"PART III WAS THE MOST FUN of the three movies to make because I got to wear a cowboy hat every day to work,” chuckles screenwriter Bob Gale, recalling the laborious yet liberating shoot for Back To The Future’s guns-blazing trilogy ending. Marty and the Doc may need a DeLorean to travel back in time - but not Gale. The memories he holds of the often-testing shoot for the franchise’s climactic third instalment remain as fresh as the film’s picture-postcard cinematography, despite three decades having lapsed since its 1990 debut.
“We wanted it to be iconic,” Gale tells SFX during a brief pocket of downtime amid rehearsals for West End hot ticket show Back To The Future: The Musical. “It was a beautiful environment. The air was fresh and we got to shoot in Monument Valley where John Ford and John Wayne made all those great Westerns,” he beams. “It was such a thrill.”
The fact that Gale - writer of all three instalments of director Robert Zemeckis’s time-travelling trilogy - has such a fond sense of nostalgia for his stint in the Old West almost defies logic. By all accounts, rounding out Marty and Doc Brown’s adventure through time from 1985 to 1955, over to 2015, 1885 and back again was far from a walk in the park. Following the mammoth success of the original, the powers-that-be swiftly decided they wanted a sequel - and sharpish. However, when Gale and Zemeckis sat down to set the DeLorean’s time circuits for another trip, they soon discovered they had big plans and not enough time. Ironic, eh?