Back to the future: if the film exists, it is thanks to a photo – Actus Ciné

Now considered one of the most famous trilogies in cinema and pop culture, Back to the Future has not always been obvious in Hollywood. Denied by many studios before Steven Spielberg finally gave it a chance, the story of Marty McFly, the Doc and his DeLorean was born one summer day in 1980, in a cellar.

Indeed, as we learn in the documentary Back to the Future – Time Travel, American Dream & Rock’n’Rolldirected by Bruno Sevaistre and broadcast on Arte this Friday, February 10, it was by rummaging through the boxes of memories of his parents that screenwriter Bob Gale let the brilliant idea that would one day become… Back to the future.

“I came across my father’s school album in the cellar. I leafed through it, and I discovered that my father was a class representative in the final year”says the screenwriter.

“It reminded me that my class representative was a stuck-up party pooper that I avoided at all costs. So I wondered: if my father was that kind of guy, if I had been in high school with my father, would I have been friends with him?”

Universal Pictures

Imagining the beginnings of the meeting between Marty McFly, a teenager from the 80s propelled 30 years into the past, and his father George McFly, high school scapegoat, Bob Gale thus begins to construct a story of family and time travel. .

5 years later, after many twists and turns that the documentary also describes, Back to the Future arrives in dark rooms at 88 miles per hour, and instantly becomes part of popular culture.

Broadcast on Arte, Bruno Sevaistre’s film also returns – among other things – to the birth of the song The Power of Loveon the misadventure of Eric Stoltz (first interpreter of Marty McFly finally replaced by Michael J. Fox), on the screening of the film at the White House, for Ronald Reagan, or even on the way in which the film team imagined a futuristic 2015.

(Re)discover all the hidden details of “Back to the Future”…