Robert Zemeckis is coming back in the near future.
The Oscar-winning director and son of Chicago will be back home on Oct. 27 to receive the Founder’s Legacy Award on closing night of the 60th Chicago International Film Festival (CIFF), with CIFF founder Michael Kutza presenting. That same evening, the recently renovated Music Box Theatre will be the venue for a screening of Zemeckis’ highly anticipated feature “Here,” which reunites him with “Forrest Gump” actors Tom Hanks and Robin Wright and screenwriter Eric Roth for the first time in 30 years.
“It’s humbling, and I’m incredibly proud,” Zemeckis told me in a Zoom conversation. “To be recognized in the place that you were born and raised, it’s emotional. It’s a wonderful feeling of being able to go back home.”
This will be the third time the legendary director of “Back to the Future,” “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?”, “Cast Away,” “Contact,” “Romancing the Stone” et al, will be closing the festival. Zemeckis received the Career Achievement Award for the motion-capture Christmas film “The Polar Express,” which had its world premiere as the CIFF’s closing night film in 2004, while the Denzel Washington-starring “Flight” closed the 2012 festival, with Zemeckis also receiving the Founder’s Award that year.
The relationship between Zemeckis and the festival actually stretches back even further, to the beginnings of Zemeckis’ career. His short film “What’s the Matter With Kids Today?” screened at the fest in 1970, followed by screenings of the shorts “The Lift” in 1972 and “Field of Honor” in 1973, with the latter going on to win the Special Jury Award at the Student Academy Awards.
“Growing up on the Far South Side of Chicago in Roseland, we were a working poor family, and there wasn’t a lot of what you would call culture in the house,” said Zemeckis. “There was television, that was my window on the world. That and the Pullman branch of the Public Library. That’s where … I saw a catalog from USC, and I looked up the cinema school and there was a picture of Alfred Hitchcock standing in front of a class. I couldn’t believe there was a place you could go to learn how to make films.
“I actually paid my way to USC by working at WMAQ-TV in the Merchandise Mart. I was an assistant news film editor. They had 16mm cameras in those days … My shift was the 5 o’clock news and the 10 o’clock news. They would run the film in, and they would process it right there in the studio.”
“Here” is based on the Richard McGuire’s highly acclaimed, 300-page graphic novel of the same name, which focuses on events that take place in the same corner of a house built in 1907. The film reunites Zemeckis and Hanks, who previously collaborated on “Forrest Gump,” “Cast Away,” “The Polar Express” and “Pinocchio.”
“Tom and I seem to have been attracted to projects that are out of the box, that seem to have a uniqueness to them,” said Zemeckis. “We were on ‘Pinocchio,’ and I told him about this book [titled ’Here’] that I had always had in the back of my mind. We were in London, and he went back to his hotel that night and got it on Kindle, and he came back the next morning and said, ‘We gotta do this.’ ”
The main story takes place in the 20th century and the early years of the 21st century. For Hanks and Wright to play characters who age through the decades, Zemeckis made use of a new tool called Metaphysics Live.
“I call it digital makeup,” he said. “You basically use the tools that we have to create digital imagery to put old age makeup flawlessly on the actor, and now we have the ability to put young makeup on them to make them youthful … The performances are the actual actors, they’re doing the scene, and then the super computers create the imagery that makes them look like when they were young.”
“Here” will open in theaters on Nov. 1.
The Chicago International Film Festival runs Oct.16-27, with screenings at AMC NewCity14, the Music Box Theatre, the Gene Siskel Film Center and the Chicago History Museum, among other locations. Opening night will feature an adaptation of August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play “The Piano Lesson,” with director Malcolm Washington and actor John David Washington in attendance. For tickets to all screenings and the complete festival schedule, visit chicagofilmfestival.com.