“If these walls could talk…” That phrase is often said about the sites of well-known historical events, but it also applies to the private places where we spend most of our lives. In his upcoming film Here, director Robert Zemeckis puts a new spin on that idea, exploring what would happen if these walls could see.

Here takes place entirely from one fixed point of view. The camera never budges. It doesn’t zoom and never even turns. What does move—and rather quickly—is time. More than a century of life in one American living room plays out during the brisk 104-minute story. “The single perspective never changes, but everything around it does,” Zemeckis tells Vanity Fair in this exclusive first look. “It’s actually never been done before. There are similar scenes in very early silent movies, before the language of montage was invented. But other than that, yeah, it was a risky venture.”

Here is a Forrest Gump reunion of sorts, both in front of and behind the camera. The film, which debuts in theaters November 15th, stars Tom Hanks and Robin Wright and was cowritten by Zemeckis and Eric Roth, all of whom collaborated on that earlier Oscar-winner. Little has been shared about Here's unusual point of view until now. “That’s the excitement of it,” Zemeckis says. “What passes by this view of the universe? I think it’s an interesting way to do a meditation on mortality. It taps into the universal theme that everything passes.”

Although Here’s focal point doesn’t change, the actors do. Hanks plays a baby boomer named Richard, who at certain times in the story is approximately his own age of 67 but also traverses the decades thanks to traditional makeup effects, as well as digital de-aging effects. Hanks ages into his late 80s and also goes backward to when Richard was a very young man in the 1960s—looking just like two-time Oscar winner did on his TV show debut as the baby-faced star of 1980’s Bosom Buddies.

Wright joins the story during Richard’s late teenage years as his girlfriend and later wife, Margaret, as the couple raise their own children in the house he grew up in, and also goes from looking decades younger to old age as her lively, more adventurous character pulls her husband through the changing times. “Eric and I wrote our generation,” says Zemeckis, who is now 72.

UPDATE: The trailer for Here has debuted. Watch it below:

These aging transformations can be tricky, even with state-of-the-art tools, as Zemeckis knows well. His holiday film The Polar Express pioneered digital performers 20 years ago, which he continued to refine in 2007’s Beowulf and 2009’s A Christmas Carol. Even for the most adept filmmakers, being on the cutting edge also means sometimes tipping into the “uncanny valley,” the term for an audience’s perception of something being unsettlingly unreal. Many films have fallen into it as they experimented. Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, for instance, used de-aging techniques to shave decades off of Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci, but some critics noted that they still felt like old-timers with young faces.

A lot has changed in the five years since, and Zemeckis has continued to build upon and improve those techniques with Here. “I’ve always been, for some reason, labeled as this visual effects guy. But those were always there to serve as the character arc,” he says. “There’s always been a restlessness in trying. I’ve always thought that our job as filmmakers is to show the audience things that they don’t see in real life.”

One thing Zemeckis says he has learned is that successfully cracking the transformation is as much about the voices as the visuals. “It only works because the performances are so good,” he says. “Both Tom and Robin understood instantly that, ‘Okay, we have to go back and channel what we were like 50 years ago or 40 years ago, and we have to bring that energy, that kind of posture, and even raise our voices higher. That kind of thing.”

As the eras change, so do the symbols of progress in the living room. The film doesn’t typically smash-cut through the years; it deploys gradual transitions rather than abrupt jumps, using the scenery and props to guide the viewer backward or forward in time. As one scene ends, panels appear on screen, layering in segments of the room from earlier or later times before the full image changes. For instance, a 1960s television beside the fireplace will suddenly become covered by a rectangular window into the past, showing a 1930s radio in the same spot. Then the rest of the room from that era fades in and takes over the full perspective as another scene begins.

Zemeckis and Roth borrowed the effect from Here’s source material, a 2014 graphic novel by Richard McGuire, which itself was adapted from a comic strip the artist created in 1989. “Instead of cutting to the next image in the full screen, we’re [easing] into the next scene, bringing us into the next moment in a way that allows us to actually overlap stories.”

Here has some parallels to a traditional playhouse experience, since the film takes takes place in one location, but it differs because the set itself is constantly evolving and changing. “When you’re watching something on the stage, you are the editor and the filmmaker,” Zemeckis says. “You decide, ‘Am I going to watch that character or am I going to look over here and see that guy who’s sitting on the sofa?’ What we do with the panels is we guide the audience to what we want them to see.”

Using these panels, flashes of the home’s many inhabitants over the decades weave together throughout the story. A World War II veteran turned salesman named Al (WandaVision’s Paul Bettany) and his homemaker wife, Rose (Yellowstone’s Kelly Reilly), move into the house shortly after he returns Stateside after surviving heavy combat. Hanks’s character, Richard, is their firstborn, which sets the core of Here’s story in motion. “There were men in the 1930s and ’40s who lived through the Great Depression and then World War II, and then entered the buttoned-down ’50s where everyone had this conformity,” Zemeckis says. “They didn’t have the tools to express their feelings. And so, there was a lot of anger and a lot of lashing out.”

Al is not abusive per se, but he’s got more edge than the Father Knows Best era acknowledged. Rose is no pushover either, even if the doors open to her are vanishingly few. “The whole point was to make the story identifiable,” Zemeckis says. “We didn’t want people [in the house] to be criminals or spies in highly dramatic situations. There are some people who probably won’t like the fact that the conflicts in the movie are not over the top—that they’re pretty rooted in reality.” Rose and Al are actually named after Zemeckis’s own parents, although he insists that wasn’t his idea, but Roth’s. “I didn’t do it. Eric did it,” he says. “None of it is actually biographical.”

Tonally, Here calls to mind Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, just whittled down to a single room. Hanks’s Richard finds himself overwhelmed by his headstrong father, just as his mother does at times. Richard doesn’t have the rebellious or adventurous streak we’ve come to associate with the ’60s, which causes friction in his own marriage as Wright’s Margaret pushes back against the norms that kept women like her mother-in-law, Rose, from pursuing her own dreams. “Richard is fearful, and I think that’s a common malaise in people,” Zemeckis says. “And yet he’s doing it for all the right reasons. He doesn’t want to risk his family.”

Richard is a 1950s kid whose plans to become an artist are overshadowed by his responsibilities as a husband and father in the 1970s and ’80s. As a new millennium turns over, he is stunned to realize how quickly time has passed. Margaret, meanwhile, senses the ticking clock throughout, urging him to break free, move out, and explore the world. The clashes between the generations show how quickly a culture shifts as children grow up and parents grow old. “I think that the film speaks to the truth that we have to accept that everything changes,” Zemeckis says. “Where we get in trouble is when we resist that reality of life, and then we get dug-in and miss out on opportunities.”

While Here focuses mainly on this family, the film occasionally flashes back to those who inhabited these four walls before them and faced their own upheavals and conflicts. Michelle Dockery (Downton Abbey) and Gwilym Lee (Bohemian Rhapsody) play the home’s first residents at the dawn of the 20th century, an aviator and his wife who never suspect how soon their living room will be used for a funeral wake. David Fynn (The Mauritanian) and Ophelia Lovibond (Guardians of the Galaxy) costar as an inventor and a pin-up model living the high life in the home during the Roaring Twenties, while Nicholas Pinnock (For Life) and Nikki Amuka-Bird (Knock at the Cabin) play a couple who lives in the home after Hanks and Wright, chronicling the social upheaval of 2020 in their own family, as well as their housekeeper (played by Anya Marco Harris.)

Sometimes Here journeys even further back, showing glimpses of this woodland location before the home existed. The Colonial mansion that for much of the movie sits across the street outside the home’s front window gets a supporting part, and the Native tribe who inhabited the land before settlers encroached also turns up throughout the story. Just for fun, the audience also briefly glimpses what was there in the prehistoric era.

The passage of time is one of the reasons Here exists. After decades of innovative hits such as the Back to the Future trilogy, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Contact, Cast Away, and Beowulf, Zemeckis found himself wondering what frontiers were left to explore. On the set of Disney’s Pinnochio, in which Hanks played the puppet maker Geppetto, the director began brainstorming with his frequent star. “We were in London, musing about movies, and we were both talking about, ‘Is there a possibility to do something that is completely unique, something that has never been done?’ And I said, ‘Well, there’s this graphic novel that I’ve never been able to get out of my mind. It’s called Here.’ That night, Tom went home, bought the book on Kindle, and came back the next morning and said, ‘My God, that’s it. That’s the one!’

“Coincidentally, as I was checking on the availability of the graphic novel, I got a call from Eric, who says, ‘We need to write something together.’ I said, ‘Hey, well, listen, I actually am excited about this idea that Tom’s excited about. Get this book…’ He called me the next day and said, ‘This is it. This is what we have to do.’”

Despite all their years of experience, the veterans of Forrest Gump came together to experiment, without being sure the movie would work. Zemeckis was happy to have found a new hill to climb. “I think that that makes the story hopeful,” he says. “As long as you’re breathing, you can always get on with your dreams.”