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Here, the new movie from director Robert Zemeckis, features a camera that stays firmly rooted in space, while all of time flows around it — evolution flourishes and civilizations rise, though most of the movie is set in a relatively tight span of about 120 years, from the turn of the 20th century to the present day, during which the unroving eye inhabits a New England home’s living room.
It’s a fascinating and audacious technique, and one that works better than it has any right to do. Zemeckis got the idea from a graphic novel, also called Here, published in 2014 by Richard McGuire, expanding on his own six-page comic strip from some 25 years earlier. (Like the film itself, the concept of Here has wafted through time.)
“About 10 years ago, my agent sent me the book,” Zemeckis tells me. “It was one of those things where, as soon as I opened the book, I basically saw — not exactly, but in a general sense I saw the movie.”
He continues: “I thought that it was like something like I’d never seen before, and the graphic novel is quite cinematic, but I also thought when I saw it — boy, this can make a really, really interesting movie.”
To be fair, he’s not the first to have that thought. In 1991, two students at the Rochester Institute of Technology’s department of film and video, Tim Masick and Bill Trainor, produced a six-minute short based on the idea, for their senior thesis project. Almost 30 years later, a VR version of Here was unveiled during the COVID-dampened 2020 Venice Film Festival.
But Zemeckis is the first filmmaker to bring the power of, well, Robert Zemeckis to the project. He’s no stranger to busting out high technology in the service of storytelling, with admittedly uneven results. High-water marks include 1988’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit and 1994’s Forrest Gump (two of whose stars, Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, reunite to play a married couple in Here).
But he’s also had critical failures with motion-capture films like 2004’s The Polar Express and his 2022 version of Pinocchio. And 2011’s Mars Needs Moms, another motion-capture effort he produced but did not direct, remains one of the industry’s biggest box-office bombs, and led to the closure of Disney’s ImageMovers Digital studio after the film was released.
Zemeckis says he approached Here with some trepidation.
“There was doubt throughout, because there was no comparable film that you could look at to see if it could work or not,” he says. “It was pretty much something that we weren’t sure about until it actually came together and we saw the whole thing.”
He continues: “I mean, as it gets close, in the editing, it was starting to become very apparent that it was working. But while we were shooting it, all the scenes felt good, but whether it was all going to come together as an entity, we weren’t sure. So I’m glad that it did.”
One of the things that works well is that Hanks and Wright, who play characters from their teenage years into old age, look and sound right on the screen. Special effects de-age (and in some cases extra-age) the actors’ faces, but they also move appropriately compared to, say, 2019’s The Irishman, in which Robert DeNiro had the face of a young man, but still held his body like the septuagenarian he was.
“It’s all acting,” Zemeckis says, lauding praise on his performers. “What makes the … digital makeup work in our movie? It all comes down to performance. The actors were very, very focused on knowing that they had to act youthful, and that’s what they did, and they paid a lot of attention to that. Also with raising their voices and just performing the way they should if they were 30 years younger than they really are.”
Viewers of Here may be pushed to think about events in their own spatio-temporal history. I often ponder the fact that I have been riding the same Toronto subway rails since the 1970s, and have lived in the same house now for almost a quarter century, on the same street where my father lived almost a hundred years ago. But Zemeckis has me beat.
“I actually am fortunate enough to own a house in Tuscany that’s 600 years old,” he says. “And I think about it all the time. It was a farmhouse back in the 14th century. I think about the lives and the families and the joys and the sorrows that must have passed through these walls. And you know, every generation, feeling that ‘this is our time, this is our moment.’”
He recalls a day one summer when a car drove up, and an elderly man alighted from the vehicle. “And we had to translate, because I don’t speak Italian very well. And he pointed to this window. And he said, ‘I was born in that room.’ So that was actually quite fun.”
Moviemaking technology continues to press ahead. The recent film Alien: Romulus raised eyebrows when it digitally recreated the late Ian Holm to play a version of his android character from the original Alien film. But while Zemeckis is happy to apply digital de-ageing makeup to Hanks and Wright, he has no interest in working with a fully digital creation.
“It’s kind of like music, where you can create a synthetic digital sound of any instrument perfectly, but I think you still need the warmth of a human performance to evoke emotion,” he says.
He continues: “Having done animation quite a bit in my career, I have no interest in animating a performance, because you would lose that great thing, that thing that the actor brings, which is his instrument, and his take on the character, and everything that he does. You would be sacrificing that.”
He adds: “That also means, as a director, I have to think up everything that these characters would do. And that’s just too much work!”
Here opens Nov. 1 in theatres.