On May 9, 2023, actor Tom Hanks released his own novel called The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece: A novel. Hanks has spent decades acting and has countless awards to his name, so his book sought to pull back the curtains on the movie-making process. As part of releasing the book, Hanks hit the road for a while and did some interviews. Of course, those invariably detoured into discussions about his long and illustrious career.
From Philadelphia and Big to Cast Away and Saving Private Ryan, Tom Hanks has been a part of so many successful movies. Yet, Forrest Gump might be his most well-known role and that’s the one that everyone wants to know about. Interestingly, making Forrest Gump wasn’t a walk in the park. The bigger surprise is that it might have never been made without I Love Lucy’s influence on the world of cinema.
Making Forrest Gump Was a Brutal Experience for Tom Hanks
In the same month of his book’s release, Hanks was interviewed by The New Yorker in front of a large crowd when the interviewer asked if he knew when he was acting well. Hanks simply said that he couldn’t and proceeded to talk about the unpredictability of acting. He said that he might show up to set happy and be expected to film a depressing scene. On the flip side, he said there were times when he was in an awful headspace, and a director would have an upbeat scene to film. The latter was what happened with Forrest Gump.
Unfortunately for Hanks, Forrest Gump had a lot of different settings. After all, Forrest literally ran across the country, and that meant the actor had to go across country and film for 27 days straight. He remembered how he would “fly to [each] goddam place, put on the costume, run for an hour and a half, then go back, get on the plane, and then fly to [another place] and do it all over again.” The problem was after those 27 days, director Robert Zemeckis wanted to film all of Forrest Gump’s park bench scenes — which included the box of chocolates scene — in a day and a half. To make it all work, Zemeckis decided to film in I Love Lucy’s multi-cam setup.
