Tom Hanks hopes Here will teach people ‘the importance of being in the moment’

Actor Tom Hanks has said he hopes new film Here will teach audiences “the importance of being in the moment”.

The film, which tells the story of several generations of people who live on one plot of land over the course of a century, sees the 68-year-old reunited with Forrest Gump co-star Robin Wright, screenwriter Eric Roth and director Robert Zemeckis.

Speaking about what he hoped viewers would learn from the film, Hanks told the PA news agency: “I think the impermanence of what happens is something we just have to accept as part of the human condition, right?

“The truth is, yesterday means nothing because there’s nothing we can do to change it, and tomorrow, it means nothing because there’s no way we can predict what’s going to be.

“All we can do is exist in the today.

“We were talking about Michelle Dockery’s character, (who) lived over 100 years ago, Ben Franklin in the Revolutionary War, that was 200 years ago, we have people that lived 6,000 years ago, and nobody knew that they were living in the past.

“Nobody knew that they were doing something other than dealing with what needed to be done right then and now.

“There’s an awful lot of philosophy you can jam into that reality, and I think it’s manifested from the very first moment of the film, when Robin and I walk in as our older selves to an empty house void of anything that could be a memory other than what we’re carrying along in our heads.

“And what speaks to impermanence, as well as also the importance of being in the moment right here, right now, better than that?”

Hanks went on to talk about his reunion with Wright, Roth and Zemeckis, revealing that the trio had not expected to have the long careers they have had.

He explained: “We’ve seen each other so much, and Robin has worked with Bob multiple times, as have I.

“We did have a moment where the four of us, Eric Roth and Bob, and Robin, and I, were sitting around a table saying, ‘well, didn’t see this coming, did we?’.

“If you had gone back to 1994 and said, ‘this is just the first of many’, I don’t think we would have believed it.

“And it was something to note as one of the kindly things that can happen in a career that’s marked with any sort of longevity, and then we had to forget it and just get along with the script that was in front of us, and the work that was due.”

An adaptation of the 1986 novel by Winston Groom, Forrest Gump (1994) follows Alabama man Forrest Gump (Hanks) recounting his life, which sees him end up in the middle of a number of historic events.

The film won six Oscars, including best actor for Hanks, best director for Zemeckis, and best screenplay based on previously published material for Roth.

Here, which will be released in the UK on Friday, uses digital de-ageing software to make Hanks look younger while playing his character Richard Young throughout the course of his life.

Speaking about the technology, Hanks added: “It’s a great tool, because the super computing means you do not have to wait for post production to do the purely technical visual view of it.

“It was a bit intimidating, because we could see it in real time, 19 people could be in the scene, and then we could gather around the monitor and see exactly, more or less, how it was going to work.”