‘Phoenix’ rises

“Our house was beside an army barracks and they used to fly helicopters out of there a lot, so I remember in the 1970s being intrigued by that,” the Dundalk, Co. Louth, native said recently. “They would literally take off 50 yards from my backyard. So, I’m pretty sure that was the start of my love of all things aeronautical.”
Having begun his career as a photographer, Moore, who’s 35, found himself directing commercials in the late 1990s. It wasn’t long before Hollywood came calling and Moore was hired to direct “Behind Enemy Lines,” a $40 million Gene Hackman-Owen Wilson picture about a Navy pilot shot down over Bosnia.
“It was a lucky break,” Moore insisted. “It literally was somebody saw a spot and said, ‘Who did that?’ . . . They called me in Ireland and they were like, ‘Come on over,’ and I was like, ‘Are you sure?’ And they said: ‘Here’s a plane ticket. Come on over.’ — It was certainly like, somebody pinch me. “
Moore said that after he made his first film he was sure he would never work again, even though the movie did well at the box office.
“You do the job and then you think, ‘OK, that was fun. Now I’ll be run out of town and they’ll discover what a fraud I am,’ ” he said. “I went back to Ireland and I was like, ‘OK, that was that.’ I didn’t have intense management conversations about the next move and then what happened really was the producer on ‘Behind Enemy Lines,’ John Davis, who actually turned out to be sort of a good friend, he had ‘Flight of the Phoenix’ and said: ‘You like airplanes. Here’s another airplane crash movie. Let’s go for it.’ “
Starring Dennis Quaid, Giovanni Ribisi, Hugh Laurie, Tyrese and Miranda Otto, “Flight of the Phoenix” is the tale of a group of crash survivors stranded in the Gobi Desert in Mongolia who try to build a new plane out of the remains of the old craft.
“I’m a big airplane enthusiast and the yarn is just a great survival story, so you put those two things together and I was pretty set on it,” Moore said.
Since the story is essentially timeless, Moore said he relied more on classic filmmaking techniques than computer-generated wizardry to tell it.
“We photographed this movie,” the filmmaker said. “We used some [computer-generated] work, obviously, in the crash sequence, but we used a lot of miniatures where, nowadays, you use C.G. work. We built a lot of scale miniatures for the crash, which is very unusual now. It’s a real dying art.”
Noting that many special effects-laden flicks may impress, but not ultimately satisfy, ticketholders, Moore said he wanted to treat audiences to a good, old-fashioned, movie-going experience.
“They feel it,” he said. “It looks like a big-ass thing crashing into a big-ass thing. It feels more realistic.”
The film is based on a 1965 James Stewart-Richard Attenborough movie with a similar title, and Moore said the core plot was so easy to relate to, it did not need to be changed for modern audiences.
“The story itself has a huge twist that doesn’t need updating and I was very worried and cautious that we didn’t try and modernize the film,” he said. “There is no attempt at modernizing the film, but the story basically concerns people being lost and it’s kind of hard to sell that in today’s world with Global Positioning Systems and mobile phones — and 24-hour this, that and the other thing — that people can genuinely get lost. So, what we did was shift the emphasis from the idea that they were lost to basically the idea that the oil company they were working for decided they weren’t worth spending the money to find.”
In an interesting advertising gambit, the studio behind “Flight of the Phoenix” launched an advertising campaign that aired during commercial breaks of “Lost,” the popular new ABC drama about plane crash survivors stranded on a tropical island.
“That was a big gamble,” Moore said, pointing out that the fact “Lost” has so many loyal viewers means people are willing to accept people going missing in the 21st century. “It was a very expensive thing to do. But it paid off, I think.”
The film opened Dec. 17 and ended its first weekend in the Top 10 at the box office, even though it debuted against some other big holiday movies. “Flight of the Phoenix” is also competing against the Howard Hughes bio-pic “The Aviator,” which opened last weekend.
“People stand there and go, ‘Which airplane movie should I see?’ ” Moore said. “Of course, ‘The Aviator’ is Martin Scorsese, Leo DiCaprio. It’s a $200 million epic that looks amazing. I’m going. You’ve got my nine bucks. So, obviously you’re worried, but there’s just nothing you can do. You’ve started making the film three years ago and you never think that you’re going to be in a room two weeks before you open going, ‘Should we open now?’ It doesn’t affect your decision-making process early on and there’s nothing you can do about it later on, so you just roll the dice and see what happens and hope people like the movie.”
The “Flight of the Phoenix” script was co-written by “She’s the One” and “The Brothers McMullen” scribe Edward Burns.
“Ed Burns came along to give it a little street smarts,” the filmmaker remarked. “Ed has a particular knack for urban, sort of wise-ass characters? dialogue, so he worked on a couple of the characters. I think he did a good job.”
Another advantage Moore said he had in making his sophomore film was its cast of actors, all of whom worked in the face of blistering heat and maddening sandstorms on location in Namibia in southwest Africa.
“How lucky am I?” the director wondered. “This is my second film. The first movie was more of a shoot ’em up action film, but I was just anxious, keen, nervous and delighted to get to work with a real solid cast. You’re talking about, at any point, 11 guys [a core of nine], but 11 characters and each one of them kind of knocked it out of the park. It was a bit daunting because you’re turning up Day One and you’ve got you — not against — but you versus this incredible cadre of actors that know exactly what they are doing. I look at Giovanni Ribisi and I think, ‘That guy is going to be a landmark on modern American acting. He’s a young Brando.’ It was a real thrill and they took it easy on me. They could have kicked the crap out of me. It would have been very easy for the actors to have banded together and decided, ‘OK, he doesn’t know what he’s doing.’ But they gave me a break.”
So, what, if any, message would the filmmaker like moviegoers to take away from “Flight of the Phoenix”?
“If I was talking to a high school bunch of kids, there are plenty messages about teamwork and believing in yourself, but in terms of an adult audience, I just hope people get a thrill out of it because it’s an old-fashioned story,” Moore said. “Go to the movies to see a story as opposed to a $100 million effects bonanza or something that’s ultra-violent. This thing is just like a story around a campfire. The story is about, can you be the best person you are at the worst moment?”