The Decision to Tell This Particular Story: Asked why we haven't heard more about the Lafayette Escadrille in films before this, Bill said, “I don’t know. It’s like, why did nobody ever make a movie in 50 years about the Titanic? I don’t know. There are technical reasons that it’s hard to do, very hard to do. There aren’t a lot of directors around who are pilots; there aren’t a lot of guys like me that really, really want to make a movie like this. There are not a lot of people like Dean [Devlin] who have the vision and the guts to go out and raise $60 million dollars without any big stars and without a studio.
The confluence of those two personalities and the script that was good, and the sense of adventure that all of us have. It’s, ‘Let’s do something nobody else is doing.’ I mean, why make a movie that is like another movie? There’s no reason to make a movie if somebody else has made before, is there? Well, there is a reason – if you want to capitalize on their success. But that’s not the way Dean and I think about our lives.”
Bill hopes contemporary American audiences accept and embrace this historical drama. “I hope it will connect the way Private Ryan connected, maybe, or the way Titanic connected. It’s a little bit of both movies. It’s a love story. It’s a period movie. It’s a movie about war, but really about the personalities that hinge upon each other during that war. It’s not about who’s going to win the battle or how are we going to kill those guys over there. It’s about these personalities, about these characters. I don’t know if you could have predicted how those movies would have done. Actually, Titanic was predicted to be a disaster, wasn’t it?”
Tony Bill on Casting Flyboys: “Well, one of our rules was that we only wanted to cast - because this movie is so independently financed, the entire budget - without regard to who was in the movie or what they’d done or anything else. We were basically given the dream come true of saying, ‘Okay, who are the best actors for the parts?’ As you see, it’s a combination of experienced actors and first-timers. The casting process was really simply saying, ‘Let’s go look at a bunch of actors, audition them, and meet them and read them, and after that we’ll say who we think should play the parts - who are the best actors for the parts.’ Some people, like David [Ellison], were encountered through aviation. David and I met through a mutual friend who’s a pilot before the movie was even considered. We didn’t even have the script, but I had come across David before I was given the script.”
Bill says that hiring Ellison, an actor without any feature film experience, in strictly a technical advisory role was never considered. “No. You’re making a movie about young guys who are pilots, why not use a young guy who’s is a pilot, who is an actor? He was an actor, was a pilot: sounds right to me. Then of course you say, ‘Well is there anybody out there that we’ve heard of before who would be good in this movie?’ Well James Franco was an actor that we’d heard of before, so he made sense. All the other actors in the movie are people that we found through the casting process.”
The Visual Style of Flyboys: “I wanted to shoot the whole movie with real airplanes. You can’t do it. You can’t have airplanes pass within two feet of each other safely. They could never do that before; Howard Hughes couldn’t do that.
I don’t know if you noticed, there are tracers – bullet tracers [in the shots]. In World War I, all of the airplanes were firing tracers so you could see where you were shooting. Well now, if you’re using real airplanes and real bullets, you can’t have another airplane in front of the one you’re shooting at. Only now in this movie will you ever see what World War I really looked like because we can use CGI to put the real bullets with the tracers in. There are many things that we could do with our technology that could never be done before. The combination of real airplanes, CGI, models, green screen - any number of tricks - is what our movie uses. That was our philosophy. Whatever we can do real, do it real.”
Before including any special ‘tracer’ effects, Tony Bill says they researched exactly how the tracers would have looked during World War I. “We did that during the green screen stage. We didn’t fire real bullets, but we fired real guns from World War I – with real shells.”
The Real Deal: Incredibly, some of the airplanes from the era not only still exist but are in good shape. In putting together the fleet of planes for use in the film, Bill was able to actually get a hold of some of the real planes. “We got fifteen of them in this movie. Some are totally original historical survivors. Some are existing replicas, and some of them we built ourselves for the movie.”
