American Cinematographer - June 2006 - 30

A Doomed

Flight and a Broken Romance
down to not
to

having to explain very much
each other! I knew what he was

thinking and he kind of knew how I
would interpret it."
One of the cornerstones of that

language is verisimilitude, a
quality that also distinguishes the
common

British

Several

Revisiting Flight 93
by John Pavlus

passengers on
United Airlines

Flight 93

prepare

to make a move
on

the terrorists

who have

hijacked their
plane.

Five years after the 2001 terrorist
attacks on New York City and Washing¬
ton, D.C., the events are
receive the Hollywood

beginning to

treatment.
Flowever, "Hollywood" isn't exactly an

accurate
tense

description of United 93. The

drama, which

recounts

the

passengers' effort to thwart their plane's
hijackers, was made by British filmmak¬
ers.

Furthermore, it features

unfolds in

no stars

and

quasi-documentary style,
wholly in one cramped location.
United Airlines Flight 93 was the
only hijacked plane that didn't strike its
intended target on Sept. 11, thanks to
the heroism of its passengers, whose
mutiny against their captors forced the
plane down in a Pennsylvania field. "The
events on this plane represent some¬
thing different [from the other events of
that day], the spirit of people who don't
just accept what is handed out to them,"
says Barry Ackroyd, BSC, the film's direc¬
almost

26 June 2006

a

aesthetic

that

influenced

tor of

Ackroyd's development as a cinematog¬
rapher. Relatives of Flight 93s crew and
passengers were regularly consulted
before and during filming, and some
even visited the set. "They were also
the first audience for the film, and they
wholeheartedly support it," notes
Ackroyd. The air-traffic controllers who
assisted Flight 93 and a handful of mili¬
tary personnel who responded to the
crisis that day play themselves in the
film, and the production went on several
fact-finding expeditions to the relevant

much

air-traffic-control centers. The filmmak¬

photography. "We don't know how
they fought, but they did fight
back. It's a very American story, obvi¬
ously, but it's a story that affects us all."
Ackroyd's body of work made him
well suited to topical, emotionally
wrenching material based on real

consulted the

Wuornos: The

phonebook-sized
Boeing 757.
"We wanted to be as honest as possi¬
ble, down to the look of the plane, the
food that was being served and even
the newspapers that were handed out
that day," says Ackroyd. "Paul was very
keen on nailing all of those physical

and Anne Frank Remembered, he has

details

events. In addition to numerous credits
on

documentary features such as Aileen
Selling of a Serial Killer

shot

a

dozen films for social-realist film¬

maker Ken Loach, among

them A Fond

Kiss, Bread and Roses and the forthcom¬

ing Wind That Shakes the Barley. "Mike
bring all of that [documentary]
knowledge to the making of feature
films to try to lend them a sense of real¬
ity," says Ackroyd. "That led me toward
United 93 and [director] Paul Greengrass, who has a similar background. I
only met him a few weeks before we
started prepping, and I think he wanted

to think I

me

to shoot the film because we share

the

same

kind of

language and under¬
standing, which, funnily enough, breaks

ers even

technical manual for the

so

that this wouldn't feel like

a

studio film, even
was

though 90 percent of it
actually shot at Pinewood Studios.

Some of the theories [about what

happened to the plane]

are pretty

extreme, and we wanted to stick to

what

was

included

known.

Those

details

phone conversations and

sounds that could be overheard from the

pilots' intercoms. The dialogue is pretty
much exactly what was known to be
said."

prep,
their
age,

During the project's month-long
Ackroyd and Greengrass solidified
approach to blocking and cover¬
rehearsing and staging scenes

PUOincoctvluereusfrayt.l,

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United
American Cinematographer - June 2006

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