We Got This Covered: The movie also speaks to society’s need for heroes to the extent that they’ll turn a blind eye or be enablers. Being a celebrity or a movie star or anything else, is it harder to deal with these things because people will lay out an escape path for you?
Denzel Washington: I think that everybody was covering their own behinds in this movie, so I don’t know if it was just so much that they thought my character was such a great hero as it was they needed him to be one in order to fulfill their agenda.
We Got This Covered: The airplane sequence was harrowing just from the safety of the movie theater. Have any of you had that kind of experience travelling in the air and literally thought that this could be it?
Bruce Greenwood: I crashed a Cessna 185, ripped off the wings and sank. There were three of us hanging upside down from our seatbelts, and the other two swam and got to the surface. I was 16 years old and the first thing that went through my mind as I was having trouble trying to take my seatbelt off was “maybe I should just die like a man, but if I yell I might live. Why am I having this conversation with myself?”
The pilot, who was a friend of my dad’s, got to the surface and realized I wasn’t there and dove back down and opened one door, the plane filled with water and he grabbed me by the scruff of my neck and pulled me through the seatbelt and we swam to the surface. While sitting on one of the wings that was floating on the water, I realized that I had been pulling my seatbelt the wrong way. It was just that panic that overtook me.
We Got This Covered: Denzel in the hospital scene when the tears are rolling down your face, what state of mind were you in to do that scene?
Denzel Washington: These questions are kind of hard for me because I don’t analyze what I’m doing. I’m not sitting outside of myself watching myself. He was injured and disoriented, he was getting bits and pieces back of what had happened to him, and I almost feel like that state of mind doesn’t set in until everybody’s gone. That was the beginning of it for me, and everything else was just taking in information about what happened, who’s gone, who’s fault, did we get hit by another plane or things like that.
We Got This Covered: Mr. Goodman, the performance you give in this movie is terrific. What inspired your character?
John Goodman: Everything was pretty much in the script. I’d like to say that I spent hours in a room by myself painstakingly constructing this thing, but everything was there. He was this really needy guy who carries a 7-Eleven around with him in his bag and has a lot of friends.
We Got This Covered: Mr. Zemeckis, one of the best scenes in this movie is when Denzel puts that vodka bottle on top of the fridge in the hotel room and then grabs it. Did you know from the outset how you were going to shoot that?
Robert Zemeckis: Yes, I always wanted the scene to be suspenseful. I constructed the refrigerator so that its walls would glow, and I shot all of Denzel’s performance at 64 frames so that I could dial different speeds of his movement to make it look almost surreal. I was channeling one of my favorite directors which was Mr. Hitchcock and I was pulling a lot of shots out of his playbook for that scene. I wanted it to be this kind of idea that the alcohol was a siren that’s calling him.
We also had discussions about whether the actual grab of the bottle was going to end up in the final movie or not. We had the option to take it out, but when I finally put the scene together it just felt perfect.
We Got This Covered: This movie is not like any others out right now. Since it is unique and so different from everything that’s out and popular right now, what drew you all to this material?
Bruce Greenwood: One of the things that drew me was working with Denzel and Bob, but there’s so much ethical and moral ambiguity in the movie that it gives everyone a chance to decide who they are going to assign themselves to and ask themselves how long will they hang with that person. So you get to ride along with virtually every character while they make choices that you’re invited to buy into or not.
Kelly Reilly: This is the first film that I have made in America. I lucked out massively to work with Denzel and Bob and to play a role which was slightly complicated and nuanced. I would have begged for this role so this was just really a no brainer for me.
John Gatins: Without these two guys (Denzel and Bob) the movie doesn’t get made. I didn’t write it thinking that it would ever get made at a certain point. This script was like my own private little Rubik’s Cube that I would pick up through the ten years I was working on it. I work on assignments sometimes and the studios are very clear about what they want, but this was not that. I just wrote this story that was kind of fascinating in my head and I just let the story tell itself.
Melissa Leo: Well I heard that Mr. Zemeckis wanted me to come along, and I heard that I would get to play a scene opposite Mr. Washington so I said sure. What I understood once I had been given the script and read it was that Bob was asking me to do something that would in effect complete his film for him. So it was a very big honor he paid me in asking me to do it, and I very happily joined.
John Goodman: I liked the script and I liked the questions that it asked everybody such as what would you do in this situation.
Denzel Washington: If it ain’t on the page, it ain’t on the stage. You read a lot of scripts and then you read one which makes you feel like you read it in fourteen minutes because you’re turning the pages so fast because you can’t wait to see what’s going to happen next. This was one of those scripts and I had to be a part of it. It was like a Eugene O’Neil play; the tears and the pain were all on the page.
Robert Zemeckis: The script being so unique is what attracted me to this project because it was bold and audacious, and I loved the complexity about everything in it. I loved the moral ambiguity of every character in every scene and every aspect of the script. I remember getting to the stairwell scene on page forty and saying to myself “man that is bold! Can we actually do that?” And that’s when John had me.
That concludes our interview but be sure to check out Flight, in theatres this weekend.
