HE’S MADE CARS fly, Tom Hanks run (and run), and pushed the boundaries of CGI filmmaking —but with new drama Here, Robert Zemeckis is taking on a whole new challenge. “When I presented this idea to my longtime crew,” he tells Empire, “they thought, ‘Oh, this is going to be kind of easy.’ It turned out to be maybe the most difficult thing we’ve ever done.”
That idea was to bring Richard McGuire’s unique graphic novel of the same name to the big screen, presenting a multitude of interwoven narratives throughout American history, all from one perspective. One fixed camera angle, pointed at one single spot, as it becomes home to everything from dinosaurs to early humans to a living room inhabited by one family after another. “If everything has to work within this one perspective, it’s like, ‘Okay, what is that perspective?’” Zemeckis explains. “‘What’s the height of the camera? The angle of the walls? The perfect lens?’ It’s endless.”
But once Zemeckis had that down, the creative benefits of the camera constraints revealed themselves. “We all felt it was so liberating to work this way,” he says, recalling conversations with his cast during shooting. They didn’t have to run scenes repeatedly to capture the usual coverage, and the wide framing often sees the actors’ full bodies in shot. “When you have actors who have chemistry and they’re fully in the same frame, it’s very intimate and powerful,” the director explains. “The timing of the performance is completely real. There’s no false storytelling imposed on what they’re doing.”