Robert Zemeckis has imagined a lot. A plutonium-powered DeLorean, tearing through time. A desert island survivor, and his beach ball best friend. From the film noir-inspired cartoon-human metropolis in Who Framed Roger Rabbit to the trippy far-reaches of the cosmos in Contact, there’s not much the 72-year-old hasn’t been able to invent across a turbulent four decades in Hollywood.
But the horror of the fires that have devastated his home city of Los Angeles this week? That’s something he might never have dreamt up. “It’s apocalyptic,” the director sighs, describing the “90-mile-an-hour blow torch that [began burning] through the Pacific Palisades” on Tuesday, forcing 180,000 residents to evacuate and reducing entire neighbourhoods to rubble. To Zemeckis, the carnage underlines how “everything is fleeting. The only moment we have is the one that we have right now, right here.”
Not that he needed the reminder. The Polar Express, Cast Away and Romancing The Stone filmmaker returns to UK cinemas this weekend with Here – an experimental drama written with long-time collaborator Eric Roth and shot on a single sound stage at London’s Pinewood Studios.
It’s a meditation on the exact thing that the last few days in California have emphasised to onlookers around the world – that life isn’t just a box of chocolates, as one of his most famous protagonists once suggested; it can also be heartbreakingly brief.
Adapted from an acclaimed 2014 graphic novel by Richard McGuire, the deeply divisive film (more on that divisiveness later) shows centuries’ worth of existence unfold from one single vantage point, as if a camera were plonked in one spot at the dawn of the dinosaurs and the tapes left to roll.
What sparse plot there is, interrupted by snippets of 14th-century indigenous tribesmen and relatives of American founding fathers, centers on Richard and Margaret – a couple played by Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, reuniting with Zemeckis three decades after their starring performances in the Oscar-winning Forrest Gump. Aided by de-aging technology pioneered in Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman and pushed to new limits here (Here was reportedly the first-ever production where the results of the digital de-aging were viewable on monitors on set in real-time), viewers are invited to witness Richard and Margaret’s entire lives bloom and wither from inside the lounge of a quaint suburban house. The phrase “living room” has never felt so apt, I tell the director.
“You know, I’m fortunate enough to own a house in Italy [that’s] 600 years old,” Zemeckis smiles back over Zoom, explaining what it was about McGuire’s graphic novel that spoke to him. “It was a farmhouse for many centuries, and sometimes I sit and think about all the lives and the families [the house has hosted]. They had the same trials, the same joys, the same sadnesses as us – their lives just moving forward. When I think about my existence compared to that house, I’m minuscule.”
To some, this existentialism might sound a far cry from the frivolity of the Eighties popcorn crowd-pleasers with which Zemeckis made his name. The same goes for Here’s bouts of bleakness; this is a film, after all, that lobs divorce, death, pandemics and the looming threat of police brutality at its characters. But look beneath the zany surface of Marty McFly’s hoverboarding in the Back To The Future trilogy, for example, and there’s a fable about what fates we’re doomed to inherit and the tomorrow we can carve for ourselves.
“I don’t know why, but I’ve always thought about those things,” he says, explaining how, if you were to make a Here-style movie spanning his own life, shot in the living room of 11344 S Edbrooke Avenue – his southside Chicago childhood home – it’d begin with a nervous kid, seldom able to take the comforts around him for granted, anxious about what’s on the horizon.
“Growing up with first-generation immigrant American parents, there was always this low-grade headache. It was like this unspoken sense of fear that the stormtroopers were right outside the door, and could come in at any moment,” Zemeckis recalls. His home was a “middle class duplex” similar to the one in Here, run by parents still wearing the scars of their Depression-era upbringings. “It was a really, really difficult life for them. That fear, that at any moment, everything we have was going to be taken away – that was something that my sister and I had to live with.”
He pauses to think. “Maybe that seeped into [Here],” the director offers, and he’s probably right: Hanks’ character in the film is an aspiring painter who misses out on the beauty of the present because he’s too busy fretting about imagined catastrophes coming down the turnpike; a “waste of life” that Zemeckis says he’s experienced first-hand.
Nostalgia like this, harking back to times gone, isn’t the filmmaker’s preferred mode of interview. Before our call, numerous reminders are issued to keep the focus of our conversation strictly to Here, with stray questions about past work forbidden. And can you really blame him? When you’ve made films with the 1.21 gigawatt cultural bang of Back To The Future – a film, 40 years on, with its own popular musical adaptation in the West End and a widely-observed annual day of celebration online each October 21 – it must be easy to feel like Michael J. Fox’s Marty McFly in the middle act of that timeless blockbuster, trapped in the past by constant questions about it.
It’s tempting to wonder, though, if Zemeckis might also insist on leaving the past behind because of frustration at how his present work is so often derided and/or overlooked. From his Beatles-themed debut comedy, 1978’s I Wanna Hold Your Hand, to 2004’s The Polar Express, Zemeckis’ reputation and box office might ran roughly parallel to that of his mentor and occasional collaborator Steven Spielberg, who discovered him through a film school short titled Field Of Honour in 1974. The Polar Express, however, marked a tipping point.
Already, a consensus was forming around Zemeckis’ work among critics – that his films were schmaltzy and propelled by technology rather than good old-fashioned storytelling. The Polar Express was criticised for its uncanny valley aesthetic, and since that festive animation, which incidentally also starred Hanks (the pair have now made five movies together, CGI-filled films like 2007’s Beowulf, 2009’s A Christmas Carol, 2018’s Welcome To Marwen and 2021’s Pinocchio have seen those impressions calcify.
As a result, Zemeckis’ standing in Hollywood has, by his own admission, diminished somewhat. Last month, on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, the director described it as a “miracle” that he was able to get funding for Here, despite the billions in box office receipts to his name. Future Hollywood historians might suggest that it’s audiences who changed, not Zemeckis.
At the 1995 Academy Awards, Forrest Gump controversially triumphed over Pulp Fiction in the race for Best Picture, but it was Quentin Tarantino’s film that’d have the last laugh; today’s Deadpool and Wolverine era of irony-dripped, reference-laden, earnestness-averse movie culture is baked in Pulp Fiction’s image. And as for the accusations about Zemeckis’ slavishness to technology… “It’s just lazy journalism, you know?” the filmmaker shrugs. ”I have no problem with using all the tools of cinema to tell the story – but the story always has to come first.”
With Here, those familiar criticisms have surfaced once more – this time at a fever pitch. It may be early January but you’ll be hard-pressed to find another film this year savaged with quite the same ferocity. Telegraph critic Tim Robey attacked it as a “garish tomb of a film” in his one-star review, echoing the sentiments of American publications whose criticisms contributed to a dismal box office when the film opened in the US in November (the film has made back just $15 million of its reported $50 million budget).
There are, it should be noted, murmurs already of this being the sort of film that might be reappraised in years to come as a conceptual masterpiece; the work of a director who could be cashing cheques from the Back To The Future legacy sequels and spin-offs Hollywood wants him to make. Instead, he’s made a philosophical odyssey about life and death, featuring a subplot about the invention of the La-Z-Boy reclining chair.
At least a portion of the backlash, Zemeckis insists, is rooted in a misunderstanding of the technology deployed to recreate Hanks and Wright’s younger selves in the film. Last month, Friends actress Lisa Kudrow criticised Here as an “endorsement of AI” during a time in which Hollywood creatives are fearing for their livelihoods due to the slow creep of artificial intelligence into every aspect of movie-making. “Is Lisa Kudrow a computing expert? Does she have a computing PhD?” Zemeckis responds with a grin.
“With Here, we just used really fast processing. That’s all we did. But it somehow got labeled AI” There’s a distinction between how studios are using AI to get out of paying artists, and the idea of directors implementing it as a storytelling tool, as might have been the case in Here, I suggest. Zemeckis nods in agreement. “AI is a catch-all word. The thing that people are afraid of when they say AI is The Terminator. That computers are going to become God and they’re going to take over. People were terrified of the steam train because they thought the human body couldn’t withstand that speed, you know? Anything that went faster than a horse was to be feared. It’s human nature to fear new technology… and then it sorts itself out,” he laughs.
“It’ll sort itself out” might have been Here’s tagline; it’s no spoiler to say that the film arrives at a conclusion that the chaos of life should be embraced as something beautiful. Some losses, of course, are too terrible to dismiss this way – throughout our conversation today, I can feel the weight of this week’s fires on Zemeckis’ shoulders. “Many people that I’ve worked with have lost their homes. It’s really tragic,” he laments again before we part. But both the film and Zemeckis seem to espouse a philosophy that there’s something liberating to be gained by realising how precious and precarious it all is – how quickly everything can disappear. So why let yourself be ground down by petty things like bad reviews or gloomy box office returns?
Perhaps, Here will find more of an audience in the UK and Europe compared to North America, and rescue it from its current financial flop status; as Zemeckis points out, “America is such a young country” compared to Italy, where his 600-year-old vacation home stands on the site of an ancient castle. As a result, he’s noticed “a kind of introspection” in Italians and audiences in Europe, informed by the centuries of history around them.
Maybe that will help Here resonate more. Maybe it won’t. Either way: “One day, the sun is going to supernova. And all this s___ that we worry about, it’s all going to vanish,” the film-maker laughs. Better appreciate it while we can, Robert Zemeckis devoutly believes, bidding farewell to go enjoy the only moment he has – the one right now, right here.
Here is on release now
2025-01-17T16:18:25Z