Tom Hanks dug into his own pocket to help “Forrest Gump” get made.
Appearing in an interview on “In Depth with Graham Bensinger”, the actor talked about the challenges faced while shooting the 1994 Oscar-winner.
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The actor recalled one scene in the film, which Paramount had said was too expensive to film, and when director Robert Zemeckis couldn’t convince them otherwise, Hanks offered to help.
“And he said, ‘Well, this run is going to cost X amount of dollars.’ And it wasn’t cheap. And I said, ‘OK’. He said, ‘You and I are going to split that amount, and we’re going to give it back [to Paramount]. We’ll give you the money back, but you guys [Paramount] are going to have to share the profits a little bit more.’ Which the studio said, ‘Fabulous, great. OK.’ And it was good for us, too,” Hanks explained.
A similar situation occurred with another scene in the film.
“They said, ‘The weather is such that we can’t get the insurance coverage on it,’ the studio said, ‘So you guys can’t shoot.’ And Bob and I said, ‘We’ll cover the insurance.’ And we did,” Hanks recalled.
Hanks ended up earning an estimated $65 million when the film became a hit, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Also in the interview, Hanks opened up about how his dad witnessed his own father being murdered.
“Well, my dad got a raw deal. When he was a very young man because he happened to witness the murder of his father in a fight. He was 8 or 9 or 10 years old, and a hired hand killed his father in the barn of the farm that they were growing up in Willows, California,” Hanks said.”
He was one of four kids and he was the only one there. And he was broken by that experience. He had to go and testify as a kid three times,” he said. “With the lawyers, and the judge, and the flag ‘Do you hereby solemnly swear?’ It was a contentious fight, the man was acquitted because it was a fight. But his father was killed and he witnessed that.”
