By William Booth
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 21, 2006
LOS ANGELES

A quick detour before takeoff, says Tony Bill, driving around the back hangars at the Santa Monica Airport. "We've got to go and steal a couple of chutes."

He is talking about parachutes, and the need to borrow one.

It's more of regulation, really, we're not going to actually use them," says the 66-year-old director of the new film "Flyboys" about World War I fighter pilots, one of the most costly and elaborate independent films ever made.

Point of fact, Bill confesses he has never operated a parachute, personally. But he explains how they work, theoretically. "After we jump out of the plane, you see, you pull down hard, with two hands, on this thing here." He is tapping a stainless steel ring now affixed to his passenger's chest. Yes, of course. The rip cord.

An apt metaphor. His film opens Friday, they've been working on it for two years, and he has no real idea whether it will find an audience to recoup the $85 million they've spent to make and market it. The independently financed and produced movie, completed without studio backing, includes a real lion, 800 special effects shots and an hour of CGI-enhanced aerial dogfights employing real and imaginary French Nieuports and German Fokkers going at it -- with a zeppelin.

Normally, recreational pilots and their guests do not strap on parachutes, but Bill explains that since his airplane is an Italian-made Marchetti SF 260, known as "the Ferrari of the skies," and "since we'll be doing some aerobatics," one dons the chute. It's an FAA thing. "Okay, let's go get some lunch."

Traditionally, Academy Award winners (Bill won his as a producer of "The Sting" in 1973) may enjoy chef Bruno's warm lobster salad at the Hotel Bel-Air. Bill prefers to soar over Malibu to a little airstrip in Camarillo and eat at the diner beside the tarmac. Along the way, he wants to fly upside down and talk about the young men of the Lafayette Escadrille, the first American fighter-pilot squadron to see action in World War I in the skies over France, which is the subject of his movie, staring James Franco and Jean Reno.

"Did you know that the pilot's life expectancy in 1917 was three to six weeks?" he asks. "I've also read that in some RAF squadrons during the especially bad months, it had been whittled down to 17 hours. Just imagine."

Back up a second. One doesn't so much sit in a Marchetti as wear it. It is like wriggling into a pair of metal jeans, if your pants came with swept-back wings and a bubble of curved plastic over the tiny two-person cockpit. The Italian air force uses them as trainers for fighter pilots. Bill taxis his Marchetti out to the runway, completes pre-flight instrument and engine checks, gets his clearance from the tower and then floors it.

"The thing about WWI airplanes is they were so pure," says Bill. Just wood and canvas strapped to an unreliable engine that did not recirculate its oil, but spat it out, coating the pilot and plane in flammable materials. Bill's director of photography, Henry Braham, who is also an experienced aerial cinematographer, described them nicely as a flying wicker basket. With the open cockpits, the pilots could smell the mown hay below.

They were the motorcycles of airplanes," Bill says. "And the pilots were like our astronauts." If John Glenn went to space with a machine gun.

On the way to Camarillo, Bill steers the Marchetti a couple of thousand feet above the rugged finger canyons of the Santa Monica Mountains. In World War I pilots routinely flew as high as 20,000 feet. "It is almost unthinkable what these kids put themselves through," says Bill. "They were up all night drinking and smoking. They took flasks of brandy up with them for the cold. Or the fear. They had no knowledge of hypoxia.

You know, over 12,500 feet, you really need supplemental oxygen. They were flying airplanes that had only been designed months earlier. They were virtually test pilots. They're up there at 18,000 feet looking for Germans. Their reflexes are shot. Their mental capacity is diminished. They're hung over. Oh, and they're flying airplanes that don't fly very well and they've only been flying themselves for 50 or 60 hours their entire lives."

Bill describes "Flyboys" as the most improbable film. "It has no stars, no studio, no book and no history that people will remember," he says. "It's got these old early airplanes but we live now in the era of spaceships. It's not a movie targeted at kids or women or old men, but it's an action picture with a love story that they might like." It also employed a director who had never used computer-generated imagery, hadn't directed a feature in seven years and never made a film that cost more than $10 million.

A lifelong pilot (he soloed in a glider at age 14) with a library filled with books on aerial combat, Bill suspects that some audiences won't believe what they are seeing on the screen -- and that impression might be enhanced by the mingling of computer effects with real aerobatic flying.

There is a shot of a man running across the top of a German dirigible during a dogfight. That's just crazy. But it happened. "Their greatest fear was burning alive." But World War I pilots never flew with parachutes. "The thinking was that they might jump out of the planes too often," Bill says. Rather, they flew with a pistol. "We don't know how often [it happened], but we do know they had the option of just shooting themselves."

Bill says he was hired to direct "Flyboys" by his friend the producer Dean Devlin ("Independence Day" and "The Patriot") because Devlin wanted a pilot.

There is a long history of great World War I flying aces movies dating back to the dawn of cinema ("Wings," "Hell's Angels," "Dawn Patrol"), and Devlin and Bill sought to harness modern special effects wizardry and actual aerobatic flying (they had a fleet of eight replica airplanes) to give audiences the sense of what aerial combat was like. In a few days, the critics and audiences will let them know if they succeeded.

"You couldn't film real planes today doing what they did back then. It's reckless. It's too dangerous. It's not allowed," he explains. "They flew too close. A lot of times they just collided in midair. You couldn't choreograph that and if you could, you couldn't have a near miss all the time. Sometimes you'd have a hit." Then he thinks of a gallows humor crack: "And of course then, you'd probably miss the shot."

Bill is very happy, sincerely, that no one died during the filming. He himself is an expert aerobatic pilot. Sometimes, instead of fighting the traffic from his home in Santa Monica to a meeting in Burbank, he'll just fly there. "It takes five minutes," he says, but you know that is only an excuse.

For lunch at Camarillo, he recommends the chili con carne with onions, a daring choice, for on the way home, Bill takes the Marchetti through its paces. Ready for another barrel roll? The only sensible answer to that is: no. But away he goes, bringing the plane through a loop, and when we are upside down, with the sea sparkling below, glued to the seats with the forces of 2.5 Gs, the pilot-director is beaming like a kid on his birthday, and maybe it makes sense why those World War I pilots took to the skies, not to kill, you know, but to fly.