newjerseynewsroom.com

BY PAULA SCHWARTZ

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

Nobody swaggers like Denzel Washington. In “Flight,” directed by Robert Zemeckis, Washington gets to do some of his famous swaggering. He plays Whip Whitaker, a veteran airline pilot, who’s just had an all night marathon of booze, sex and drugs in an Orlando hotel room. But he pulls it together – kind of - and in his shades and uniform he’s headed to fly a jet. He’s cocky and arrogant, but we know that attitude’s all façade and fueled by cocaine.

On the plane Whip’s already poured some vodka into his orange juice before he even gets into the cockpit. Soon the skies darken and there’s some seriously scary turbulence. The scene of the plane going down is mesmerizing and terrifying – don’t think about it on your next flight I dare you – and after some fancy maneuvers, including flying the plane upside down, Whip lands the plane in the middle of a field. But this is not a similar story to “Miracle on 34th Street,” the story of pilot Chesley B. Sullenberger III, who landed his plane safely in the Hudson River, getting all his 150 passengers to safety. Six people die in Whip’s flight although the stiff, corporate lawyer (Don Cheadle) assigned to protect Whip says the two flight attendants who died “don’t count.”

“Flight,” which closed the New York Film Festival, has given Washington his meatiest role since his Oscar-winning turn as a bad cop in “Training Day” (2001).

At the press conference for the film last Sunday, Zemeckis, John Goodman, Don Cheadle, Melissa Leo, screenwriter John Gatins and Greenwood talked about the film. Washington arrived 12 minutes late, and everyone clapped as he sat down with the other cast members.

What drew him to want to portray this character someone asked. “It was just a great screenplay first of all, just a great play,” Washington said. “I read it and I was like wow, and then my agent said, ‘Bob Zemeckis wants to make this movie.’ Those two elements are all it took.”

As for the toughest scene for him in the film, Washington said, “Right now,” while everyone laughed. “I don’t know. I don’t think of it that way,” and then he turned to the director. “Bob, what do you think?” (When it comes to the press, Washington is always cagey.)

“They were all tough. Making movies is tough,” Zemeckis said. “All I can say is, you know, watching Denzel work every day was just an absolute joy. He brought so many levels to this performance that just blew me away every day, but it was a tough…it’s a harrowing story. Every day we were dealing with a lot of dark stuff so it was draining.”

Gatins, who wrote the first 40 pages of the script in 1999 and put it down because, he said, “I figured it would never get made,” added that it was personal. “It was born out of what I like to say are my two greatest fears, drinking myself to death and dying in a plane crash.”

Zemeckis, who flies and owns planes, said the script didn’t change much from the original version. “The plane being inverted was always in John’s original screenplay, and I thought that was a really clever device to arrest this descent, but then we talked to aviation experts to make it as real as we possibly could and then designed it.”

“Flight” marks the director’s return to live-action filmmaking after 12 years.

He’s directed special-effects films like “The Polar Express” and “Beowulf.” “Movies have to have a certain amount of spectacle. That’s why we go to movies,” he explained, “but what got me excited about this movie was dealing with these complicated characters and doing the non-effects part of this movie.” The movie had a 45-day shooting schedule, and he kept expenses down by utilizing what he’d learned from “all those years of all the digital cinema I’d been doing.”

The director said the main reason he wanted to make “Flight” was because of “the moral ambiguity of every single character, and every single scene and the entire piece,” especially Whip, whose “substance abuse is basically a symptom of what his real problem is, and his real problem is having this disconnect from everybody and everything and sort of brokenness and to me that’s what attracted me to the piece.”

As for why it took so long for him to complete the screenplay, Gatins said he had problems ending it. And then there was the Sullenberger story. He was in Arizona at a car show in 2009, when he got e-mails saying, “There’s this guy who landed in the Hudson and it’s your movie.” Gatins told them, “I’m not sure you understand what I’m trying to do because I’ve read about Sullenberger. He’s a great guy, married with two daughters…a good guy, who did an amazing feat of flying.” “Flight” is the polar opposite of his story.

Someone asked the cast members if the movie had changed their experiences with flying? “It’s probably why I haven’t seen it yet,” Cheadle said. “I’ve been on 25 planes this year. I don’t know if I’ll watch it tonight.”

Gatins said, “I was a terrified flyer, even though I fly all the time for work.” Zemeckis, who flies his own Cesna, took Gatins up in his plane, and they scouted various locations together, an experience the screenwriter didn’t exactly enjoy. “He constantly wanted to work on the plane,” Gatins said, “so we’d be sitting on plane…on this sequence…(the crash sequence) and we’re on the storm, and I’m sweating, trying to focus, trying to do a good job.”

Washington is in every frame of “Flight.” When asked about preparing for the role, he said, “We had the opportunity to go on a flight simulators and it was great,” he said, making it sound very easy. “I mean I just have a good job. One day I’m flying, driving a train, whatever. For me it was just fun.”