The sands of time have run and produced a re-make of the classic 1965 movie The Flight Of The Phoenix. Director John Moore chats to Steve Pratt about his reasons for taking on the movie.

DIRECTOR John Moore admits that not all the cast in the remake of Flight Of The Phoenix welcomed filming on location in the middle of the desert in Namibia. Some went more sand crazy than others. "One cast member wanted to leave the day he got there," he says. "There's no easy escape. You can't hop on a plane to anywhere. You're three flights away from places where high maintenance actors want to live."

He declines to name which actor wanted to go home, although he does say it wasn't star Dennis Quaid. That actor was more comfortable than most at the controls of a plane as he's a qualified pilot and aviation buff. The original Flight Of The Phoenix, which starred James Stewart, Richard Attenborough and Peter Finch, was his father's favourite film.

Unhappily, Quaid didn't get to fly for real in the movie. "He was due to fly but we had an accident on site that grounded our plane and prevented him from flying on the last day," explains Moore.

The film is a fresh take on the 1965 film of the same name, directed by Robert Aldrich. It was his son Bill Aldrich who suggested developing a remake.

Irish-born Moore, who previously helmed the action movie Behind Enemy Lines after directing award-winning commercials, has an interest in planes anyway. "I just like the way they look and think they're fascinating things. The only thing more fascinating than flying them is crashing them," he says. Quaid's character Frank Towns is at the control of a cargo plane that crashes in the Gobi Desert. For the surviving passengers and crew, the only hope is to rebuild the plane. Masterminding the operation is the mysterious Elliott (played by Giovanni Ribisi) who suggests building a new plane, to be called the Phoenix, from the undamaged components of the wrecked C-119 cargo plane. The original film was set in the Sahara but in the new one the Namibian desert stands in for the Gobi.

The Jennifer Lopez film The Cell is the only other picture to have filmed there. "It as quite a good deal for us," says Moore. "The minute you get airborne in other places you sees roads and buildings. In Namibia that doesn't happen, it's just desert.

"Physically, the location was demanding on the crew. I could sit in a box watching a screen but they were out there in the sand.

"The set kept changing as the sand moved. Over a period of four months, one of the major dunes rose in height by 120ft. The designer spent most of the time with a bulldozer trying to put it back." The film recruited dune groomers - more than 200 of them - locally to make sure the sand looked the same from shot to shot. "One stray footprint and you're done for," says Moore.

Stuck together in the desert, some actors began to behave like their characters, he says. Quaid remained a real morale upper whose grouchy reputation is undeserved. "He was very good if people got down. He had his guitar with him and would sit and play," says Moore.

The cast also includes British actor Hugh Laurie, record star Tyrese Gibson from 2 Fast 2 Furious and New Zealand actress Miranda Otto. The latter, who played Eowyn in two instalments of The Lord Of The Rings trilogy, was the only woman in the cast Moore never talked to her about this fact, but notes she handled herself without a problem.

There was a certain amount of resistance from the studio to casting her. "She's a very beautiful woman, but not a dumb Hollywood beauty. There was a certain amount of pressure to cast that type of actress for a bit of tit-and-ass in the movie. And we didn't go for a dumb-assed love story," he says.

Bill Aldrich didn't have any creative influence on Moore's film. He says. "I didn't have the balls to ask why he wanted to remake his dad's movie., but he's proud of it."

He points out that today's younger cinema-going audience won't know the original, so won't make comparisons. He sees the optimistic Flight Of The Phoenix as "my tirade against reality TV - we seem hellbent on destroying ourselves, every show is about the idea of annihilation."

* Flight Of The Phoenix (12A) opens in cinemas tomorrow.

Published: 03/03/2005