It is hard to imagine 'Forrest Gump' without the "box of chocolate" monologue, but star Tom Hanks initially didn't believe in the impact of the scene.
Hanks, currently acting up a storm in 'Elvis' with his perplexing Dutch accent, recalled shooting the scene in an interview with CinemaBlend, and said he initially doubted the framing device for the film.
“In ‘Forrest Gump,’ all the stuff that we shot on the park bench in Savannah, Georgia, we were just shooting fodder for a possible narrative piece of it,” Hanks recalled.
"I said to Bob [Zemeckis], ‘Is anyone going to care about this nut sitting on a [bench]? What is this? No one knows what’s in this [box], I mean…'”
Hanks continued, “we ended up shooting, it was probably like, you know, 13 pages of dialogue that we had to shoot in a day and a half. And so it was written on cue cards. I didn’t need the cue cards after a while because you get into it."
"But Bob says, ‘I don’t know, it’s a minefield, Tom, it’s a minefield. You never know what people are gonna take away from it!’ And it ends up being, you know, that thing.”
Hanks revealed that Zemeckis helped ease him into playing the role of Gump, recalling that the film shot for three days only for Zemeckis opting to not use any of the footage so Hanks could "get into the groove".
“‘We’re not going to use any of these first three days because I don’t think you’ve got it. You haven’t got the character,'” Hanks recalled Zemeckis telling him on set, with Zemeckis telling him "don’t try so hard."
When all was said and done, with the film becoming one of the highest-grossing films of 1994, and took home the Oscar for Best Picture, beating out the likes of 'Pulp Fiction', 'Four Weddings and A Funeral,' 'Quiz Show' and 'The Shawshank Redemption'.
Zemeckis took home the Oscar for Best Director on the night, and Hanks and Zemeckis would of course reunite in 2000 for 'Cast Away' as well as 2004 Christmas classic 'The Polar Express'.
