Tom Hanks Second Guessed The Bench Scenes in 'Forrest Gump'

The bench scenes from Forrest Gump were some of the most iconic in the entire movie, which centered on the title character, who despite fighting in Vietnam, meeting a President and captaining a shrimp boat, only wishes to be reunited with his childhood love.

Those scenes also include the movie’s most iconic line: “My Mama always said, ‘life is like a box of chocolates, you never which one you’re gonna get’.”

While chatting with CinemaBlend, Tom recalled not really making sense of those scenes at first.

“I will tell you, in Forrest Gump, all the stuff that we shot on the park bench in Savannah, Georgia, we were just shooting fodder for a possible narrative piece of it. And I said to Bob [Zemeckis], ‘Is anyone going to care about this nut sitting on a [bench]? What is this? No one knows what’s in this [box] I mean…’” he said.

Tom went on, “We ended up shooting, it was probably like, you know, 13 pages of dialogue that we had to shoot in a day and a half. It was written on cue cards, [and] I didn’t need the cue cards after a while because you get into it. But Bob says, ‘I don’t know, it’s a minefield, Tom, it’s a minefield. You never know what people are gonna take away from it!’ And it ends up being, you know, that thing.”

Forrest Gump went on to win Best Picture at the Oscars in 1995, and also won Tom another Best Actor.

In another recent interview, Tom revealed why he likes to crash weddings.