‘The Lift’: Revisiting an early Robert Zemeckis project
When it comes to visual effects and their relationship with the spectacle of Hollywood, very few filmmakers understand it quite like Robert Zemeckis does. The director of beloved productions such as Forrest Gump and the Back to the Future series, Zemeckis has attained both critical and commercial success due to his understanding of the popular consciousness. Unfortunately, the director hasn’t been able to maintain the streak in recent years.
With duds like Welcome to Marwen and The Witches, many film fans have been anticipating Zemeckis’ retirement for a long time now. Last year, Zemeckis added another failure to his filmography in the form of a live-action version of Pinocchio. Guillermo del Toro’s unique interpretation of the mythology of Pinocchio put Zemeckis’ project to shame, further fuelling speculations about the end of Zemeckis’ career. However, the director is showing no signs of slowing down and is currently attached to a new film adaptation of Richard McGuire’s graphic novel Here.
Instead of focusing on Zemeckis’ retirement, we have actually chosen to go back to the very beginning of his film career by exploring his first student film. Titled The Lift, the film constructs a nightmarish vision of a businessman dealing with the mundane routines of daily life while trying to make sense of an unruly elevator in his building.
A graduate of the University of Southern California’s prestigious School of Cinematic Arts, Zemeckis was deeply influenced by the environment that the institution provided. During an interview with the DGA, the director opened up about his passion for filmmaking and the impact that film school had on his trajectory within the industry.
Zemeckis recalled: “I knew all the mechanical and technical stuff before I got there, because I was fortunate enough to get summer jobs at a local commercial film company during my last two years of high school. By the time I started my freshman year at college, I already knew how to sync-up sound, how Moviolas worked, how to splice film and the other things, so I got to concentrate on storytelling. But film school was great for three reasons. You got to make movies relatively inexpensively.”
The filmmaker added: “Another was that—remember, these were the days before video—we’d watch four movies on Saturday and four more on Sunday. The film school was in a shabby little horse stable, and we were sitting on folding chairs, but we were still watching classic movies projected and without commercials. The greatest part by far, though, was being in a pressure cooker environment with people who shared a similar passion for movies. That was all you talked about all day long, 24/7.”
The Lift is obviously the work of a director who is learning the ropes, but it is interesting for a number of reasons, especially because it is devoid of the commercialism that would define Zemeckis’ later efforts. With a deep philosophical concern about humanity’s increasing dependence on technology and the neuroses brought on by modernity, this is the work of a future pioneer.
Watch the film below.
