Here, the new movie from director Robert Zemeckis, features a camera that stays firmly rooted in space, while all of time flows around it — evolution flourishes and civilizations rise, though most of the movie is set in a relatively tight span of about 120 years, from the turn of the 20th century to the present day, during which the unroving eye inhabits a New England home’s living room. It’s a fascinating and audacious technique, and one that works better than it has any right to do. Zemeckis got the idea from a graphic novel, also called Here, published in 2014 by Richard McGuire, expanding on his own six-page comic strip from some 25 years earlier.
(Like the film itself, the concept of Here has wafted through time.) “About 10 years ago, my agent sent me the book,” Zemeckis tells me. “It was one of those things where, as soon as I opened the book, I basically saw — not exactly, but in a general sense I saw the movie.
” He continues: “I thought that it was like something like I’d never seen before, and the graphic novel is quite cinematic, but I also thought when I saw it — boy, this can make a really, really interesting movie.” To be fair, he’s not the first to have that thought. In 1991, two students at the Rochester Institute of Technology’s department of film and video, Tim Masick and Bill Trainor, produced a six-minute short based on the idea, for their senior thesis project.
Almost 30 years later, a VR version of Here was unveiled during the .
