether they're presidents or John Lennon." "And so he's almost gotten as big in a sense as all these other famous people." "I guess at this point in the movie it's like he's incorporated all of them into him, too, so that as you're watching, that's why you can feel what he's added up to" "and then to have these scenes thrown in, I think, was fantastic." "I remember when Bob called me in and had me read these scenes he'd written, both this happy face and "shit happens" joke." "I read them and said, "These are the darnedest things, Bob," ""you've gotta be kidding me!"" "He said, "Oh, no, we gotta have these scenes."" "My God, this is just what the audience needs at this moment in the movie." "Well, this is what it all adds up to." "Yeah." "Philosophically that's where we are." "I love the justification, the rationale as to how this happened." "He couldn't draw that well and didn't have a camera." "But he wanted to put his face on it." "In a sense, by incorporating all these experiences in Forrest's life, into where he is today, and what we've all experienced in this movie so far is propelling us directly ahead to this moment on the bench," "when he discovers that, in fact, he... he's within running distance, or walking distance, of his destiny." "And it's kind of like the momentum of the movie is carrying us to that point where we're gonna take off in real time with him." "But what's also true to Forrest is that just when it's its most serious it almost means that the entire story you've heard until now did not have to happen, because he didn't have to be waiting for that bus at all," "so you just were in the hands of an idiot." "I think when we got the first screenplay for the movie, in fact the film ended on the bench." "And it was strange, it was almost like Waiting For Godot where you spent this entire movie on this bench, and then at the end, how do you end this movie where somebody's just sitting there?" "And Bob came up with this breakthrough of actually propelling us into real time to tell the end of the story." "And I think that that was key to taking this movie to a new level." "The original script that Eric wrote was all narrated and it was all after the fact, and then the idea came about, and I really don't remember how, of the narration catching up to real time." "And then the movie taking on a life of its own, and the only dilemma was we couldn't figure out how to do the one line when Jenny dies." ""You died on a Tuesday," or whatever he says was such an important line." "So we just ended up doing it, and we rolled it into his scene at the grave side, and that became that one line we were able to save, so it was an important idea that the narration stopped" "and we caught up to the real film." "It ended up working great for the movie." "It's a very simple place that she has, but..." "I like that it's in keeping with her." "And the scene here is just so... touching." "It's so wonderful that they were so closely connected during this run where he was trying to run because he couldn't understand or deal with the pain of losing Jenny." "And there she was watching his run." "You know, and really Forrest was in her mind all the time." "Of course, they were separate from one another and didn't know that." "And there's the introduction of someone who people recognise." "Yeah, little Haley Osment was... a young boy then, had never been in a movie, and I cast him as young Forrest." "He was an intelligent actor then, and of course he's gone on to become a young movie star." "Nancy Haigh, the set decorator in this film..." "I say in this film almost because it was like she was in the film, she just kind of permeated all the settings." "She just seemed to really know the right level to bring to all the environments, whether it was this wedding or the last scene," "in the apartment, the house..." "And I think she just did so much research in the area and lived, in a sense, in the area." "And everything that she did, that Nancy did in the movie just seemed so naturalistic." "For Lieutenant Dan to now come around, and you realise that he's now in the position, sort of, that Forrest was in relationship to his legs at this setting..." "I think the structure of the story, how it resolves the different storylines of the other characters, is incredible because they all kind of fold in to Forrest ultimately." "And even just looking at this scene, where the wedding takes place." "It's just a few intimate friends." "He's a very famous person, actually, but it's just an intimate moment." "This is a very magical shot in the film, sort of depicting time passing." "And the three of them finally together as a family." "A lot of the magical shots that we see in the movie, like when Forrest is reminiscing to Jenny, were real, and they were depicted in the way that we were blessed when we went to film them." "In a certain way, the experience of making the movie was really blessed, because we really could have had insurmountable problems in trying to tell a story like this, but I felt that by the end of this process, everything went right." "And we would show up to a setting... and I was just so thrilled about the material that we would get." "We'd go to Monument Valley and we'd have the beautiful sunset." "Wherever we went, characters that we got to be in the movie." "It's truly remarkable, how some movies just seem to fall together." "Fall into place just right." "When I really think about it, what I found compelling about the story was, it was this story about all different types of love." "It was, you know, love between friends, between mother and son, son and mother, romantic love, friendship, all this, and grieving." "It had all this great stuff in there, which is why I think the film was very popular, because I think it was, you know..." "It's kind of a good thing and a bad thing because the bad thing is that we have to go to movie theatres to get in touch with grief in our society nowadays, but it's a good thing because people can do that," "and that's what attracted a lot of the huge audience." "When the movie was done we thought," ""No one under the age of 35 is gonna understand this movie."" "Before we released it we thought it was all about the baby boom generation, the Vietnam war, you know, the hippy peace movement." "And then all of America came to see the movie, so then we figured no one in the international market will get this, because it's all about American history and it's got American colloquial humour in it," "and then it became this huge movie all over the world." "So it must have touched some nerve that's beyond the historical part of America, and it was all about, I guess, the real human story and all the life metaphors that are in the film." "The good news is that if we ever do the sequel," "Haley's turned into this big star actor now." "When he was that little he was a great actor so he's always had the fire, so it was fun to see him go." "And Hanna, too, little Hanna, she just showed up in The Virgin Suicides." "I love to see these young actors, like, you know... mature, and become good adult actors." "There's a real comfort to having these bookends on a movie." "You know where you start, you get to see this feather float down and... begin the story, and place you in this fable." "And then at the end you've brought so much, and you're experienced, that it's wonderful to allow you just to begin to think about the journey with the feather sort of... closing the book for you." "So many film-makers constantly work, because they never want to deal with the let-down." "But you always go through withdrawal when you finish a project, especially when it's something where everyone is a joy to work with, and everyone is doing such great work." "Where the emptiness comes from is that all this passion goes away." "It's like everyone was so passionate about this movie, and you want that with you all the time." "If you talk to people who knew me, the year after this movie I went into a severe depression, and everyone thought, "It's because it's so successful, right?"" "And it wasn't the success of the movie, it was just about being depressed because, you know, this wonderful experience in your professional life was over." "That's the good and bad news about making movies, they end." "They always end." "You're always gonna be done with 'em." "You know, that's nice because at least you're not in one of those jobs like Jack Lemmon in The Apartment, where your job never ends, and you just keep moving a piece of paper from here to there." "But the price you pay for doing these projects that actually must be finished is that you have to then deal with the emptiness that comes along with it being over." "And everybody deals with it a different way." "I personally now choose to go through that let-down period, and not sign on for another project." "Because I know that I wouldn't be..." "I would be reacting to the wrong thing, and I would end up doing a project that wasn't good." "I would be choosing the project for the wrong reason rather than having a clear mind." "I'd be choosing as a reaction to the one I was just finishing." "So my advice is to just deal with it and know that it's gonna happen." "You're gonna have these..." "And what happens is when you're doing a giant feature film, it literally comes to a screeching halt in less than 12 hours." "For the two years you're making this movie, through the marketing, the advertising, through the publicity, to the release schedule, you're in front of this locomotive and you've got a call sheet as long as your arm," "and the day that movie opens, nobody needs you for anything." "It happens in 12 hours." "Boom." "That's it." "Your agent says, "Did you see the grosses?"" "And that's the only call." "Because the movie's over, so you've done your job, and it just comes to a screeching halt, and you have to learn to live with that because it just completely is over." "Hi, I'm Wendy Finerman, one of the producers of Forrest Gump, and it gives me great pleasure that with this DVD we'll be able to bring Forrest into many more homes across the world." "I think what's so rewarding here is that Forrest is a little bit of everyone, and when I first read the novel Forrest Gump by Winston Groom," "I imagined what the world would be like if everybody had come in contact with a man like Forrest." "He was so honest." "He was so simple." "He had a way of looking at people, incidents, history, animals, nature, in ways that I don't think anybody had ever quite seen the world before." "And with a lot of effort on hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people's parts," "I think that the movie that was made took that story to a level that was higher than any of us had ever imagined." "Eric Roth wrote the blueprint for the movie that everybody else so graciously and diligently and in a dignified way just kind of made it just to a level that none of us could have ever imagined." "The icing on the cake was to have Tom Hanks as Forrest Gump." "Even though Forrest appears as such a simpleton, he's very complex, and there is no one else who could have played this role." "The image of Forrest sitting on the bus bench is exactly how the screenplay starts, and the feather is the touch that kind of Eric brought us into, and I think his intention was destiny." "I think when Bob let that feather float in the beginning of the movie and ended up right at Forrest's toe, it set the tone for the wonderful journey that was ahead of us." "Tom came to play this part because Eric and Tom and I had been working on another project together, and we had talked to Tom about doing it, and he kind of was somewhat interested, and once Eric came aboard, yeah, he was somewhat interested," "and once Eric wrote the screenplay, Tom was there." "There was no question about what the screenplay did in terms of moving us, and there was only one man that could give the screenplay its life, and that was Bob Zemeckis." "We had no idea who else there would be that could mix both the magic, the imagery, and be able to take us places visually that we'd never gone before." "And obviously Bob went so far beyond our wildest imaginations in doing that." "One of the things that I remember in the beginning sitting down and talking to Bob about his vision of the movie." "And one of the images that he talked about was the scene with the doctor's office was Norman Rockwell." "And he talked about Americana, and he even talked about that industrial avocado green." "And he always wanted to present a picture that could be accessible to anybody, and so anybody could kind of put themselves in that place, so they would have an easier way of understanding who Forrest was in that place." "And just like this doctor, and we've all seen those medicine cabinets, and we've all seen that kind of room, made us very comfortable in meeting this very, very unusual character." "I think what gave Forrest the strength from his inception was his mother." ""You know what, Forrest?" "You're not more different than anyone else,"" "I think were her exact words." "And she allowed him to have the confidence that I think all of us as parents today wish that we are able to give our own children." "Bob's vision of mixing mediums in terms of stock footage and special effects and other things like that were also able to take us where Forrest's imagination took us." "Bob knew exactly what he wanted to do when he put Forrest in the kind of braces that he put on him." "From the beginning, he knew what it would be like" "when Forrest would break free and run from those braces." "And every little moment, which is amazing about working with Bob," "I really think he sees what he's going to do today and knows where it's gonna come out in the future." "Oak Alley is a wonderful place, that we kind of all fell in love with the South." "When we were driving around looking for places, it was very important that the trees kind of made you feel, with that Spanish moss, right away you know you're in the South." "Right away you know you're in a place of home." "And one of the things that was most important to everyone, and in particular to Forrest, was his home of Alabama." "Throughout every incident that he went in his life, if you notice, he always came home." "Home was where he was safe, and home was where he knew he was comfortable." "The other thing that Bob did which was very interesting was in terms of Mama, and Sally, was she was always a lady." "No matter what situation you put her in, she was still a lady." "You never felt that he came from an unfortunate house or he came from a place where he was denied anything." "You felt like he came from a very old wonderful Southern house, and it wasn't that they were rich or they were poor, but they were what everybody imagines the South to be." "So right away, everybody kind of understood where Forrest came from." "I think every parent has a fear of when you sit there and somebody calls you in and says," ""How is your child doing in school?"" "And what Mama had to deal with was what every parent's fear and nightmare is that they'd have to deal with." "And the way that she kind of said, "My son's not gonna be any different." ""I don't care what you say,"" "led the road for Forrest ahead of him." "Bob had a wonderful way of knowing what was gonna be funny and just kind of could hear the audiences roar with laughter even while he was filming a scene." "And it was amazing to have somebody around who just knew..." "I've never in my life, nor ever will in my life work with somebody who has that ability to put his finger right on what will make people laugh and make them cry." "Curious George is a really funny important thing to me" "One day Eric was writing the scene of Mama reading to Forrest, and he said, "Wendy, what book should that be?"" "I remember running upstairs to my daughter's bookcase, and I came across my old copy of Curious George." "And I ran back to Eric, and I said to him, Curious George." "And we said, "Yeah, that makes sense,"" "and I always chuckle at that notion of Forrest getting Curious George read to him in the way that I read to my kids, and the way everybody across the world reads to their kids." "The boarding house was a labour of love." "Rick Carter took it so seriously as he does with all of his work to make it authentic and real and not movie over-the-top." "In some movies that you see people live well beyond their means of who their characters would be." "Everything that was created in this house was to make it look authentic." "If you notice, nothing's overly lavish." "These are people who have a nice, old, Southern home, but anything that was valuable from their future is gone or sold." "Once Elvis came into the picture, and Forrest learned how to dance and put two and two together," "I think the audience is well aware that they were on the road to somewhere very, very special." "Michael Conner was an amazing find of Ellen Lewis's - the young Forrest Gump." "We looked forever." "We had searches throughout the country." "We must have gone through 10,000 different faces, and once we met him, we knew he was... he was it." "He had never been on a plane when he flew out here for the screen test." "He'd never really acted." "He only had directed his own home movies." "And he had a sense of innocence about him that you know that Forrest of youth would have had." "This is another special moment for me, too." "The bus driver bears my daughter's name." "And it was great how we meet her in the 1950s... and as you know, we will see her again later." "And Bob has those little touches of just making everybody kind of feel comfortable in a very small-town way." "He also has a way of picking out moments that we all feel that we've been through." "I think everybody as a child knows that one moment where where do you sit?" "Are people looking at me?" "Am I the geek?" "Am I the nerd?" "And he has a way of capturing it in a way that you both have empathy for the character, and you also could have imagined, oh, my God, those were moments in my life, or they really were moments in my life." "I remember this bus scene cos we were filming down in the South, and it was in August, and it was as hot as hot could be with more mosquitoes per square inch than there ever lived." "And these little kids spent two days driving back and forth on this dirt road in the bus, and the way they looked is nothing compared to the way they felt." "One of the keys to the beauty of Forrest Gump is Forrest's love for Jenny." "From that moment where that little girl offered him a seat next to her, a love affair of life took off." "They had a way of talking with each other and they had a truth and they had an honesty." "And I think one of the main points of the movie is unrequited love, and I think that from the second that Forrest laid eyes on Jenny, the whole movie took a turn of his love story with Jenny." "Jenny, like Mama, never looked at Forrest any differently... and I don't know if that's the real reason he loved her or the reason that in some ways she was a lost soul like he was." "One of the keys to finding Jenny... was who, as with Tom, could number one, age 20 years, basically go from high school through mid-adult." "That was number one really important cos both of those characters had to be able to play 16 all the way to 36." "One of the other things was the chemistry between the two of them, because it is such a love story, that what Bob insisted on and I think was so brilliant about it was that we screen-test whoever these two people would be," "so you really could tell if there was magic between them." "And it's probably been one of my greatest lessons in filmmaking and something that I truly now do try to insist on if it's possible is if somebody really wants to play a part, they will screen-test for it." "And as you know, and you'll see in the DVD, this is what Robin Wright did." "I also think that Robin kind of had the look so much of a Jenny." "You knew that she carried stories within her that weren't quite always easy to tell that she wore." "One of the fun parts for me personally is that I'm a runner." "So I could understand often when he was going somewhere how he was going, how he felt." "Not that I run like this, or the wind, as Forrest would say, but there's a great freedom in being out there and running, and a great piece of mind, and you felt like wherever he was running, he would feel that." "He would just run through anything and it would not even faze him." "Also funny for us to look at today, cos children today have no idea that you run or ride a bicycle to somebody's house." "It's unheard of that..." "In the South, you'd walk to somebody's house and not be scared." "You'd probably still do it today, but in the big cities we all live in, kids don't run around and don't have the freedom that they do." "This scene of Jenny being chased by her father kind of led us all to understand Jenny's pain and one of the reasons why she probably fled a lot in her... throughout the rest of the movie." "Bob had an amazing way of telling the story of her abuse without getting graphic." "And kind of the birds were what made us think of Jenny from then on." "I remember when Bob created those birds, or rather Ken Ralston did digitally for Bob, they kind of were foreshadowing Jenny's story." "It's birds always go away, but they always come home." "In the same way that Forrest would run to Jenny's, it was wonderful for me with this scene that Jenny would come to Forrest's house." "This scene's wonderful cos he gives her that look that he's growing up to be a man." "What was great in this transition was we just went from young Jenny and young Forrest to older Jenny and older Forrest, and we did it with such ease that you never even noticed that these two characters had aged 10 years." "One of the other things in Forrest we all chuckled at, and it was established in the book, was his sense of being at a certain place at a certain time where something miraculous happened, and when he gets discovered by Bear Bryant," "it is just kind of the chuckle that leads us on his journey of a lot of historic events and a lot of famous people." "And it was great how the running tied into a lot of things Forrest does, and it kind of gave him a special talent that carried him through Alabama, through Vietnam, through, you know, a cross-country marathon." "From a physical standpoint it was amazing what Bob did with this, because this..." "You have seen, we're filming in a local stadium, and all of those people, basically, were computer-generated." "They were moved around and multiplied, and you got the feeling you were in the Orange Bowl or wherever the Classic would've been." "The amazing part about Forrest in the Wallace scene was we all knew he was not feeling what those Southerners were feeling." "We know that he had no judgment about going to school with African-Americans." "We know he really didn't care." "He was darn curious about all the commotion, and by him being there, he was able to touch a little bit of history, because when she dropped that book, there was no other Southern student who was gonna go pick it up" "other than Forrest Gump." "One of the things that was so hard in getting Forrest Gump made for nine years was everybody thought it was very episodic." "There was not a story with a traditional three-act structure, and you kind of went from one episode to another episode and what tied you all together was this unbelievable character." "But yet it was not presented in a traditional way that most movie stories are, and ultimately that was the thing that people really grasped onto and loved, is because they were just waiting every time to see where Forrest would go and where the story would take you." "And they never had any idea of what was ahead or what was in store." "Forrest in a lot of ways always came to Jenny's rescue, and unfortunately, often for his own benefit, he didn't know what he was doing or what situation he was in." "And she often was his reason." "She would try to make him understand situations of which he really wasn't capable." "Even with how mad she is at him in this scene for ruining her date... you know she can't help herself but really loving this man." "One of the other really wonderful things that came to life when the movie was made was the music." "Joel Sill chose so many songs that the moment that you would hear a couple notes in the tune, you'd know exactly where you are." "It would set you in a time and place." "And he did it in a way that was very natural and not directed." "Bob also had a way, at the end of any scene, of cutting to something that would put a real little touch on it that you didn't quite expect." "Just like the football players falling on each other." "When Forrest and the President shook hands for the first time, it was an amazing moment for people." "I remember seeing audiences just gasp." "Friends seeing a clip of it just couldn't believe it would happen." "It was something none of us quite realised the effect on cos we had all been witness to the preparation of it so much." "But it was truly one of the most memorable moments in cinema because we really took one of our most famous American icons and had him meet Forrest Gump." "Some of the points of history we were taken through, they'd have humorous moments with Forrest, and then often there'd be a very sad button." "Whether it be George Wallace, the Kennedys and other future moments." "But we realised that was through the '60s - we made great strides, but there was also great sadness." "What's neat about the bus scene to Vietnam is it mirrors the bus scene when Forrest first went off to school, and you kind of know from his friendship with Jenny that the moment he sits down next to Bubba," "that will be his best friend just as Jenny is his best girl." "In the way that you knew that Jenny had her past and her damages, that she was in some ways a damaged soul, it was similar to the way that Bubba looked at the world in a different way, kind of the same way that Forrest looked at it " "just a little bit cockeyed." "I think for all of us after all of the shrimp through filming this movie, and also being down in Beaufort, South Carolina, living there, which is a shrimping area itself," "I think that all of us have had our shrimp probably for the rest of our life." "Once again, what made Forrest so extraordinary in the military was because he just kind of did what he was told." "He didn't get distracted in the way that often people, let's say, a higher intelligence, or larger capacity for life would have, and I think that's what made him such an extraordinary soldier." "Any of those simple tasks he was just extraordinary at, and I think that was also the fun of showing him to the world, cos everybody hopefully thinks there's one little thing they're extraordinary at, and if you can find that one little thing," "you know what makes you feel good and understand where everybody was rooting for Forrest." "There were moments in this movie that none of us could foreshadow what audiences would think, and to hear everybody just roar when Bubba cited his thousands of shrimp recipes was one of surprise, and I guess, glee." "Whenever there was a quiet moment, you always knew Forrest was thinking of Jenny." "And I think in some ways it comforted everyone to know that he was not so lonely and sad, but yet, he was always thinking of her." "It was always important that wherever you are in the movie you had a feeling of where Jenny was." "And the decision was conscious to always not let too much time go by without us realising where Jenny was, what she was doing." "And also at times, she supplied for us kind of a benchmark in history of what was happening and what was changing." "Here, we're seeing Jenny and Forrest go in two separate directions." "She is obviously becoming a lot more anti-Vietnam." "He's on his way to Vietnam." "We both know that the future for them together does not look great, but once again, there he is, he sees her, he's gonna notice her distress, and like her Prince Charming, he comes to save her." "He always seemed to show up at the perfect moment." "Save her, and then, once again, she'd always forgive him and be thankful he was there." "But this time, when she knew he was leaving, she was scared, everybody knew what it meant when you're going to Vietnam." "Robin Wright, in her portrayal, she really often..." "It's just seeing her and looking at her, and you understand the time and place of where she is and what she's doing, and one of the things great efforts went into were her hairstyles." "She had numerous wigs." "Her hair went from long to short, from a hippie to trying to be good Southern mother." "And little touches like hairstyles, it's amazing the effect they can have." "When we all sat down and started talking about who would be the perfect Mama, it was funny." "Tom and I both came to kind of the same conclusion, that there was nobody better than Sally, and we just saw that she was what Mama Gump would be, and she kind of is what Mama Gump would be." "Lieutenant Dan's character was just so out there." "We had real difficulty thinking about who'd be the perfect Lieutenant Dan, and when Gary Sinise walked into the room at Bob's office and read the lines," "I remember everybody just turned and said," ""Oh, my God, he's here."" "And what was wonderful about Gary was Gary is such a well-trained actor, and he had never..." "None of us ever think of him as being particularly funny, and there were just comments that came out of him, like the first time we set our eyes on him, that were absolutely hysterical." "It's amazing to look at the whole place and know that this was again a wetland side, a marshy side of South Carolina that probably was only about 40 minutes from Mama's house." "And so much was done in terms of visual effects that will never be known to the viewer." "Mountains that were put in backgrounds." "The boys all went into real military training with Lieutenant Dale Dye, who is a military expert, and Parris Island is a very famous Marine base which was in the same locale as where we were shooting this movie, so..." "We went one day and hung out at a Marine shooting base where everybody truly did shoot real M-16s and stood and worked out with real Marines and everything was done so the actors could get a taste of reality, so when they went to portray it," "they really were in the mindset of what was authentic." "When we cast these boys," "I think it was really important that they were a little bit of everymen, because I think that's what, for the most part, our troops in Vietnam were made up of." "A cross-section of the typical American boys from all over the country." "Just as you're yearning for what's going on back home, the story comes and gives you what you'd like." "That's where a lot of people found great peace in Forrest Gump because everything you were expecting back home was not what you'd expect, but it was answering questions of what you were wondering." "One of the few things taken from the book was Forrest's friendship with Bubba." "Bubba, in the book, very much like in the movie, in the script, was truly Forrest's best friend." "He was the only person who knew and understood Forrest, and only Forrest could probably know and understand Bubba." "And what was also so important to the story was what Bubba gave Forrest was shrimping and one of the things Jenny helped encourage with Forrest was running, so both of these two key characters in his life were able to supply him with two of the most necessary things" "he had for surviving in all the different situations that he did." "What was great with Jenny was she let us have a little notion of everything happening during the '60s and early '70s." "With just one little look at her, you know exactly where she was going, what challenge she had, and you could place her in the time and the moment." "The filming of this sequence was terrifying." "First of all, because it was so real." "You had the feeling of..." "It was a combination of days and days and days work, but every little episode that was constructed and then to lay on each other was real, it was intense." "I remember watching Tom carry all these bodies back and forth and back and forth and you knew they were actors, and you knew it was make-up, but somehow you knew what it all meant." "No matter how crazy and intense Lieutenant Dan was, you really did know he cared about his boys, and you felt he had a true sense of responsibility for them and he understood both Forrest and Bubba were probably a little more limited in intelligence than some of his men." "For someone people thought had such limited intelligence," "Forrest was terribly devoted and terribly responsible." "And I think everybody's heart sank when he knew Bubba wasn't with him and he knew that Bubba was probably in trouble." "The moment that Forrest finds Bubba... is probably the largest moment of growth that he's had in his life up until this very moment." "And I think this is truly the moment he's become a man." "I think he's witnessed loss right before him." "And for me, from the moment you read the script, to the moment Bubba is in his arms, the word "home" is the thing that resonates with me to this day." "Just "I want to go home."" "It's also the first time that we see Forrest's real pain and his real loss." "And he's a different man than he's ever been on the bench before." "Just as reality would really sink in," "Forrest would always do something that was so absurd or so crazy that got you back into the notion of the fun of the movie." "I think for everybody that was on the set that day when Lieutenant Dan was picked up without any legs, even though we could see them with the blue screen, was truly gasping, because it was the first time," "as in many scenes in this movie, that somebody had truly lost their legs." "And once again, just as he was on the road to happiness, he unfortunately had to suffer a disappointment." "Ping pong is one of the fun things that was also in the book that we altered slightly." "What's also fun is Forrest became good at things that were just everyday things to most people." "Nobody would think of being a professional ping pong player." "Or where that would lead you, which we all know where it led him to." ""Just keep the ball and watch," and there he went." "This stuff was really fun because all the special effects stuff we did." "Still, Tom had to become a fairly good player to make it look believable that a ball would bounce like that." "Destiny is a very important part of the whole movie." "Every character in the movie has his or her destiny." "Lieutenant Dan is the voice for all of us as the audience because he's the only one who acknowledges what destiny is and what destiny's significance is in everybody's journey." "I think it was a very conscious moment of Eric Roth's to include that destiny in there." "What was great was Forrest went to the White House again, and so many times he did things again." "Washington was a wonderful place to shoot." "It was amazing." "Wherever you were, you looked around and couldn't believe that you were in front of the Washington Memorial, the Lincoln Memorial, the White house." "It truly was the most fun we had for those 10 days." "When we shot in front of the Washington Memorial, it was one of the coldest days in November they ever had in Washington." "We were on the news, because we were recreating a day that was quite warm, and people were dressed very casually, with limited layers." "And it truly was, I think, in the twenties, and we had people in flimsy peasant dresses and sandals." "Every time we'd yell, "Cut," they'd go to a hot soup line." "The other really fun part is people like Abbie Hoffman, a lot of people's children would not know him, and I think that Forrest was able to educate people with important... as I've said before... icons of history" "that you look at Abbie Hoffman and know what the sentiment and feeling was at that exact time and place." "Washington's also very difficult to shoot in." "You're restricted about where you can put cameras, where you can sit, where you can have a truck, so it made all the filming terribly difficult." "We had a hard time deciding what Forrest would say about Vietnam, and we couldn't figure out what his words would be, and the idea came in to have the police stop his message because we never figured out what words" "he would use to describe the war." "By the time he started talking again, you know it was something brilliant he said, even though none of us heard it." "What was wonderful is how they would meet all over the world." "Nobody ever questioned it." "They were happy to see them together." "The two days we filmed, the skies were different." "One day was cloudy and one was clear." "And Bob computer generated the skies to match." "Every single role was meticulously cast." "There were pictures of references of what the Panthers looked like so we could figure out a resemblance." "It was very important that everybody be realistic and everybody be authentic." "Obviously, it couldn't be identical, but if you took pictures from who the group was and put it up against who were cast, it would be astounding how close we came." "What also is great about Forrest is he was rarely violent." "The only time he ever would lift a fist was in defence of Jenny." "What's difficult for people is they're knowing Forrest has grown, and Jenny's character is so lost, she's not going anywhere with her life." "Bob had a love of William Castle, and for me this scene was fun because Rosemary's Baby is playing at the Graumann's Chinese Theatre." "And we went to a friend of mine's, who is Bill Castle's daughter, and we got a copy of the real poster so we could have the authentic poster on top." "We don't believe him." "This wonderful look Forrest gives lets us know." "One of the other things going on the entire time is there's this Jenny's theme that goes on, this wonderful score that Alan Silvestri wrote, and it kind of always takes you back to our feeling of" "the love the two of them had." "All you need is to hear those notes, and you know exactly where you are." "The other fun part about them was you always knew at some point they'd be back together." "You couldn't wait for it to come." "So much is said with just a look." "What's amazing to look at is how many important things happened in that span of years." "Our country was at a point where there were so many changes." "Another funny thing during this scene was when we filmed it, by accident we had had the flag of China upside-down and when we were fixing other things with special effects, we put the stars in the right order, right side up." "People knew where we were going, and they just couldn't wait." "This scene, supposed to be in New York City, was shot in downtown Los Angeles." "Gary did a lot of research into what a man with no legs, who was a drunk, a Vietnam vet, would be like." "I remember him walking through his apartment and wondering what pictures he would have, and he put himself in the mind and the place of a man in that situation." "I think we're reminded about the pain of the war and of the times without saying anything." "Forrest always had a way of being on a path to go somewhere, either bumping into Jenny or Dan on that way, and he'd get back on that path." "In most cases, he was carrying on somebody's destiny." "Even at their most dislikeable, characters like Gary were still totally endearing, cos you know that Forrest would somehow lead them in the right way at some point." "It's only 1972, and I think everybody who's been with us since the beginning feels like it's been 30 or 40 years." "And every moment's kind of touched with bittersweet." "Looking back, I think the audience is so emotionally... moved by Lieutenant Dan, but they also are equally staggered visually by his lack of limbs." "As Forrest left the military," "I think the movie took a different turn, because it was less reflecting about the sadness and grieving of the Vietnam War, and became about other things." "Once home, he had to learn his own way, because he had nobody or no general or military telling him what to do any more." "Bob had little touches of Forrest whenever he took his picture - with his eyes closed." "We had a wonderful gospel group that was local that we used for all of these background songs." "The sadness of the movie for the most part is lifted once he gets home, and he's following Bubba's wish." "I think at some point, Forrest is happy, because he thinks he's with Bubba again." "All of us in the audience felt that as well." "For the first time, he's become a man with his own journey, even though it's not so fortuitous in his fishing accomplishments are going to be as of yet." "To me, this is one of the most comforting scenes because they share that moon, and, therefore, Jenny and Forrest will be together soon." "People have fun, because they always knew that the characters had just as much fun with Forrest as we are." "This Randy Newman song adds to the fun of the moment." "The filmmaking behind this was extraordinary." "They literally brought in jet engines to simulate the wind and blow the rain like a hurricane." "No matter what situation we got in or how extraordinary it was, we had no idea where it would lead us, and I think that nobody during this hurricane knew that Forrest is going to come out a millionaire." "We had no idea Bubba Gump Shrimp would become a sensation." "Even after the movie came out, we got demands from Paramount to mass-produce more hats that they quickly sold nation-wide." "And, in retrospect, none of us even would have imagined there'd be the demand for a Bubba Gump Shrimp hat." "I wish we'd known beforehand." "Nora Dunfee was a wonderful actress who Ellen Lewis found from New York." "She was a famous acting teacher, and she was spectacular." "Lieutenant Dan jumping overboard is an homage to Eric's theme of destiny." "You will be taken wherever you're taken." "I think once after Bubba died," "Lieutenant Dan, when he came back into his life, did become his best friend." "Little touches throughout the movie." "There are more mailboxes than there were before." "If you notice, Forrest wore a blue shirt and khaki pants through a lot of the movie, and it was always buttoned up until the end, when Forrest had grown a little and had unbuttoned his shirt button." "That was a choice of Bob's to show his character had grown." "All of us have a gasp in our throat knowing this is when Sally is leaving Forrest, but we feel more comfortable because he's grown as a person." "A little Sally goes a long way, and you know that her words will be with him forever." "This was a funny moment when we came up with the idea of the fruit company, because that little icon let everybody know," ""Oh, my God, he's taken care of forever."" "The little Snapper lawnmower was important to Bob that he found that exact right model that he remembered from the early '70s." "No matter how much the world changed," "Alabama stayed the same." "Every time you went back to that house and room, they always were the same." "So you got a feeling that at least Alabama was peaceful, even though the world was going through turmoil." "We're not sure even if it's real." "For the first time, we feel that Forrest has become a man, because of his loss and because of his growth." "And Jenny's survived the turmoil that she's been through, and finally this couple may have a chance." "This moment you watch Jenny's face, and you see all her pain, and, unfortunately, all the poor decisions that she's made really come back to her childhood." "I think what Forrest says now is as poignant as his mother saying, "Life is like a box of chocolates."" "Because it's his view of the world." "I think we all feel happy when Forrest and Jenny are together because we also know that he's so happy." "And he so deserves it." "And right now, we know where we are: 1976." "That ever famous Forrest pose." "And he probably is the smartest man living." "That's so wonderful." "So many of the images in the movie were images we've seen previously, but we've watched these characters grow." "There's different emotion and depth to all of them." "And there she goes again." "The movie's about many icons." "You look at the sneakers." "We know the Nike swag." "We can place the time." "For everybody, they may have a different meaning, but they know exactly what's happening at that moment." "Tom was incredible." "Tom worked out and got into shape for Forrest, so, when he was running, he was in amazing shape, and one needed to be in amazing shape to age those years, and Tom's known for discipline" "in any role that he portrays, but this role, where he really did have to age 20 years and had to do it mainly with his eyes and facial gestures." "Because, if you notice, his clothing only changes because we begin the movie, and his top button is buttoned, and by the end of the movie, he's not that little boy, but he's a man, and his shirt's a little looser." "That gives us insight into where he's grown." "Much of it came from looking into his eyes, understanding that this character truly did grow, even with the limited intelligence that he had." "He became a man." "He became responsible." "He really did kind of figure out what his own destiny was." "Cleverly, they had teams that flew all over the country, and Tom's brother often posed as his double, just running." "I remember the challenge was how to get the happy face in." "And a little move like placing a muddy tee-shirt to his face created history." "Nobody questioned what he did now, just as they didn't question what he said with Abbie Hoffman." "They didn't question when he stayed home after he had shrimp boats." "They didn't question anything cos they felt comfortable that Forrest, deep inside, knew his destiny, what he was doing for himself." "For me, the fun of it was..." "the irony of... she's living on Henry Street, which happened to be the name of one of my children, and it was just a total coincidence that it was Henry Street, but, two blocks from the filming, there really was a Henry Street." "And there he was sitting on the bus bench for so far." "20 years of stories and two hours of movie, and he was a couple blocks from where he should have been." "And we also know for the first time that Jenny's found her way, and we don't quite know why until we meet their son." "None of us knew when we met little Haley Joel Osment he was going to become the actor that he is, and we chose him because we felt that he was the proper mixture between a Jenny and a Forrest." "Even though Jenny has told us that little Forrest is one of the smartest in his class," "when they move together, we also know how smart his father is, too." "Everybody's happy at this moment because big Forrest finally has the woman he loves," "a son, he's at home and he's joined by his best friends." "They're happy because the man we met, everybody thought was just a common idiot, and he probably turns out to be one of the wealthiest men alive, not in terms of money, but in terms of his goals and family and friends." "You see when Forrest walks in, he's watching the bed he lost his mother in, and I think he knows deep inside Jenny's time's not too long." "At this moment, Forrest has finally explained the significance of the feather and destiny and floating around on a breeze." "And if you watch, there will be the birds for Jenny." "What's amazing, he's probably become the best father in the world." "What's most amazing to me is to watch Forrest go through so many outrageous journeys" "and have so many challenges and trials and tribulations, but yet he finds such inner peace with himself, within his family, within his home, and within his friends." "And ultimately, with Jenny and little Forrest." "When people think about Forrest Gump, you think about all the funny, hysterical and ironic moments of Forrest put into real-life situations that we all can remember and visualise, and I think we often forget at times the poignancy of the movie" "and how emotionally moved we are." "When everyone was making this movie, it was truly a labour of love." "Every single person gave their all, and none of us had any idea of the magnitude of the message we were about to, in a collaborative way, present to the world." "And that's when movie-making is its most special, because when you do it for the love of what you're working on is when magic can happen."