Recently, Lea Thompson was shown a few of her interviews from back in the day when she was promoting Back to the Future, which was released in theaters in the summer of 1985 (and you can watch now with a Starz Bundle attached to your Prime subscription). Her reaction is wonderful, and she gets into what it was like when the now-iconic movie was released in a way I’d never realized before. Remember, the production of Back to the Future was pretty messy. Michael J. Fox replaced Eric Stoltz deep into filming, and they famously completely reworked the ending. Seeing Thompson look back on it now, more than 40 years later, really crystallized how it must have felt for all involved when the movie was finally released.
The Movie Has Proved Very Enduring
In a conversation with ET, Thompson was first shown a clip of an interview she did way back when Back to the Future was released about trying to relate to people in the 1950s. That’s an interesting question, because it’s not dissimilar to how many younger people might feel about the 1980s today. Of course, the movie remains popular with people of all ages well into the 21st Century. After giggling at herself and a scene from the movie, she explains that no one had any clue just how culturally relevant the movie would remain decades later. Thompson says:
I don't think any of us thought that 40 years later, that people would still be loving it. I don't think that we knew that it would have this kind of bounce, that people would have this nostalgia for the '80s.
She goes on to remark on something I think anyone with kids will understand, adding:
Different people find at different ages find something in the move out. Like, I'm a parent now. I understand. My kids think I was never a kid!
Ultimately, Thompson nails exactly what I think it the reason it’s still so relevant today. Whether its the 1950s or the 1980s or the 2010s, we all wonder about eras that came before our time and often don’t realize that people in the ‘50s and the ‘80s might have been culturally different, emotions are the same. People don’t change that much. We wear different clothes and have slightly different attitudes, but we all wonder what our parents were really like as teenagers. We all wonder how their upbringing was different than ours, or even different from how they remember it.
There are many things that make Back to the Future timeless (pun intended), and Thompson really has her finger on the pulse of that. Not to bad for a movie that must have seemed doomed on the set as so many things were seemingly going wrong (like a complete re-casting). Instead, what came out of the chaos is a masterpiece from Robert Zemeckis, Bob Gale, Lea Thompson, Michael J. Fox and everyone else involved.
