Grateful American: A Journey from Self to Service(42)

I was all set to say yes to Tall Tale when the phone rang. I’d landed the role of Lieutenant Dan Taylor in Forrest Gump. It would mean I’d need to turn down the Disney movie. Did I still want Forrest Gump?

It’s a funny thing about movies—how do you ever know what’s going to be a hit? Disney has been known to produce some wildly popular movies, and Tall Tale featured Patrick Swayze, who’d done very well. Would working with Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump prove a better choice? Moira and I talked it over. We decided I needed to place my bets with Forrest Gump—plus, I really wanted to play the role of the Vietnam veteran—while she took the role of the mother in Tall Tale. So Moira took the kids to Colorado to shoot the Disney movie, while I flew to Beaufort, South Carolina, to work on Forrest Gump.

Life is full of ironies. If I had landed the roles in Little Buddha or Wyatt Earp—roles I had desperately hoped for at the time—then I wouldn’t have been able to do Forrest Gump. Little Buddha turned out to be a box-office disappointment. Wyatt Earp received mixed reviews and floundered in the wake of the similarly themed movie Tombstone, released six months earlier. Tall Tale was fun, but didn’t earn back its budget (although Moira was great in her role) and has largely been forgotten today.

And then there was Forrest Gump.



Beaufort, South Carolina, is near Parris Island, where the East Coast Marine Corps boot camp is located. It’s hot, humid country known for its bayous, shrimping industry, and antebellum architecture. I arrived in early September 1993, to prepare to begin shooting. Before leaving Los Angeles, I was fitted for a long-haired wig for Lieutenant Dan’s “lost and angry” phase, and I needed to come to the set with scruffy facial hair. In Beaufort, we did all the makeup tests and wardrobe fittings first, getting our looks down for each section of the film. To prepare for shrimping scenes, we took a day trip out to sea on a shrimp boat to watch the deckhands drag their nets for shrimp. We did some work with a dialect coach to get the accents right and also went to Marine Corps Recruit Depot at Parris Island to do a little weapons training for the Vietnam scenes.

I wanted to give my all to the character of the wounded Vietnam veteran, so I began reading the 1992 Pulitzer Prize–winning autobiography Fortunate Son by Lewis Puller Jr., a United States Marine Corps officer who had been severely injured when he stepped on a booby trap bomb. Both his legs were vaporized, and he lost his left hand and nearly all of the fingers on his right. Puller was the son of the most decorated marine officer in the history of the Corps, Lieutenant General Lewis “Chesty” Puller. Like Lieutenant Dan, Lewis Puller returned from Vietnam and struggled with many demons, including alcohol abuse, the difficulties of living with his injury, and the isolation he felt as a veteran of an unpopular war. He worked hard to overcome his challenges, became a lawyer for the VA, and even ran for Congress at one point. But just a few months before Forrest Gump opened, Lewis lost his battle with those demons, taking his own life on May 11, 1994. I was very sad to hear of his passing. Reading his remarkable book and knowing his story helped motivate me. They became important parts of my preparation for the character.

Prior to shooting, Bob Zemeckis, Eric Roth, and the cast had two or three sessions where we read through the script. The actors Bob had assembled were terrific: Sally Field as Mama Gump, Robin Wright as Jenny, and Mykelti Williamson as Bubba. During these sessions, we would read the script and Bob and Eric would fine-tune as we went along. At one point we got to the section in the script where Forrest says he’s going to start a shrimping business. In this version of the script we were reading, Bubba had only mentioned his fascination with shrimp one time. So Bob stopped the reading and asked Eric, “Why does Forrest decide to go shrimping? Bubba’s barely said anything about it.” The two of them looked at each other, and that’s when they decided that all Bubba should ever talk about is shrimp. So whenever you see Bubba in the movie, what is he talking about? Shrimp! And of course, Forrest Gump, in honor of his friend Bubba and his love for shrimp, carries out Bubba’s dream of starting a shrimping business.

Later, just before we began shooting, Bob and I were at a restaurant, and it popped into my head that during the scene where Forrest Gump pushes Lieutenant Dan across a busy New York City street and they almost get run down by a yellow cab, Lieutenant Dan should stop and bang on the hood of the car and shout, “Hey, are you blind?! I’m walking here! I’m walking here!” This was a funny homage to Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy, Oscar winner for Best Picture in 1970. Bob loved the idea, and even took it a step further by underscoring the scene with Everybody’s Talkin’, the iconic song from the movie.

The first scene we shot was the scene were Forrest comes piloting into the harbor in his shrimp boat. When he sees Lieutenant Dan waiting for him on the pier, Forrest gets so excited he jumps off the boat and swims for his former platoon leader. The shrimp boat runs in circles by itself and eventually crashes into the dock. All went well during that day’s shoot, and we rounded out the week by shooting some of the other long-hair scenes, the rest of the shrimping scenes, and Lieutenant Dan screaming at the heavens during the hurricane. For that I was stuck up in the rigging of the shrimp boat all night. To create the hurricane, the boat was docked with crew members pulling it up and down with ropes on either side to make it rock back and forth. Heavy water cannons were positioned in different areas around the boat that shot water up at me while giant Ritter Max fans were turned up full blast to create wind. On top of that, they had a DC-9 jet engine set up to blow like crazy while I hung on for dear life and screamed, “You call this a storm?! Blow, you son of a b**h! Blow! You’ll never sink this boat!” Luckily, I didn’t have to shoot the next day. After a night of that, my voice was shot.