Foxx, Biel and Lucas play three of the best fighter pilots in America, a solid trio who are part of an elite group of test pilots allowed to fly stealth fighter jets. When their commanding officer inserts a new wingman - a UCAV (Unmmanned Combat Aerial Vehicle) nicknamed EDI - into the team, it becomes an issue of man versus machine.
Rob Cohen on the Challenges of Directing “Stealth:” “Cars exist pretty much on the X/Y axis and combat, aerial combat, is in the Z axis. It’s like three-dimensional chess and that made it, since film is intrinsically a two-dimensional medium, it was a challenge.
Personally, it’s like you can’t storyboard it. You try, but it always, it just looks [flat] because you have none of the vertical, none of the depth which comes from the Z axis. I moved it to sort of small cartoon versions to try to get the feeling. But because the relationship between the foreground and background is so critical, you don’t get that feeling. You don’t get it. So eventually, as we did the early wire frame work and the train generator work, we started to put those things in relationship to each other. That’s when we began to feel the 3-D effect.”
Jamie Foxx on His First Movie to Hit Theaters Since His Oscar Win: “Actually, this other movie I did in Mexico that was probably going to go straight to video, a little home movie I made… Just kidding (laughing). We actually shot - movies come out [out of sequence]. When I went to do this movie, it was Ray Charles was like, ‘We hope we get funded for it,’ and ‘Collateral’ was like just finished. So it was a good movie to come into. It was a great movie to come in with. It’s fun – that’s what movies are about, come and just have a good time.”
“Stealth” is All About Teamwork – Did the Cast Do Anything Special to Bond Off the Set?: Jessica Biel, one of the very few females on the set, said, “I don’t think we did anything. We just had fun. We had such a good time, that’s all we did. We worked, we’d go have barbecues and we’d go dancing. And then you’d hang at the beach, midnight swimming, it was fun. But it was just normal stuff, you know? It wasn’t like anything out of the ordinary.” Jamie Foxx added, “And then there was Thailand…,” but didn’t elaborate.
Josh Lucas said, “You’ve got to remember, too, this movie - there is a chemistry that happens in this movie which is really created by the director in the sense that we’re all working on different sound stages at the same time. We’re not together. It looks like we’re together, but there’s three planes on three different sound stages and they’re all being videoed in the same [way], so it looks like we’re working. But really everyone’s half a mile apart. It was difficult.”
Josh Lucas on the Core of His Character: “I think any good hero at his core has all sorts of difficult, interesting issues going on. And that’s the thing that I think sets this movie apart in my mind is that you have a big, fun, playful action movie with some really interesting questions. I think the character’s dealing with a pretty serious moral dilemma, actually, about this plane and about the fact that he doesn’t think in any way that humanity should be taking on a war. To have that little concept, or big concept inside of really a roller coaster of a film, I think, makes it easier for me to play someone more complex rather than a rah-rah hero.”
Jessica Biel on Her Knowledge of Fighter Jets Prior to “Stealth:” “Well, I didn’t know a lot at all. I guess I had an idea that ‘stealth’ means you can’t really see them, but it wasn’t anything technical. I didn’t have any information. I didn’t know much at all besides maybe something I might have seen on Discovery or something. I really learned an extremely large amount of information just being part of it and going to the Lemoore Air Force Base talking to pilots, sitting in the planes, and really getting an idea of what possibly could be the future.”
PAGE 2: On Machines Taking Over for Humans and the Humor of "Stealth"
