Fly Hard

Air Force One is the surprise hit of the summer Stateside: it took $37.1 million during its first weekend, and is the strongest opener ever for the post-blockbuster lull spell of late July/August. We interview Harrison Ford - who plays the US President - on page 30. But first, Wolfgang Petersen: the thinking man’s blockbuster director...

The German director Wolfgang Petersen - maker of assorted brainy action hits including In The Line Of Fire and Outbreak - has a thing for tight, confined spaces. He used a submarine to incredible, nail-biting effect in his brilliant 1981 World War Two drama Das Boot, and now admits to using many of the same techniques in Air Force One, his new action-drama with perennial superhero Harrison Ford as a rugged US leader taken hostage on board his own, eponymous presidential flying fortress.

“Oh yes,” Petersen smiles, buoyed with confidence in what is certain to become his biggest feature to date. “There's definitely a parallel between the two, although one is a true story set during World War Two and the other is entirely fictional. But what they both have in common is that dramatic tool of taking place in a small area - a plane or a submarine - where people are locked in and cannot escape. Using that type of dramatic setting is what I really enjoy. With all my experience from Das Boot, I was able to use many little tricks that I'd learned for using every single inch of a small space to work up the tension and drama. Its such a joy to do that again.”

Yet Petersen - who's now a major Tinseltown player with his own production company (at the moment working on Anthony Hopkins and Richard Gere projects) - wasn't attracted to Air Force One simply for all its nooks and crannies potential. Instead, the big draw was the chance to add yet another major name to an impressive tally of leading men that already includes Dustin Hoffman and Clint Eastwood.

“Harrison Ford was already attached to play the President when I first heard what the film was about, and I thought: ‘Wait a moment - Harrison Ford playing the President? It's something only he could do.’” Jack Nicholson, Kevin Kline, and a few others might beg to differ on that score, but we get his drift. “So I read the script, thought it was extremely exciting, and regarded the linked issues as very interesting. The Russian situation is pretty real, and so are events in the White House, where there's a female vice-president, played by Glenn Close. It's also interesting how we deal with the question of quite when it is that you decide that the President is incapacitated and unable to run the country. But the real key to this feature is its creation of a positive president - indeed, it goes so far that he actually becomes the action hero.”

Air Force One documents what kicks off when the President's plane - on its way back to the US from Moscow, and full of high-ranking cabinet members, along with the Prez and his First Family - is hijacked by Gary Oldman and a gang of Russian terrorists. They want General Radek (Jurgen Prochnow), a dictator deposed in a recent US-backed Russian coup, to be released; but the President, a famous hardliner on terrorism and human rights violations, is unlikely to play ball. It'll be tears before bedtime for one side or the other before the day is out.

“You introduce your actor as the President and it had better work immediately, because otherwise you'll get the giggles right there,” grins Petersen, justifying choosing Ford for the part: most actors wouldn't have been able to pull it off. “But even before we shot it, I found I could easily see Harrison Ford in those opening scenes where the President's giving an important speech in Moscow. I just knew he'd look right in a motorcade, and exude the right stamp of authority. Harrison Ford has built up a certain image in the last 20 years - he's a very down-to-earth, trustworthy man. People like him because they believe him. He's a very honest guy, a good American, he's everything that you would hope the President would be. Of course, the reality is different in lots of cases, but if you want to show a positive president, Harrison Ford is just ideal.”

As with other Petersen films such as In the Line Of Fire - and Ron Howard's Ransom this year - Air Force One is half all-action extravaganza, half serious drama. Certainly, neither the leading man nor the director were interested in churning out another pile of bullets ‘n’ bangs bollocks, be there a president-as-hero twist in the tale or not. And while the conventions of this movie genre had to be followed to a certain degree - “it's still a big American action movie, with Gary Oldman's bad guy having to be really bad,” Petersen concedes - he was more far interested in his audience walking away from the pic thinking about President James Marshall, the man, than President James Marshall, the action hero.

“It's more of a personal portrayal of him. It's about the personal conflicts within a man who has said he will never negotiate with terrorists, and is now forced into a situation where one of them is holding a gun to the head of one of his family. To be honest, I think it's somewhat wishful thinking that a president would say: ‘Let's go back and talk about morality, let's bring a halt to all the senseless killing all over the world’ - but then this feature's talking more about ethics than politics anyway.”

Although both Air Force One and In The Line Of Fire are about very American men doing the right thing, Petersen insists he is not particularly attracted to patriotic themes.

“I don't really know why I make these choices, but when I came to America to do research for In The Line of Fire, I went to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, and as I was sat there I had goosebumps - there's just something about Americans’ pride in dealing with their history. We didn't have anything like that when growing up in Germany. I was taught the other way: ‘Don't forget anything in our past because it's all bad!’ I didn't learn to be proud to be German, so I think that's one reason I am attracted to films like this and In The Line of Fire - I'm almost jealous. That said, if you look carefully at this movie, I think you can see that I did things an American director would never have done.”

Which means that while Air Force One makes use of a stereotypically evil foreign terrorist leader, at least he's not Arabic and gets to be played convincingly by a top notch actor, the ever-excellent Gary Oldman. “If you listen carefully to the words he throws in Harrison Ford's face, and what he tells the President's daughter about capitalism, democracy, and the changes inflicted by the break-up of the Soviet Union,” Petersen asserts, “the points being made aren't the usual US propaganda, where the Americans are the good guys and everybody else is scum.”

An obvious problem reared its pug ugly head and refused to lie down as the film's pre-production went into action: as Petersen knew all too well from his In The Line Of Fire days, the secret service aren't over-keen on revealing how they work, and are certainly unlikely to start doling out plans for the President's private jet. So how do you set a feature inside Air Force One when so few people know what it's like beyond that cabin door?

“We were desperate, desperate, desperate,” laughs Petersen. “We couldn't get hold of any information about how the plane really looks. At first we were reduced to just patching it together from a TV film about the plane and the odd piece of news footage. So when Clinton said we could go and check out the real thing ourselves, and we were like, ‘Oh, wow!’ Harrison had simply asked him at a dinner in Wyoming - and the next day we were on the plane. Our art director was going crazy and scribbling everything down because we weren't allowed to take any photographs.”

So were they reduced to gibbering schoolboys by the experience?

“Oh absolutely. It was awesome. It was so hilarious when they took us around the plane - they'd say, ‘Look at this chandelier’, and, ‘Look at this leather’, and I'd be saying, ‘Yes, yes, but how many weapons do you have?’ Of course, they were very tight-lipped about that type of stuff.”

Needless to say, Petersen wasn't allowed to use the real Air Force One for any of his exterior shooting. Instead, a standard Boeing was painted and stood in for the vast majority of the film's aerial and ground-based shots. And in a summer in which everything but the kitchen sink has been done CGI, it's refreshing to discover that some film-makers haven't fallen back on the industry's latest box of tricks alone. “About 80% of what you see is the actual jet,” Petersen confirms, sounding pleased with himself that even the feature's most dramatic and climactic scenes were largely shot for real. “It's all about the flying,” he offers, tight-lipped only because he doesn't want to ruin the film's conclusion.

According to Petersen's estimate of his budget - “$85 to $90 million” - Air Force One recouped more than a third of its costs during its opening weekend in the US alone. It's an expensive film, but it's by no means the biggest spender of the hot-weather season - and here's one director appalled by Hollywood's current lack of financial acumen. “I'm proud mine is one of the most inexpensive films of the summer - most of them cost between a $100 and $200 million dollars. Of course, $85 million is still a big budget, but I won't take on a film like this if it doesn't make financial sense. I hope that after this summer, people will now think twice about putting out a movie like, for example, Speed 2 - which I've heard came in at about $175 million, and did nothing at the box office. Batman cost close to $200 million and is performing poorly too.”

Petersen's solution? The obvious one: a return to what he calls,“the middle class movies now disappearing. The $35 to $40 million films with great actors, but not superstars. The good films of the ‘30s and ‘40s were middle class films - not all were Gone With The Winds. Every middle class carries its society, and it's the same with film-making.”

- By Lesley O'Toole