The road for me in making Life in Flight was sort of long and windy. I first wrote Life In Flight as a story, and only after a friend in the film business read it, did I turn it into a screenplay. That part was actually brutal -- the translation from narrative prose to script format was torture. Then there's this long and selective process of finding the right people to make it with -- your producers, your actors, your crew. I think most people would say I got my movie made really quickly, from script conception to film completion in about three years -- but when you're living it, waiting to hear back from this person or that person, it's hell! An eternity. Ironically, once you go into pre-production and then production the whole thing takes on this super sonic speed.
But the really amazing thing about making a film is watching it go from this very private experience of isolating yourself away to write and conceptualize a story, to this hugely collaborative experience where all these people take a piece of it and start to add their own layers on. Actors onto their characters, set designers into the look of each scene, cinematographers in capturing light and mood. It all needs to filter through a singular lens of your vision as the director, but I loved letting each of the parts grow and evolve under the collaboration of talented people.
In the end you have this thing, this movie, that hopefully conveys that one idea, that underlying theme you felt so compelled to communicate. For me that underlying theme was the struggle we all have with our quiet, private fears. Not the big obvious fears in the world like war or environment or the state of humanity, but those private and personal fears we all have within us. The stuff we struggle with on the day to day that can hold us back, or hopefully, as the film explores, set us free. And I think for all its strengths (and of course, come on ... its weaknesses-!), Life in Flight does manage to provoke some thinking about that. It's a quiet movie, but I think one that in the end has managed to find its way into many people and make them think. That's a good thing.