EAA Sport Aviation - January 2012

HEROES & LEGENDS
George Lucas

GEORGE LUCAS’S LATEST FILM, Red Tails, is about the Tuskeegee Airmen. He visited AirVenture Oshkosh 2011, where he showed the movie trailer for the first time in public at the Fly-In Theater. Red Tails opens January 20.

Are you interested in aviation?

I’m interested in aviation. I’m interested in airplanes. I’m interested in machines. I’m much more of a car person than an airplane person. But, obviously I like airplanes. I like driving fast. Racing. That kind of thing.

I’ve done a fair amount of flying in Star Wars, and it’s something I enjoy and I know how to do. I do like things like air combat in a movie that I can create.

What are your thoughts
on private space travel?
I think private space travel
is fantastic. I think the more
things get turned over to
private industry in the space
realm, the faster we’re going
to move forward. I think we’ve
finally reached that point
where it can be transferred
over to private industry.

What inspired you to make Red Tails?

Submitted by Stephen Ruby, via Facebook

A friend of mine who is an aerial photographer told me about the Tuskegee Airmen about 20 years ago. I started working on it, and I’ve been working on it ever since. It is a great story about kids who fly in the war. I saw it in the beginning as sort of a group like in American Graffiti, except instead of having fast cars they had fast airplanes, but they’re still young people.

I always wanted to do an air combat movie because there really hasn’t been one done about dogfighting. It’s amazing to me that nobody’s done it at least since Flying Leathernecks or films that were made during World War II, so that’s what got me into it.

What were some of the
challenges that came with
making the flying scenes?
Making dramatic sequences
out of air combat is very
difficult because it’s very
complicated. It’s very intricate
to be able to follow a pilot and
know when and how to make
it interesting. There’s an hour
worth of combat in this movie,
so it’s a lot of fighting. And
we had to make it interesting.
Make sure that everybody
knows the geography of where
everybody is, what they’re
doing, and why they’re doing
it. So, in that part, it’s a real
challenge and it’s fun. The
technical part of actually doing
it wasn’t…I’ve done it enough,
that wasn’t the hard part.

Have you been to AirVenture
before? What are your
impressions?
Submitted by Marty Whyte, via Facebook
This is my first visit. I think
it’s great. Harrison Ford has
been telling me about this
for years and wanting me to
come. I finally got here, and
it’s everything he said it was
and more.