"Flight" director Zemeckis interviewed on NPR

http://www.npr.org/2012/11/29/166082140/flight-takes-on-questions-of-accountability

'Flight' Takes On Questions Of Accountability

Fresh Air, National Public Radio

EnlargeRobert Zuckerman/Paramount Pictures

Acclaimed writer-director-producer Robert Zemeckis has worked on more than 30 films, including the Back to the Future series and Forrest Gump, for which he won an Oscar for best director.

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November 29, 2012

Director, producer and screenwriter Robert Zemeckis is known for the Back to the Futurefilms — which marked his arrival onto the Hollywood scene in the mid-1980s — as well asWho Framed Roger Rabbit and Forrest Gump. His latest film, Flight, stars Denzel Washington as William "Whip" Whitaker, a heroic airline pilot with a dark secret.

Early in the film, the plane Whitaker is piloting takes a terrifying plunge after a mechanical malfunction. Whitaker — in a daring maneuver that others are unable to later re-create — manages to flip the plane over, fly it upside down and successfully avert a full-blown disaster. He eventually crash-lands the plane while saving scores of lives.

This dramatic action sequence may be the scene-setter, but the movie subsequently becomes a character drama. Upon waking in the hospital, Whitaker learns that toxicology reports were taken while he was unconscious — and they've revealed that he had alcohol and cocaine in his system when the airplane malfunctioned. He then faces charges and a hearing from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB).

And he has to face himself: Will he hold himself accountable?

EnlargeRobert Zuckerman/Paramount Pictures

Denzel Washington stars in Flight, the latest film from writer-producer-director Robert Zemeckis.

"Basically what he and I spoke about was the character's level of denial," Zemeckis says about working with Washington. "That's what you're ultimately seeing in this performance, and that's what I think he did so brilliantly in his portrayal."

Zemeckis, whose films include the motion-capture animated movies A Christmas Carol, Beowulfand The Polar Express, is known for his use of new technologies. That said, he recognizes the pitfalls of jumping to embrace them too quickly.

"[Y]ou can go back and see how ... in the final years of the silent cinema, where the art of cinema storytelling was so magnificent, and then when they invented the microphone and sound, everything got really static," he says. "And it all had to be reinvented again. ... So what we do is we overuse [technologies] and call attention to them because they're just so much fun to have. And then ... we learn how to use them in the way that all tools of cinema should be used, which is to make them invisible."