Robert Zemeckis’s 1985 original Back to the Future was the highest grossing film of its year, but the sequel that followed in 1989 was something else entirely. Back to the Future Part II (1989) sent Marty and Doc into 2015, dropped them into an alternate 1985, then ricocheted back to the events of the first film, all in under two hours. It’s a logistical and conceptual feat unlike almost anything the decade produced. Behind the scenes, the production was just as ambitious: two films shot back-to-back, lawsuits, hoverboards that had to be invented in a special effects lab, an actor playing three versions of himself in the same shot, and an earthquake that conveniently went unnoticed on camera. Below are 45 behind-the-scenes stories about how it all came together.

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1. The studio left Zemeckis with no real choice

The first Back to the Future (1985) had been the highest grossing film of 1985, and Universal wanted a sequel as quickly as possible. Robert Zemeckis and his writing partner Bob Gale weren’t initially keen, worrying that sequels were usually retreads of the original, but Universal head Sid Sheinberg made the situation simple: a sequel was being made, with or without them. Their original contracts gave them creative control on paper, but Universal held distribution rights and the financial muscle to take any dispute to court if needed.

So Zemeckis and Gale negotiated. They told Universal they’d do it on one condition: deals had to be in place for both Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd before anything else. As long as Fox and Lloyd were locked in, they’d figure out the rest.

2. Two sequels were greenlit at the same time

Once Zemeckis and Gale started developing ideas, they came back to Universal with a bigger pitch: a trilogy. Universal greenlit a $40 million budget for Part II, more than double the first film, plus another $40 million for Part III. Signing off two sequels back to back was unprecedented in Hollywood at the time, and it later became a template the likes of The Lord of the Rings would follow.

One of the inspirations was a cautionary tale from 20th Century Fox. They’d produced The Three Musketeers (1973), and when production problems forced the film to be split in two, the cast realised they hadn’t been paid for two films. They went to the Screen Actors Guild and the studio ended up paying the likes of Oliver Reed, Raquel Welch, Faye Dunaway and Charlton Heston twice over. Universal wanted no part of that, hence the dual greenlight.

3. Michael J. Fox got a 20-fold pay rise

Zemeckis’s condition that Fox return as Marty was non-negotiable, and Fox wanted to come back. The sticking point was salary. He’d been paid $250,000 for the first film, when he was still primarily known as a TV actor on sitcom Family Ties. By the time of the sequels, however, he was a full-blown movie star, and his agents had leverage. The reported figures were $5 million for Part II and another $5 million for Part III.

4. Fox found out about the sequel from a VHS tape

Production was punishing. The final season of Family Ties was filming at the same time as Part II, so for the first few months Fox was shooting the sitcom by day and the sequel by night, surviving on a couple of hours’ sleep. He’d done the same on the original, so he knew the drill, but there’s a quirk to how he found out the sequels were happening at all. According to Fox, the studio never formally contacted him. He only realised something was up when VHS tapes of the first film began appearing with the “To Be Continued” title card tagged on the end. Naturally, he got straight on the phone to his agent.

5. Personal moments fed into Marty’s performance

Filming coincided with two huge events in Fox’s life. His father passed away during the shoot, and Fox later said he drew on some of his dad’s mannerisms when playing middle-aged Marty in the 2015 scenes. At the same time, his wife Tracy Pollan, who he met on Family Ties, gave birth to their first son, Sam. There’s another small personal touch in the film too: Fox is a vegetarian, and the moment where Marty Jr picks the pepperoni off his pizza in 2015 came directly from him.

6. Tom Wilson’s Biff drew on real-world tycoons

Thomas F. Wilson is back as the antagonist Biff Tannen, and we see him as four characters: the future-set bully Griff (Biff’s grandson), young Biff in 1955 receiving the Sports Almanac, the obscene middle-aged Biff who’s turned Hill Valley into his Pleasure Paradise in the alternate 1985, and old 2015 Biff who steals the DeLorean and Sports Almanace. Wilson was a shoo-in to return, although he was the lowest paid of the original cast at $350,000 (Lea Thompson reportedly got $650,000).

To prepare him for 1985A Biff, Bob Gale handed Wilson photos and stories about American oil tycoon Marvin Davis, the magnate who owned 20th Century Fox at one point. Gale told Wilson to study Davis’s eyes, which he likened to those of a great white shark.

Incidentally, Gale has also said Donald Trump was an inspiration for the character (which, in hindsight, you can absolutely see). And 1985A Lorraine’s brassy look was apparently modelled on Tammy Faye Messner, the American televangelist who was a fixture on 1980s TV.

7. Wilson took to a six-hour makeup chair, starting at 3am

Playing three Biffs and Griff was a far bigger ask than the original film. Wilson wore prosthetics for both middle-aged and old Biff, and makeup artist Ken Chase took six hours each day to transform him. Calls began at 3am to be ready for the start of the shooting day.

It got more complicated still on days that featured multiple Biffs in the same scene (The Cafe ’80s exchange between old Biff and Griff is one example. Old Biff handing the almanac to young Biff is another). For those, Wilson would shoot his beats as the older character first, then spend 90 minutes having the makeup removed before going back to the set as young Biff to play opposite himself.

8. There was a major casting controversy the filmmakers had to contend with

Crispin Glover, who’d played Marty’s dad George McFly in the original, didn’t return for Part II, although the character does. Because the first film hadn’t been written with a sequel in mind, none of the cast were tied to sequel contracts. As such, Universal struck deals for Part II with everyone to return – except Glover. According to Glover, he was offered $125,000, less than half what every other returning cast member received. Bob Gale’s version is different: he says Glover’s wage demands were close to Michael J. Fox’s, and he also wanted final script approval.

Glover has said the reason he was lowballed was personal. On the first film, he’d questioned the ending with Zemeckis, arguing that giving Marty the truck he wanted and making the McFlys financially better off made money the reward, when it should have been about love. Zemeckis has talked about Glover being a wildcard whose performance had to be reined in, so the appetite to bring him back at full price may not have been there.

Without Glover in Part II, Zemeckis and Gale found workarounds. They dug out unused footage of George from the first film for cutaways. They wrote the character out of 1985A altogether by having Biff murder him off-screen. And in the 2015 and 1955 sequences, George is kept in the background, played by an actor called Jeffrey Weissman wearing prosthetics designed to make him resemble Glover. Weissman is the George we see in 2015 suspended upside-down in the “Ortho-Lev” hovering medical device.

9. The subsequent lawsuit changed Hollywood

Glover was furious when he learned the production had used unpaid footage of him from the first film, and even more so when he discovered Jeffrey Weissman’s prosthetics had been built from moulds of Glover’s own face (originally created to age him up at the start and end of the original film). Glover filed a lawsuit against Universal, arguing they neither owned his likeness nor had permission to use it.

The case was settled out of court for a reported $765,000, and Glover dropped the suit. The bigger consequence was industry-wide: the Screen Actors Guild introduced new rules barring studios from using likenesses of actors without consent. Glover’s attorney reportedly told the judge, “Things may happen in the future that will make this important.” In the age of deepfakes and AI-generated performances, that prediction has aged very well.

10. Jeffrey Weissman had a rough time on set

The new actor’s experience replacing Glover wasn’t a pleasant one, by his own account. When Michael J. Fox first saw him in the George McFly makeup, his reaction was apparently, “Crispin ain’t gonna like this.” And when Lea Thompson’s mother visited the set, Thompson reportedly introduced him to her as “the guy playing Crispin.” None of which was Weissman’s fault, of course. Cast members later apologised, and he attends cast reunions now, so the whole thing seems to be water under the bridge.

11. The fans pushed the story into the future

After the first film came out, Universal received thousands of letters from fans asking what happened to Marty and Doc in the future (having seen them head there in the original’s denouement). According to Bob Gale, that’s what dictated the opening of the sequel. They knew they had to start in 2015 and show Marty and Jennifer’s kids, which created a problem: they couldn’t figure out a way to write Jennifer into the rest of the story without taking attention away from Marty. The whole “your kids, Marty… something’s gotta be done about your kids” cliffhanger from the first film was never written as a sequel hook. It was simply meant as a great closing line.

12. A big name was nearly the new Jennifer

Claudia Wells played Jennifer in the original and planned to return, but around the time filming was due to start, her mother was sadly diagnosed with cancer and Wells stepped away to care for her. A new Jennifer was needed, and one of the names seriously considered was Nicole Kidman. She’d been recommended to Zemeckis by Billy Zane (who plays Biff’s gang member Match in both films) after they’d worked together on the intense thriller Dead Calm (1989). Kidman was apparently ruled out for being too tall for Michael J. Fox.

The part instead went to Elisabeth Shue, whose career was on the rise after The Karate Kid (1984), Cocktail (1988), and playing the lead in Adventures in Babysitting (1987). Claudia Wells later said she was flattered and honoured to be replaced by a performer of Shue’s calibre.

13. The DeLorean took flight three different ways

Turning Doc’s time machine into a flying car was one of the production’s biggest effects challenges. Effect studio ILM built a 1/15-scale remote-controlled miniature with folding wheels for many of the flying sequences. For close-up driving and cockpit shots, a DeLorean body shell was mounted on a moving practical rig. And a separate fibreglass DeLorean was built for landing shots, lifted and lowered on hydraulics to create the illusion of the car settling on the ground. Watch closely on landings and you can sometimes spot the wobble: it occasionally looks like the car’s been balanced on an off-screen forklift, because it more or less has.

14. The future Hill Valley is full of film references

The 2015 sequence is loaded with nods to other films. Marty walks past a holographic ad for Jaws 19, and on the marquee the film is credited as directed by Max Spielberg, Steven’s real-life son who was four years old at the time of filming. Parked on the streets are recognisable cars from other science fiction films too: a Spinner, the flying police car from Blade Runner (1982), and the StarCar from The Last Starfighter (1984).

There’s also a more curious reference. When Marty Jr nearly gets clipped by a car crossing the street, he hits the bonnet and shouts, “I’m walking here! I’m walking here!” It’s a direct echo of Dustin Hoffman’s famous line in Midnight Cowboy (1969), although exactly why it’s there is anyone’s guess.

15. Thge futuristic diner borrowed from a famous watch brand (and paved the way to Middle-Earth)

Cafe ’80s, the 2015 throwback diner where Marty plays a Wild West arcade game, was designed by visual effects art director and concept designer John Bell. He took inspiration from the visual identity of Swatch, the Swiss watchmaker, with bold clashing colours, geometric shapes, and playful typography. There’s a reason for the Swatch flavour beyond aesthetics: in early drafts, the hoverboards were going to be made by Swatch rather than toy brand Mattel.

The waiters in the cafe are digital avatars on screens, modelled on Michael Jackson, Ronald Reagan and Ayatollah Khomeini, and clearly inspired by the British 80s TV character Max Headroom. Jackson was apparently very cooperative with allowing his likeness to be used, and was performed by E’Casanova, who billed himself as the “#1 Michael Jackson Tribute artist.” He wore a rubber mask for the shoot, although Bob Gale said he looked more like Jackson without it.

The arcade game Marty plays, Wild Gunman, was a real Nintendo light-gun title, but the full-size cabinet seen in the film was built specifically for the shoot. The two unimpressed boys watching him play included an eight-year-old Elijah Wood in his very first film role, credited as Video Game Boy 2. He’s the one declaring it’s for babies, starting a career that would lead to him being cast as Frodo Baggins in The Lord of the Rings series.

16. The hoverboard required half a dozen tricks to sell

Pulling off the flying hoverboard effect took a small arsenal of effects techniques. For waist-up shots, Michael J. Fox was simply riding a regular skateboard. For the shot where Marty is stranded on the lake, the hoverboard had a mirror on its underside; the reflected water hid the mirror entirely. Full-body flying shots used a crane-and-cable rig attached to the back of a truck, with Fox and Tom Wilson (as Griff on his own board) suspended in harnesses and the camera mounted on the moving vehicle. ILM also developed a custom post-production tool called Wirem to digitally remove the wires from the finished shots.

Once Fox was rigged into a harness, his shoes were permanently fixed to the hoverboard, meaning he couldn’t walk between takes, so crew members had to literally carry him around the set.

There’s also a great piece of foreshadowing trivia that almost was: Griff’s “Pit Bull” hoverboard was originally going to be called “Mad Dog,” a setup for Buford “Mad Dog” Tannen, Biff’s ancestor and the antagonist of Part III. Quite why they changed it is a mystery.

17. The 2015 gang included a future Bruce Lee

Griff’s three henchmen are Data, Whitey and Spike. Data is played by Ricky Dean Logan. Spike is played by Darlene Vogel, who happens to have heterochromia, a condition that gives her two different coloured eyes. Zemeckis wanted to lean into the effect, so Vogel wore a red contact lens in one eye to exaggerate it. And Whitey is played by Jason Scott Lee, who would go on to play the martial arts legend himself in Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story (1993).

18. The film’s most spectacular stunt nearly killed someone

For the scene where Griff’s gang crashes through the courthouse window, Darlene Vogel was replaced by stunt double Cheryl Wheeler Duncan. The take didn’t go as planned. Instead of going cleanly through the window, Wheeler Duncan smashed into one of the concrete pillars and dropped thirty feet to the floor, ending up in a pool of her own blood. Some crew members initially thought she was dead. The shot wasn’t reshot, and you can see her hitting the pillar in the finished film. Mercifully, Wheeler Duncan wasn’t permanently injured.

19. A futuristic kitchen appliance was Pizza Hut’s idea

The pizza hydrator that Lorraine uses to feed the McFly family in 2015 wasn’t born of pure imagination. Universal had struck a sponsorship deal with Pizza Hut, who insisted on being written into the script. The same logic applies to the appearances of Pepsi, Nike, Mattel, Texaco and several other brands across the 2015 sequence. Where Zemeckis got clever was in the brief he gave them: he asked each company to redesign their logos and products as they thought they might look in 30 years’ time. The results, particularly the Texaco service station, suggest the design teams had a lot of fun with the homework.

20. There was a futurist behind 2015’s gadgets

The man responsible for much of the future tech was concept designer Edward Eyth. The pizza hydrator started life as a normal countertop oven that he made more playful. He designed roughly a dozen variations of wrist communicators, and later said, “In many ways I predicted smart watches of today.” He also designed the futuristic Texaco station and pitched Zemeckis the idea of giving the McFly home a giant aquarium where the family could harvest real fish, which Zemeckis vetoed as too lavish for a middle-class household.

The hydrator effect itself is gloriously simple. The pizza hydrates from tiny to enormous in about three seconds, in one continuous shot. To pull it off, Lea Thompson placed the small pizza into the hydrator and closed the door. The huge pizza was fixed to the ceiling of the rig and dropped down on a cue, so when she opened the door again, it was already in place. Practical effects at their most elegant.

21. An earthquake hit while filming a key scene

While the cast were shooting the McFly family kitchen scene in 2015, an actual earthquake struck California. Everyone on set felt the rumble, and yet, when Zemeckis watched the footage back, he discovered there was no sign of it on screen. The reason is one of the film’s neatest behind-the-scenes wrinkles: the soundstage had been locked off and every prop glued in place to allow for some of the effects work happening in that scene. So when the quake hit, the entire set moved as one. The take in the film is the take that survived an earthquake.

22. Zemeckis made it a family affair

The two police officers who bring the unconscious Jennifer home are Officer Foley and Officer Reese. Foley is played by Stephanie Williams, who would later carve out a TV career, while Reese is played by Mary Ellen Trainor, who at the time was Robert Zemeckis’s wife. Trainor turns up in just about everything: The Goonies (1985), Lethal Weapon (1987), Die Hard (1988). And 1989 in particular was a remarkable run for her: alongside Back to the Future Part II, she also appeared in Lethal Weapon 2 and Ghostbusters II. The unofficial sequel queen of the year.

23. A supporting actor really did not like the film

Needles, the smarmy colleague who needles (sorry) Marty into accepting a dodgy deal in 2015, is played by Flea, bassist of American rock band the Red Hot Chili Peppers. The band were touring at the time, so Flea had to fly in to shoot his scenes, having only slept for two hours the night before (although that’s probably reasonable going by Chili Peppers standards). He didn’t watch the films for years afterwards and once described Part II as “a multi-million dollar piece of trash.” Some of that bitterness may stem from the fact that, in the rush of arriving on set, he lost a hand-knitted jumper given to him by his grandmother.

24. There was a plot hole the film tried to paper over

A 1990 TV special called The Secrets of the Back to the Future Trilogy revealed several deleted scenes from the 2015 sequence, including Marty stumbling onto a destroyed Hill Valley High School, and an extended moment where old Biff begins to fade from existence after returning the DeLorean to 2015 before vanishing entirely. Test audiences didn’t understand the fading scene, so it was cut, although you can still see traces of it: when Biff steps out of the car, he visibly seems to be in pain.

The reason for that scene is a plot hole. Old Biff goes back to 1955 and changes the timeline, as we discover. But when he returns to 2015, he comes back to the original timeline rather than the altered one we then see Marty and Doc travel to. The film’s own time travel rules say that shouldn’t happen: in the first film, Marty goes back to 1985 and his family have changed. The fading scene was an attempt to address this, although even with it included, the logic doesn’t quite hold up.

25. Zemeckis flew between two productions for three weeks straight

Production on Part II and Part III ran for 11 months, with two years of pre-production beforehand to build sets and write scripts. The two films overlapped: Part II was being edited while Part III was being filmed, and Zemeckis was overseeing both at once. During the final three weeks, he barely slept. He’d finish filming Part III in Northern California, fly to Los Angeles where Part II was in post-production, then catch a 4:30am flight back north to be on the Part III set in time for the day’s shoot. Director as endurance athlete.

26. Designing the future was a tricky job

The first film’s costume designer, Deborah Lynn Scott, didn’t return. Zemeckis replaced her with Joanna Johnston after working with her on Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988). Johnston had to design across multiple time periods, but she said the most difficult by far was 2015. She admitted she was “terrified at the prospect of designing the clothing of the future,” which makes sense: 1955 and the Old West have photographs and reference points, but 30 years ahead has nothing to look at.

Johnston’s creative philosophy for the 2015 wardrobe was that men and women would be equal in society, which fed into the design of Marty’s self-lacing Nike MAG Power-Lacing shoes. Those were designed by Tinker Hatfield, the actual Nike designer behind the Air Max. The trick to the auto-lacing on screen was simple: the trainers were stuck to a fake floor when Fox put them on, with a crew member underneath pulling the laces tight by hand and switching on the Nike logo light. The same approach was used when his jacket resizes itself: crew members just out of frame pulled cables. Sound design did the rest in post.

27. Doc’s shirt foreshadows the locomotive

There are some quietly clever costume choices, particularly with Doc. The shirt he wears for most of the film features a pattern of horses and trains. That’s not random: it’s a foreshadow of the climax of Part III, where Marty returns to 1985 by hitching the DeLorean to a locomotive. One of the perks of shooting two films back to back is you know what’s coming in the next film.

28. The Hill Valley town square had to be rebuilt

The first film’s production designer, Lawrence G. Paull, also didn’t return for the sequels. Zemeckis replaced him with Rick Carter, who’d worked with Steven Spielberg on The Goonies and the TV anthology series Amazing Stories and came on Spielberg’s recommendation. Carter said the biggest challenge was 2015 Hill Valley, but the more counterintuitive expense was simply restoring the existing Hill Valley town square set on the Universal backlot, which had been damaged during the first film.

They’d done so much damage to it the first time round that fixing it for Part II ended up costing more than the original build. Most of that money went into excavating a 60-by-80-foot square for the lake and filling it with 80,000 gallons of water. There’s a lovely piece of continuity in the rebuilt set, though: the ledge on the clock tower that Doc broke in the first film is still broken in 2015 if you look closely.

29. Lea Thompson had “stolen” a costume

Because the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance sequence in Part II involves restaging scenes from the original film from new angles, the costumes had to match exactly for continuity. This created a small crisis: the dress Lorraine wore at the dance couldn’t be found in the costume department’s archives. Lea Thompson then admitted to Zemeckis that she’d taken one of the dresses home after the first film as a keepsake. She went home, retrieved it, and wore it again. The production let her keep it afterwards, mercifully.

Thompson took a souvenir from this film too, although a less obvious one: the fake breast implants from 1985A Lorraine, on the basis that they’d been moulded from her own chest and she didn’t fancy anyone else getting hold of them.

30. There was an even darker version of the McFly family

In the alternate 1985, Biff mentions Marty’s siblings Dave and Linda, although neither appears on screen. Originally they were going to. A scene was shot with Marc McClure (who plays Dave in the original) where Marty runs into him outside Biff’s Pleasure Paradise as a homeless drunk. A second scene was planned in which Linda would be working as a prostitute to settle her gambling debts. Wendie Jo Sperber, who plays Linda, was pregnant and unable to film it, so the Dave scene was dropped along with it. Probably for the best, given how grim the Linda concept reads on the page. Thankfully, both characters return to their normal selves by the end of the trilogy.

31. The Pleasure Paradise has some hidden details

1985A is full of blink-and-miss-it touches. Biff’s Pleasure Paradise casino is built on top of the Hill Valley courthouse, with the old clock tower visible behind the neon sign of Biff lighting a cigar with a $100 bill. There’s a video playing inside the casino that fills in Biff’s rags-to-riches backstory, which reveals that Lorraine is his third wife. The first two were Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield, two genuinely impressive pulls for a Tannen.

And inside Biff’s penthouse, two pornographic film tapes are visible in the background, titled “Black Taboo” and “Playing with Fire.” Both are real adult films, and both share an incest theme, which is presumably why they were chosen. Quite which crew member pitched that as a background detail, and how, is best left unexamined.

32. The mechanic and the old man are the same character

When Biff gets into a furious argument with Terry, the mechanic who fixed his car after the manure incident in the original, this isn’t actually Terry’s first appearance in Part II. He’s also in the 2015 sequence as an old man, and a fairly important one: he’s the one who asks Marty for a donation to save the clock tower, then gets chatting about the World Series, planting the idea about buying the Sports Almanac. “Put a little money on the Cubbies!” That’s the same character.

Another great detail: Terry is played by Charles Fleischer, the voice of Roger Rabbit.

33. The football scores are all real

To convince young Biff that the Almanac is genuine, old Biff plays the radio commentary of a UCLA versus Washington college football game, predicting the result in advance. The game on the radio took place on November 12, 1955, and really did end with UCLA kicker Jim Decker hitting a last-second field goal to win. Biff later catches a string of other scores on the radio while driving, all of which are real historical results.

34. A made-up sport almost replaced the hoverboards

Bob Gale wrote the screenplay for Part II while Zemeckis was off making Who Framed Roger Rabbit, so when Zemeckis came back, big changes followed. One casualty was an action sequence built around a fictional 2015 sport called SlamBall, played in an anti-gravity chamber, combining elements of jai alai, handball and roller derby. It was cut for budgetary reasons, although SlamBall is still listed as one of the sports on the back of the Grey’s Sports Almanac.

35. The original sequel was set in the 1960s

The single biggest change Zemeckis made to Gale’s draft was the time period at the centre of the story. In Gale’s original screenplay, Marty and Doc didn’t go back to 1955 to retrieve the Almanac from Biff. They went back to 1967. Lorraine was an anti-Vietnam protester and flower child, George was a college professor at Berkeley, and Marty accidentally stopped his parents going on their second honeymoon, which meant he was never conceived and had to fix things.

Other beats in this draft included Marty being arrested for not having a draft card, with Lorraine posting his $500 bond and that money being what stopped the second honeymoon. Doc had to enlist help from his younger self to fix the Mr Fusion device powering the DeLorean, and the younger Doc was apparently a heavy pothead.

When Zemeckis read the draft, his criticism was that the plot was too close to the first film, and that by 1967 Lorraine would be a touch old to be a peace-and-love hippy. He had the idea of returning to the events of the original instead and told Gale to scrap 1967 in favour of 1955.

36. Marty plays the first film’s theme song (badly)

The score and song choices are full of callbacks to the original. After 2015 Marty has been fired and is playing his guitar in the living room, he’s noodling badly through the main riff of “The Power of Love” by Huey Lewis and the News, the theme song from the first film (and still a banger.) The score also nods backwards: the music for the hoverboard chase is a clear development of the skateboard chase music from the original, just more intricate and built out.

37. Perry Como was nearly the original 1955 song

When Biff is driving towards the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance in 1955, the song playing on his car radio is “Papa Loves Mambo” by Perry Como. There’s a nice piece of trivia attached to that choice: “Papa Loves Mambo” was apparently Zemeckis’s first pick for the original film, before it was replaced by “Mr. Sandman.” He saved the track for the sequel instead. A wise swap, for us. “Mr. Sandman” is perfection in that context.

38. Recreating the first film took genuine memory work

Restaging scenes from the first film created a logistical headache that nobody had foreseen, because the camera setups for the original hadn’t been documented anywhere. The crew were largely working from memory. Cinematographer Dean Cundey said that on the first night of filming, they were recreating the climactic clock tower lightning strike from the original, and they couldn’t match the lighting until someone remembered, “I had a light over that doorway,” and another crew member recalled the exact filter that had been used on it. Now, every shot setup gets documented as a matter of course. Sequels weren’t really common enough back then for anyone to have thought about it.

39. An invented camera device made one actor become two

The film’s biggest technical innovation was a new camera system. Several scenes required actors to perform opposite themselves at length: Tom Wilson as Griff and old Biff in Cafe ’80s; Fox playing Marty Sr, Marty Jr and Marlene at the 2015 dinner table; old Biff handing the Almanac to young Biff in 1955; and Christopher Lloyd as both 1955 Doc and 1985 Doc at the clock tower. Traditionally this was achieved with a locked-off camera and a split frame down the middle. This time, however, Zemeckis wanted the camera to move.

ILM’s solution, drawing on a system Zemeckis had encountered on Who Framed Roger Rabbit, was to mount a 35mm VistaVision camera on a computer-controlled dolly. The scene would be shot once with a human operator, and the computer would record every tilt, pan, focus pull, and movement. The same scene would then be shot again, with the VistaGlide playing back those moves perfectly.

So for the Almanac handover, Wilson played old Biff first, then went through the makeup change to young Biff and shot the scene a second time, with the VistaGlide replicating the moves and an earpiece feeding him the dialogue from the previous take to nail his timing. ILM then composited the two passes together. There’s one error in that scene, if you look carefully: there’s a brief moment where old Biff’s hand seemingly disappears, victim of a compositing glitch.

40. The Jaws hologram was meant to look broken

Another standout ILM moment was the holographic shark advertising Jaws 19. The visual effects supervisor was Ken Ralston, and his team produced several iterations, each technically better than the last. They ended up using the very first version because they preferred how glitchy and unstable it looked.

At one point in development, the hologram was actually advertising a fictional Godzilla 2015 instead of Jaws 19. (A real Godzilla film, directed by Gareth Edwards, did arrive in 2014, so they’d have been close.)

41. The glamour magazine has its own story

The Oh La La magazine which Biff hides inside the Sports Almanac’s cover is a fictional French glamour title invented for the film. Its cover image is actually a flipped photo of English actress Venetia Stevenson, taken from the cover of the July 1955 issue of Swank, an American men’s lifestyle magazine. Stevenson, incidentally, was the daughter of Robert Stevenson, the director of Mary Poppins (1964).

42. The tunnel pursuit was shot in a much shorter tunnel

The climactic car chase sequence used the Griffith Park Observatory Tunnel in Los Angeles, which is considerably shorter than it appears on screen. Several tricks were used to extend it visually: a wide-angle lens, repositioned and unevenly spaced roof lights, and a painted backdrop at the far end. The combined effect makes the tunnel look about five times longer than it actually is.

Also, Zemeckis knew this particular tunnel well: it’s the same one Bob Hoskins’s Eddie Valiant drives through to reach Toontown in Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

43. A deleted scene caused the 1885 detour

The DeLorean ends up in 1885 because of a malfunctioning dashboard, but originally there was a funnier reason. In the original script, Old Man Peabody from the first film had been committed to a mental institution for claiming to have seen a spaceship (the DeLorean). On the day he’s released, he sees the DeLorean flying overhead, fires his shotgun at it, and damages the time circuits, wiring it to go to JAN 01 1885 12 AM. Bob Gale said the scene was dropped because the original actor, Will Hare, wasn’t available. A loss, as a reprisal of Peabody’s great line “Take that, you mutating son of a bitch” would have been a treat.

44. A director-fuelled hoax got out of hand

To build anticipation for the film’s release, a behind-the-scenes TV special aired in the U.S. on November 17, 1989, hosted by Leslie Nielsen. It included behind-the-scenes footage, cast interviews, and clips from the finished film. During the special, Zemeckis cracked a joke that hoverboards were real but had been suppressed by parent groups concerned about safety. The joke landed too well: Mattel were inundated with calls from people trying to buy one. Rumours then started spreading that a child had been killed testing a hoverboard and that Mattel were facing a lawsuit, none of which was true. Zemeckis ended up having to publicly backtrack and clarify that he’d been winding everyone up.

45. The numbers and the legacy spoke for themselves

Released on November 22, 1989, Back to the Future Part II was made on a $40 million budget and grossed $118.9 million worldwide. At the Academy Awards, it received one nomination for Best Visual Effects (Ken Ralston, Michael Lantieri, John Bell and Steve Gawley), losing to The Abyss (1989). Today, it sits at 63% with critics and 86% with audiences on Rotten Tomatoes, and a 7.8 out of 10 on IMDb. The size of that gap between critics and audiences tells its own story: this one isn’t universally loved, but those who do love it really love it.

And there it is, 45 stories from the trip to 2015 and back. Back to the Future Part II remains one of the most ambitious sequels of its era and a film whose ideas, hits and misses included, are still being argued over more than 35 years later. If you want the full deep dive, our podcast episode goes even further behind the scenes. Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or at alltherightmovies.com.