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\u201cThe birth of the\u00a0second unit came as a result of too much to do and too little time to do it,\u201d Starkey said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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He, Woods and everyone else on set had a grueling schedule. After a full week of shooting in the South, the crew would fly to the Eastern Seaboard to film running shots all weekend. They traveled to Asheville, North Carolina, to shoot at the Biltmore Estate, and Maine and Vermont to chase fall colors in New England, then returned to their main set by Monday morning.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt became a seven-day-a-week thing,\u201d\u00a0Starkey said. Hanks once said he worked on the film for 27 days straight.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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A scene from 1994\u2019s \u201cForrest Gump,\u201d directed by Robert\u00a0Zemeckis.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Sunset Boulevard\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
But there were limits to the jet-setting production, which Starkey chronicles in his book \u201cOn the Set of Forrest Gump.\u201d The so-called \u201cfirst unit\u201d had to stay in the South to keep filming key scenes. \u201cGoing to Glacier National Park was too far away for the first unit to be jumping on a plane, going and filming, and coming back,\u201d Starkey said. So Woods went out ahead.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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Members of the \u201cForrest Gump\u201d crew in Port Clyde, Maine. Left to right, additional photographer E. J. Foerster, producer Steve Starkey, director of photography Don Burgess, director Robert Zemeckis and second photographer Chris Woods.<\/p>\n
Courtesy of Chris Woods<\/p>\n
Hanks couldn\u2019t be everywhere at once. He did the running in the longer cross-country scenes, including\u00a0Gump\u2019s arrival to the Pacific Ocean at the Santa Monica Pier in Southern California and the scene where Gump stops running for good after three years, two months, 14 days and 16 hours of running, in Monument Valley, Utah. But in those brief shots of northwestern Montana, someone else stepped in: Jim Hanks, one of Tom Hanks\u2019 brothers, served as a body double.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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The desert location in the movie \u201cForrest Gump\u201d where he decides to stop running.<\/p>\n
bmswanson\/IStockphoto via Getty Images<\/p>\n
Jim Hanks wasn\u2019t particularly hard to pass off as Tom Hanks, Starkey said. Gump had a beard and long hair during his running era, making facial differences between the men easier to hide. But Gump has a unique running style that\u2019s more of a choppy, asymmetric shuffle. \u201cTom had to instruct Jim on how to run like Forrest Gump,\u201d Starkey said. \u201cTom made him run around the parking lot in South Carolina until he got it right. It was really the running gate that had to match so it didn\u2019t look like somebody else.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
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When it came time to film the wheat scenes, the production schedule did not slow down.\u00a0<\/p>\n
They were set to film near Cut Bank, a small town on the eastern border of the Blackfeet Reservation surrounded by agriculture operations. After a location scout told Woods the fields would be cut soon, he and the crew hurried to rural northwestern Montana. They were just in time\u00a0\u2014 managing to film right as the field turned gold in a short window of sunlight, just minutes before the wheat was harvested. Production assistants had to pay several farmers $50 each to get them to pause harvesting long enough for the crew to finish shooting.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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Chris Woods films Jim Hanks acting as a stunt double for his brother Tom Hanks near Cut Bank, Montana in October 1993 while filming \u2018Forrest Gump.\u2019<\/p>\n
Courtesy of Chris Woods<\/p>\n
Woods looks back on that scene fondly. It\u2019s one of his career favorites. \u201cThat was probably the most spiritual thing I\u2019ve ever seen through with a camera,\u201d he said. The overcast dark sky, the contrast with the glowing wheat, \u201cand the fact that if we had to shoot the next day, there wouldn\u2019t have been any wheat there,\u201d Woods said, made it special. \u201cMy whole crew, we were just celebrating. It was the most amazing thing.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
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Glacier National Park was less than an hour west, so Woods decided to shoot some scenes there, too. \u201cWe might as well get a bunch more stuff there,\u201d Woods recalled. \u201cI hadn\u2019t been up there, so for me, it was all eye candy.\u201d The landscape ended up amplifying Gump\u2019s grief and loneliness in the script.<\/p>\n
\u201cRunning against this gigantic background, this gigantic landscape enhanced the emotion of how he was feeling,\u201d\u00a0Starkey said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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Going to the Sun Road along Saint Mary Lake at Glacier National Park in Montana.\u00a0<\/p>\n
UCG\/UCG\/Universal Images Group via G<\/p>\n
Glacier\u2019s iconic scenery proved to be the ideal backdrop for a few quick cuts. That included clips shot on the shore of Saint Mary Lake and a stone bridge near the St. Mary entrance and visitor center that made it into the film, as well as footage farther up the famous Going-to-the-Sun Road that didn\u2019t make the final cut. Woods remembered filming on the road, which is cut into rocky cliffs, as daunting. \u201cIt was a beautiful road, but that was terrifying,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
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Chris Woods and other crew members film scenes for \u201cForrest Gump\u201d on the Going-to-the-Sun Road in Glacier National Park in October 1993. These shots didn\u2019t make the final cut.<\/p>\n
Courtesy of Chris Woods<\/p>\n
Any visitor to Glacier National Park knows its wild country, known for high winds and sudden storms. Landscapes don\u2019t always cooperate as backdrops. Starkey wanted Gump\u2019s character to run past a lake where you could see the reflection of mountains. Gump, later recounting his run to Jenny, says, \u201cIt was so clear, Jenny, it looked like there were two skies one on top of the other.\u201d<\/p>\n
But when the crew showed up to Saint Mary\u2019s Lake, \u201cit was blowing 30 mph winds, and the lake was nothing but white caps,\u201d Woods said. He shot it anyway, and in post-production, the lake was smoothed out into glass.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\u201cWe were looking for a spectacle,\u201d Starkey said. \u201cIn our movies, we always try to treat the audience with big imagery. And there\u2019s nothing bigger than Glacier National Park, really.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
We love national parks just as much as you do, so we have a newsletter that covers them from top to bottom.\u00a0Sign up here.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A scene from 1994\u2019s \u201cForrest Gump,\u201d directed by Robert\u00a0Zemeckis.\u00a0 Sunset Boulevard\/Getty Images) Legendary Hollywood film producer Steve\u00a0Starkey was…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":605848,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[88,206,244040,245031],"class_list":{"0":"post-605847","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-movies","10":"tag-sfgculture","11":"tag-sfgparks"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/605847","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=605847"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/605847\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/605848"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=605847"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=605847"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=605847"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}