“I don’t know if we each have a destiny, or if we’re all just floatin’ around accidental-like on a breeze. But I... I think maybe it’s both.”
Terry Gilliam and Barry Sonnenfeld turned down the chance to direct. Bill Murray, John Travolta and Chevy Chase turned down the role of Forrest Gump. David Alan Grier, Ice Cube and Dave Chappelle turned down the role of Bubba. Tom Hanks based his accent on Michael Conner Humphreys who played young Forrest and actually talked that way. The line, “My name is Forrest Gump. People call me Forrest Gump”, was ad libbed by Hanks. In the book the film is based on, when Lt. Dan played by Gary Sinise sarcastically tells Forrest Gump that the day Forrest works on a shrimp boat is the day he’d be an astronaut – Forrest actually did become an astronaut. Coincidentally, the following year Sinise and Hanks appeared together as astronauts in Apollo 13 (1995). The necklace worn by Lt. Dan is a rosary with a Saint Christopher medal, inscribed with “Protect Us In Combat”. It was worn in Vietnam in 1967-68 by Gary Sinise’s brother-in-law. One of the effects shots that director Robert Zemeckis ended up cutting had Forrest running into Martin Luther King at a protest, where Forrest distracts police attack dogs by playing fetch with them making them docile. In the scene when Forrest is brought to the podium to speak at the Vietnam anti-war rally in Washington DC and the plug to his microphone gets pulled, what we did not hear him say is, “Sometimes when people go to Vietnam, they go home to their mommas without any legs. Sometimes they don’t go home at all. That’s a bad thing. That’s all I have to say about that”.
