Three decades after “Forrest Gump,” director Robert Zemeckis has reunited with stars Tom Hanks and Robin Wright plus screenwriter Eric Roth, for “Here,” which had its world premiere Oct. 25 at AFI Fest.

Spanning ages since dinosaurs roamed the earth, “Here” is told through a single-camera angle, continuously jumping back and forth among timelines, with each period using the same point of view; it’s primarily set around a living room of Hanks and Wright’s home, and unfold in cinematic snapshots mostly throughout the 20th century.

“People say I’m an innovator and I appreciate that, but I think what we’re supposed to do as filmmakers is entertain,” Zemeckis prior to the premiere during a special Director Spotlight conversation with Hanks. “And I think that by presenting images in movies and stories to people that they’ve never seen before is kind of entertaining, it can be drama, it can be horror, it can be whatever.”

The two discussed Zemeckis’ films, which include groundbreaking ventures such as “Back to the Future,” “Death Becomes Her” and “Who Framed Roger Rabbit.” They covered their 2000 collaboration “Cast Away” before briefly mentioning “The Polar Express” and “Pinocchio” and ultimately explaining the conceptual approach on “Here.”

Hanks explained: “It begins with the era of the dinosaurs, there’s Native Americans, there’s other families that live in that house while it’s being built, you get a sense of what Bob was able to do as far as going the transitions from one to the next, but there are other times where the walls disappear and a primordial forest grows up and two people fall in love about 800 years ago.”

The actor talked about the technology it took to make Wright and himself look decades younger, with innovations that continue to worry many in the performing arts community.

“There are a lot of people s***ing their pants because you could say that this is a use of AI,” noted Hanks. “The visual way they de-aged us is in two very specific parts. One is, thanks to the speed with which the tools work at now, literally the size of files in the speed of computer work, between myself and Robin, they took 8 million images of us from the web. They scraped the web for photos of every era that we’ve ever been, every event we held, every movie still, every family photo that might exist anywhere. And they put that into the box, deep-fake technology, whatever you want to call it. Then they would create that look of 17 and 22, 27 and 34. Then we went into hair and makeup for the same amount of time that we do in hair makeup from standard room.

“So, this is a combination of this incredibly fast computing and the same makeup techniques that have been used since the days of Lon Chaney. It happened in real time: You did not have to wait for eight months to post-production. There were two monitors on the set. One was the actual feed from the lens, and the other was just a nanosecond slower of us deep-faked. So, we could see ourselves in real time right then and there, how we were moving, what our body position was. I’m going to tell you right now, a 17-year-old leaps up off the couch with a different alacrity than a 68-year-old man. And we have to make it happen.”

Zemeckis concluded, “The reason that any film illusion works is because of the performances. Tom and Robin and all of them were able to look at the playback, see themselves very glitchy but in youth makeup, in real time and go back and say, ‘Oh, I have to move quicker, raise my voice a little’ and actually hone the performance. It’s exactly as if they had old-age makeup on and they had to move like they were 30 years older.”

“Here” was one of four world premieres at Hollywood’s TCL Chinese Theatre as part of AFI Fest 2024, the annual celebration organized by the American Film Institute, the Los Angeles-based nonprofit that educates filmmakers and honors the heritage of motion pictures and television in the United States.

With 158 films from 44 countries, AFI Fest 2024 opened with the world premiere of the Disney+ documentary “Music by John Williams,” about the life and career of the four time Golden Globe-winning composer. The choice as the opening night film was lauded by co-producer Steven Spielberg, who kicked off the event saying in his intro: “That is a wonderful thing, to really be able to place the documentary form exactly where it belongs, right up alongside the narrative form.”

The five-day AFI Fest runs Oct.23-27, with closing day screenings of two other world premieres: the Netflix-distributed stop-motion animated comedy “Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl” from Britain’s Aardman Animations studio and the Clint Eastwood-directed “Juror #2,” which has been rumored to be the filmmaker’s professional swan song.