Tom Hanks has spoken about how one of his favorite Tom Hanks movies is 2000’s Cast Away, and this was largely down to the unique experience of making it – when he had “nothing but adventures every single day.” While it seems as though it’s one of his simpler films – just a man, an island, and a volleyball called Wilson – it actually was surprisingly CGI-heavy.
Director Robert Zemeckis is no stranger to working with complicated special effects. He directed one of the other best Tom Hanks movies – Forrest Gump – which involved inserting Gump into significant moments in history, and also required erasing the bottom half of Gary Sinise’s legs. He also directed the absolutely mind-bogglingly complex masterpiece Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
While they are not to everyone’s taste – he also directed the motion capture hybrid animated movies The Polar Express, Beowulf and A Christmas Carol. Surprisingly, one of his movies that you would expect to be effects-heavy – Back to the Future – only had 30 effects shots. That’s what Zemeckis told the DGA in 2013, anyway.
Regarding Cast Away, Zemeckis said; “Oh, we used a lot [of CGI shots] on Cast Away. Huge. Way more [than Forrest Gump]. It’s like everything was a digital shot. We had whole fleets of ships that we had to remove. We had other entire islands that were in the shots that we had to remove. That was a huge effects show.”
![YouTube Thumbnail](https://img.youtube.com/vi/LUDEjulbqzk/hqdefault.jpg)
It just goes to show that you cannot judge movies by their genre, and that sometimes drama movies will have more effects shots than science fiction movies.
If you’re a fan of Back to the Future, check out our guides to the best time travel movies and the best 80s movies.