Every time I walk into somebody's
living room for the first time,
they always say,
"Son of a gun! Forrest Gump
in my living room."
Elevator rides with people,
"Oh, I can't believe Forrest
Gump in the same elevator as I am!"
Yeah, I get it. I get it.
It's worthwhile.
I was lucky in that
I was studying theatre
when I was in college,
university
and I got a job before
I got out of college.
It wasn't really a job.
It was just an offer
to work in classical repertory theatre,
in which the pay was going to be
the professional experience
that went along with it.
And there was there was a group of us.
We all went
and we knew we would be gone for four
or five months.
We knew we would have something to do
with either five or six productions
that were in repertory.
And just the activity was enough to,
to warrant going.
I had no preconceived
notions of anything.
I had, you know, saved up enough money
and to barely survive
and something would happen.
And it just so happened
that the going actually was
the most important aspect of it.
Because I went and after I was there,
there was one particular show
that needed a bigger cast
then the professionals could
the professional company could supply.
And because I was there
and I ended up getting actually paid
$50 a week,
which was
the difference between life and death.
So I always felt as though
there was something on the horizon
that would come down the pike
that would get me through the next
the next few months.
But as far as you know, as far as,
you know, a bona fide break goes,
the only thing you can go on
is your faith and your instinct.
And that window of cushion that you give you
that you would be able
to give yourself.
You know, enough money literally to pay your rent.
I was married
and I had a kid at the time, and
I just always needed to have I say,
"Well I got 800 bucks in the bank.
I think I'm good for
about another three months."
The chops that you develop
in comedy
are the chops
that you will not be slave to,
but they will serve you in the
in other aspects of storytelling.
There is a timing to it. There is a pace.
There is the supreme
task of give and take
with whoever else you are there for,
the acting with in the scene.
The very first job
I had, which was in
Splash, was with Ron Howard.
I had been doing a comedy
television series and got fired
from it, went off the air,
and I was desperate,
you know, to be funny again,
quite frankly.
And the very first read through
of the of the script, of the screenplay
had all the actors
and John Kennedy and Daryl
Hannah and Eugene Levy,
everybody was there.
All the key department heads.
And I was operating from the task
that had been mine
when I was on the TV show,
which was to score,
which was to kill,
which was to take the lines
and get laughs at the table.
And I did it, you know, like flop sweat mercilessly
trying to get laughs around this table.
And it was terrible.
And I didn't get any laughs.
And I felt like I had failed.
And Ron took me aside that day
right after that reading,
and he said, "Look,
I know what you're doing
because I've done too.
You're trying to be funny.
You're trying to score.
That's not your job in this movie.
Your job is to love that girl."
And if he hadn't said that,
you know, he could have said, hey,
he could have fired me.
That day, to tell you the truth.
But he had done TV,
and so he knew what the things I had
fallen into.
So he cut me some slack.
God bless the boy.
I was
operating on so much
just instinct and energy
I would have perhaps told myself to say,
if right now, you're
putting 60% energy into 40% instinct,
reverse that. Make it
60% instinct and 40% energy.
I was just loud.
I was, I was just fast.
And I sort of like would, would
swamp the process with just this kind
of like blind accelerated pace that,
that was the only way, that was the only speed
I knew how to operate.
Ane, you know, you learn
how to start examining the text
in a different way
when you are sure enough
that you have the opportunity
to work again.
And by the time I had finished
my third year
of that of that repertory company
and was in New York
and was working in some other medium
I still had not learnt how to operate
at a slower pace of examining the text.
I was still just trying to say, "Hey,
I got this part
because I'm loud and I'm fast
and I'm funny."
I just kept throwing myself into that.
So I could have learnt
probably a few years earlier
in order to take your time
and do the interior work yourself
that you need to do
that you can do alone
just by studying the text.
Before that I would just learn the text
and then do it
as opposed to really like
sort of planning out a mode of attack.
Along comes Sleepless in Seattle,
which changes romantic comedy.
I think do you think in what way?
I don't know, you said it.
I don't know. I don't know.
If that was you know, that was...
Nora Ephron
who wrote that with her sister Delia,
she you know, she landed on this concept
of hearing somebody's voice on the radio
and the fact that they never
see each other
and they don't really know
who each other are.
That was the structure of a screenplay
and the filmmaker.
And the conversations I brought to--
I was very, I was probably very cranky
with Nora at the beginning of that
because I kept reading and say, "Ah this is
this is kid, that's a, that's a kid.
He's got a kid.
It's a kid scene.
The kid's the guy.
The kid's the catalyst.
It's just a kid.
Yeah.
It's a kid's movie."
And she said, "No.
You have to be a dad."
And then I said, "Well,
then you have to write it like a dad."
Which I'm making a joke
but actually, sometimes
we did come down to words like that.
And she says, "What do you mean?"
I said, "You're a woman, you're a mother.
You're basing this
on your experience with your boys.
I'm a man.
My relationship, with my boys is nothing like this."
For example, she wrote a scene
where Sam was going to go off
for a romantic weekend
with this other woman,
that Jonah didn't like her,
and so he was trying to
he didn't want it,
so he was throwing a fit.
And in the screenplay,
Sam, the father did not go
because he didn't want to disappoint
his son.
And that was in the screenplay.
And I told Nora,
I said, "That is such horseshit.
Let me get this straight.
A man has not gotten laid in four years,
and he's got a shot to get laid
this weekend?!
And he's not going to go
because his son doesn't like the girl?!!
I got news for you.
That kid's going to the sitter and I'm
going off to get laid!"
In the beginning,
I was just thrilled to know
that someone
was asking me to be in a movie,
and I thought that was all
that was required.
And as long as they keep asking
everything will fall, fall into place.
And I think I had to become
dissatisfied with my own process
you know, five or six movies in, where I was feeling
that I was not bringing
I was not bringing to the work
anything other than that,
anything other than that instinct.
And that's when I realised that, you know, OK,
part of me got older.
And I think even if you're as old as 29,
you have a different set
of chops and perspective.
You have a different,
believe it or not, wisdom that you did
when you were 24.
And I think about every five years
I went through some sort of process
of re-examining where I was in life,
you know, as a man as well as an actor.
And thinking like,
guess what, I'm 36 now
and there's a whole world of movies
that I can't make anymore
because I can no longer,
I don't want to play the young man
who's trying to figure out a life.
I want to play a man of bitter compromise.
I want to play somebody who's,
who's been through something.
So it's a never ending process.
I think of examining where you are
in life as a human being
and then transposing that.
So it's going to be reflected
in your work somehow.
So Forest Gump, who rightly
or wrongly, is nearly
always one of the first titles
film titles, that is, associate.
Yeah, yeah.
Every time I walk into somebody's
living room for the first time,
they always say,
"Son of a gun! Forrest Gump
in my living room."
Elevator rides with people,
"Oh, I can't believe Forrest
Gump in the same elevator as I am!"
Yeah, I get it. I get it.
It's worthwhile.
So how did you settle on Forrest Gump,
on the stance, the voice, the whole kind of bearing?
In casting of the young Forrest
had a particular dilemma
in which Bob says,
"What do you think we should do?"
And we talked about it for a while,
and there were a number of you know, it's
it's a hard role to cast. A lot of professional actors,
a lot of professional kid actors.
And we, I don't know where it came, but we,
we realised that, "Bob,
you will never get a kid in order
to recreate something that I come up with,
you know, theoretically.
What has to happen here
I think, is you've got to cast a kid
and then I follow where that kid goes."
And young Michael Humphreys came from
this part of Tennessee that is literally
really more of a part
of whatever state is below Tennessee.
What is it, Arkansas?
Mississippi? I don't know.
But he had this accent,
he had this way of speaking that I
I would engage him in conversations
with a with a tape recorder
and just get this weird kind of cadence
that it had.
We were together,
we were you know,
we were in South Carolina.
We were riding out to see the house
that they had built
the set of the of the Gump house,
which is not a real house.
And we were just in the car
and I was saying "So Michael,
what does your father do?"
And Michael said, "Ma' dad makes grease."
And I said, "How do you make grease?"
He said, "I don't know.
But they use it in lipstick
and motor oil."
And I said, "Oh, that's interesting."
Well, then he said,
he said to me, "Can I tell you what
my favourite movie of yours is?"
I said, "Sure, what is it?"
"Well, I like all of your films,
but my favourite is Dragnet."
So taking him and everything
that came out of Forrest was based on him
the way he, he held his hands
you know, this opposite way
and the way he just kind of had this,
it all came from little, little
Michael Humphreys.