Hanks Defended ‘Forrest Gump,’ and then Called ‘Pulp Fiction’ a Masterpiece
In 2022, Tom Hanks addressed the debate over Forrest Gump beating Pulp Fiction to the Best Film Oscar, in an interview with the N.Y. Times, after years of discourse that he admitted had not passed him by. He called the accusation that Forrest Gump was a “totem of boomer nostalgia” and Pulp Fiction “the fresh new thing” “not inaccurate,” but also defended Zemeckis’ film.
The problem with Forrest Gump is it made a billion dollars. If we’d just made a successful movie, Bob and I would have been geniuses. But because we made a wildly successful movie, we were diabolical geniuses. Is it a bad problem to have? No, but there’s books of the greatest movies of all time, and Forrest Gump doesn’t appear because it’s this sappy nostalgia fest.
Every year there’s an article that goes, “The Movie That Should Have Won Best Picture” and it’s always Pulp Fiction. Pulp Fiction is a masterpiece without a doubt. Look, there is a moment of undeniable heartbreaking humanity in Forrest Gump when Gary Sinise — he’s playing Lieutenant Dan — and his Asian wife walk up to our house on the day that Forrest and Jenny get married.
Forrest Gump is very successful in hitting its emotional marks and it’s not just the “magic legs” scene he refers to. Forrest learning about his son, and the final tragic conversation with Jenny at her graveside live on as some of the most emotionally impactful scenes ever performed.
A lot of that comes down to Hanks’ performance, but it’s also the strength of material. Nobody is really saying that Forrest Gump is a bad film, it just difficult to call it particularly profound or creatively challenging.
Hanks also revealed in the same interview that he learned the biggest lesson of his career working on one specific scene on Forrest Gump:
We were shooting the park-bench scenes of “Forrest Gump.” It’s summertime in Savannah, Ga. We had shot 27 straight days. It was brutal. We were sitting there, and I got this haircut, we’re trying to make sense of this dialogue, and I had to say, “Bob, man, I don’t think anybody’s going to care.” And Bob said: “It’s a minefield, Tom. You never know what’s good. Are you going to make it through safe? Or are you gonna step on a Bouncing Betty that’s going to blow your balls off?” There’s never guarantee.
I’ll be 66 in July, and I’ve been acting for a paycheck since I was 20. Forty-six years and I now know what was evident when I was 20 years old is what Spencer Tracy said: “Learn the lines. Hit the marks. Tell the truth.” That’s all you can do.
