Tom Hanks is one of the most successful actors in Hollywood, but even he felt like he needed to wish upon a a star for luck at certain periods during his career. During an appearance on Late Night With Seth Meyers last night to promote his new film Here, which co-stars Robin Wright and was directed by Robert Zemeckis, Hanks discussed the trio’s previous collaboration, the 1994 film Forrest Gump.

While we all know now that Forrest Gump was a major success, both at the box office and at the Oscars, Hanks revealed to Meyers that at the time they were filming it, he thought it was a “cuckoo movie” that made him wonder, “Are we sowing the seeds of our own destruction here? Is anybody going to care about this?”

A few days prior to filming, while staying on Fripp Island in South Carolina in the summer, Hanks said that the Perseid meteor shower was about to occur, and it was going to be visible in the night sky.

“I had never seen a meteor in my life,” Hanks explained. But he feared that, given how far south he was located, he would have to wake up at 3 a.m. to see any of the meteor shower from where he was.

“So I don’t think we’re going to see any – OH MY GOD!” he yelled, theatrically interrupting himself as he reenacted how he reacted when he actually did see a meteor. “It looked like the head of a match that you had just struck. It was a ball of red-orange fire and it streaked across the sky and left this trail that lingered and lingered and lingered. And I said, you know, if you believe in omens, maybe this movie we’re making is gonna work out! We just saw something that was other-worldly.”

“And now, famously, like ten days before a movie, you’re just out there with a telescope— ” Meyers then joked.

Whether it was the Perseids or the fact that the decades-spanning film simply struck a chord with audiences, the film was a massive hit and the top-grossing movie at the box office that year. It’s up to the meteors now to bestow the same success on Here, which arrives in theaters on Friday.

Watch the full clip of Hanks’ interview in the video above.