Eric Roth

He's playing a deeply earnest man.

So by throwing out the bizarre subplots, director Robert Zemeckis and writer Eric Roth translated the feeling of being swept up in history.

They found the human heartbeat beneath the satire.

It's like taking a punk rock song and covering it as a sweeping orchestral ballad.

I have an email, like, right.

Is it Eric Roth? Yes.

Thank you.

Oh, my

And it's it's another to see that there's another American icon right there.

But you know Tommy Hanks the book by Winston groom Eric Roth screenplay like a moment, you know Tommy Hanks garrison these and the list goes on Sally field Robin Wright

and it goes on and on man.

uh it was a it was a lot of fun from top to bottom and and from bottom to top there was some very dangerous times training for the vietnam sequences because we actually stayed in the woods the snake infested woods and for some reason man i kept snakes just I ended up standing on a snake right next to his mouth.

It's a satire with real acid in it.

But then we get Robert Zemeckis' 1994 film with a screenplay by Eric Roth, and what they do is they keep the historical collisions, you know, meeting presidents, going to Vietnam, but they completely neutralize the acid.

Completely neutralized.

The meanness just evaporates.

So how on earth does a director look at a wrestling, swearing, space-traveling cynic and extract the most earnest movie of the 1990s? [laughs]

Zemeckis, along with screenwriter Eric Roth and Tom Hanks, recognized that the chaotic satire of the book was just too cold for a mass cinematic audience.

It wouldn't play well.

Right.

He says he directs to protect his own scripts from being fundamentally misunderstood and ruined by other filmmakers.

He specifically mentions envying Eric Roth, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Forrest Gump.

Darabont says Roth got so lucky because he found a director, Robert Zemeckis, who truly understood the subtext and tone of the material.

Darabont feels that kind of creative telepathy is incredibly rare.

He does.

He and his co-writers looked at the massive book, and they just started cutting.

They slashed subplots.

They delayed the grand holy war.

It is chaotic.

But director Robert Zemeckis and screenwriter Eric Roth took that raw, messy, picaresque structure and entirely discarded the absolute circus of the plot.

They cut the space travel, the cannibals, the wrestling.

Thank goodness.