Director Robert Zemeckis told Tom Hanks to stop “pushing” so hard on the second day of filming their 1994 classic Forrest Gump.

During an appearance on the Happy Sad Confused podcast on Monday, the two-time Oscar winner admitted he still gets imposter syndrome on the second day of shooting every movie.

He then revealed that Zemeckis told him on the second day of filming Forrest Gump that he was trying too hard playing the title character, an Alabama man with a low IQ.

“(He was like,) ‘I see what you’re trying to do here, I know you’re nervous, there’s a lot of stuff that’s happening’ but he just said, ‘You’re pushing too hard and you can’t do that,'” he recalled. “And I said, ‘I know exactly what you’re saying.’ Then I said, ‘Do I get to come back tomorrow and try tomorrow?’ He laughed and he said, ‘Yeah.'”

Hanks explained that the Back to the Future filmmaker built a “buffer zone”, or a scene that might get dropped, into the shooting schedule so he could find his feet on the first day.

“What I just had to do was I had to relax and inhabit the clothes as opposed to sell them, if that makes sense,” he said. “He invested in me the greatest bit of faith that I could stand the correction, that I had the ego to understand what was at risk and that I would trust him in order to guide me along.”

Zemeckis’s correction clearly paid off as Hanks won the Best Actor Academy Award for his performance in the six-time Oscar-winning film.

Explaining why he gets imposter syndrome on day two instead of the night before a shoot, Hanks noted that once there are a few scenes in the can “I am now at the mercy of something that is beyond my power and that is whether or not the casting is right”.

Hanks, Zemeckis and their Forrest Gump collaborator Robin Wright recently reunited for the new movie Here, which is in U.S. cinemas now.

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