Zemeckis and company manage to simply, lyrically meditate on those notions for more than two hours, and never once bang us over the head with a banal observation. This is a simplicity and elegance that tempts platitude and commonplace, but in the film's final twenty minutes, simplest emotions take on deepest heart. Talking to Hanks and Zemeckis, their seriousness about craft is stirring. He never cuts to the exterior of the plane going through the clouds or something like that. I don't care how big the cast is, when you cut to the bad guys, it's like OK, we see how this movie's going to work.
Hanks adds that authenticity was important, too.
We didn't want this to be a kind of thing, that four years go by, and he's learned a lesson about himself, and he becomes Nature Boy when he gets back. That was the area where it was tough. We could figure out the logic of how he got there, and we could work on the authenticity of everything that happened to him on the island. But when it came time for him to come back to Memphis, that where it became very complicated. When there's tension in a scene, the surf is much more pounding, the waves come in at a quicker rate.