Paul Thomas Anderson on why there should have been a ‘Forrest Gump’ sex scene
There are few films that sum up cinema from the 1990s more than Robert Zemeckis’ 1994 romantic comedy-drama epic Forrest Gump, written by Eric Roth and based on Winston Groom’s 1986 novel of the same name. Forrest Gump stars Tom Hanks in one of his most memorable appearances.
Hanks plays the titular character, a simple-minded but good-hearted man from Alabama who inadvertently has a significant impact on the big historical events of the 20th Century. All the while, he embarks on a lengthy friendship-come-relationship with his childhood friend Jenny, played by Robin Wright.
Forrest Gump is certainly not an adult-themed film, but there are some figures in the film industry who believe it should, most notably the director Paul Thomas Anderson, who thinks that if there were a sex scene between Forrest and Jenny, then it may just have unlocked another facet of quality.
Anderson once suggested: “An example I’ve used before, and I’m not doing it to be salacious or anything like that. How interesting would it have been to have Forrest Gump and that Robin Wright character make that baby that we see at the end.”
“How does Forrest Gump have sex,” the director then questioned. “That’s a great character, I think, and it’s not sort of trying to just give you a boner to show you Tom Hanks and Robin Wright and see her tits in bed. It’s going, ‘What could be more human, what could be more of a revelation of a character than watching them have sex?'”
Anderson is right to bring up the lack of a sex scene in Zemeckis’ film, too, because it’s right there in the original novel. The passage in question begins, “When we get home, Jenny begun takin off her clothes. She is down to her underpants, an I am jus settin on the couch tryin not to notice, but she come up an stand in front of me an she say, ‘Forrest, I want you to fuck me now.'”
Now we certainly can’t imagine Robin Wright telling Hanks’ Forrest just how much she wants him to get down to it in Zemeckis’ film, but perhaps Anderson is correct when he says that having a Forrest intimate scene might have revealed more about his character. “I mean, that says a lot about someone I think, is how they touch another person in bed,” he said.
Could it be conceived having Tom Hanks and Robin Wright detail the following scene from the novel? “Jenny shown me shit I never could of figgered out on my own… sideways, crosswise, upside down, bottomwise, lengthwise, dogwise, standin up, setting down, bending over, leanin back, inside-out and outside-in.”
Anderson may have just been on to something there…
