WASHINGTON – The miracle of flight has overwhelmingly changed our world for the better, with global aviation revolutionizing the way we conduct business and pleasure.
Tragically, private plane accidents have stolen Hollywood headlines this year, from Harrison Ford’s survival of engine failure back in March to James Horner’s deadly solo crash in June.
Both men are key contributors to the documentary “Living in the Age of Airplanes,” currently playing at the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum in Downtown D.C. and the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia. The film is narrated by Ford with posthumous music by the late Horner.
WTOP spoke with director Brian J. Terwilliger after Ford’s incident and prior to Horner’s passing.
“We’re all passionate storytellers, filmmakers and pilots,” Terwilliger says of his collaborators. “(Horner) had a chance to see the footage very early on was like, ‘This is great. If we can get schedules to work out, when you’re ready, I’d love to score this film.’ And the rest is history.”
As for Ford, the “Star Wars” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark” star watched the film five times before recording the narration in March 2014.
“He’s a really avid pilot and a proponent of aviation, and the message of this film really resonated with him,” Terwilliger says. “He’d seen my last film, ‘One Six Right ‘ … and he really got what I was trying to do with this. It was really important to me that someone could deliver the message and the narration in a really passionate way and really mean what he was saying.”
In “One Six RIght” (2005), Terwilliger told his tale from a pilot’s perspective.
In “Living in the Age of Airplanes,” he tells the story from a passenger’s perspective.
“One of the most fascinating parts of aviation is the view that it enables us, the perspective that it physically gives us from up above,” he says. “You can see more in a single glance out that window than most people ever saw in a lifetime.”
Produced independently by Terwilliger Productions and distributed by National Geographic, the film includes footage from 18 countries across all seven continents, including stops in Cambodia, Rome and Chichen Itza, Mexico.
“We were very aware not to just make this here in the United States,” Terwilliger says. “It’s a very global concept, how the airplanes changed the world… We saw ancient civilizations in four different places, people and cultures that had never met back when they were ruling, and now here we are, we can be tourists and connect them all in a matter of a couple days.”
Terwilliger says the global scope was a rewarding challenge to put together.
“Slimming down 260 hours to a 47-minute film was a monumental task by my team and I, but to see it together, it’s one thing now, which is all a movie should be: one single experience.”
The film not only explores the 100,000 daily flights that take place around the world, it also looks at the countless ways that airplanes affect our lives even when we don’t fly.
“There’s nothing that’s like it, nothing has replaced it, and we don’t see anything in the near future replacing our ability to go between two places,” he says. “In the past, it was just our own two feet or horses. Even 200 years ago, that’s it, it was horsepower and footpower. All that changed with the steam engine, the train, obviously boats, but ultimately the jet airplane really changed the world — only 60 years ago. Just living in this fraction of a moment in time when this is possible.”
Terwilliger hopes the film will move the general public to no longer take aviation for granted.
“It seems (with) the common, traveling public, the fascination seems to be all but lost. The film really wants to bring that back and show what’s become so ordinary and somehow an inconvenience, to really turn that around and see it for (a) how new it is, (b) how truly extraordinary it is and the opportunity it’s afforded us, and then to contemplate the question: if we couldn’t fly, would we still go to the places that we go? And how different would our lives be? … For those that have become jaded, I think that it really does bring it back into something new all over again.”
Click here for showtimes. Hear the full interview below. Interview was conducted prior to Horner’s death:
