Interior. Cockpit. Night. The pilot turns to his co-pilot and announces that he has definitely lost control of the aircraft. It's a scenario that Boeing passengers will want to avoid during their transatlantic flight, especially if they suffer from a fear of flying. Fortunately, the long love affair between air travel and the seventh art is not confined to the disaster category. Action, comedy, adventure, suspense: the air travel has inspired some of the world's greatest directors. Even when the camera is playing the fool...
Macaulay Culkin comes to mind, of course, as a repeat offender in the art of missing a plane. And the sprint through Chicago airport - an exercise that a few business travellers have had to go through one day - which the director will remember as a stressful experience. "Shooting at O'Hare was daunting. We had to be quick. We only had two or three shots of the whole family running through the terminal. It was nail biting..."Chris Columbus later told Chicago Magazine. Actress Senta Moses Mikan recalls: ".There were thousands of extras, all of whom knew perfectly well the movements they had to make so that none of us were in any danger as we ran at full speed through the American Airlines terminal at O'Hare. And we were running really fast. (...) This scene could have ended in disaster.". And while the McCallister family will eventually catch their flight to Paris, neither Orly nor CDG were used as filming locations for the blockbuster.
We also inevitably think of Tom Hanks, a stateless man stranded on the ground in The Terminal by Steven Spielberg (2004). Spielberg drew his inspiration from the inextricable situation of Mehran Karimi Nasseri, who was stranded at... Paris CDG from 1988 to 2006. However, the American director moved the plot to the New York hub of JFK, and turned to theMontréal-Mirabel airport to shoot the scenes on location. After all, "Mirabel or Roissy, it's all the same everywhere"Inaugurated in 1975, the Quebec airport soon fell victim to the oil crisis, and saw its last commercial flight take off in 2004: an Air Transat aircraft bound for... Paris, once again. Although it failed to attract business travellers in the long term, this airport failure lends itself well to the seventh art, and features notably in the credits of the film The Jackal (1997), starring Bruce Willis, Richard Gere and Sidney Poitier, as well as Hold-up by Alexandre Arcady (1985) with Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean-Pierre Marielle and Jacques Villeret.
Tom Hanks' plethoric filmography also reveals a relationship with the airline industry that can best be described as 'complicated'. Although he is careful not to divulge the end of his work, a happy ending often brings his adventures to a close. He plays Captain Chesley Sullenberger in Sully (2016), in which he pilots an aircraft that suffers engine damage over the Hudson. In Stop me if you can (2002), plays FBI agent Carl Hanratty, and is regularly spied on by Leonardo di Caprio, alias Frank Abagnale Jr. This is thanks in no small part to his role as Pan Am co-pilot, embraced with malice and talent without ever having been hired by the legendary airline.
Fans and business travellers alike can take a stroll through the airport used in the filming, which took place partly at New York JFK, in a separate terminal... namely Terminal 5, which in another life was home to another historic airline: TWA. And it is once again welcoming travellers, not to take off but to stay in one of the 512 rooms of the TWA Hotel, with its delightfully vintage airport decor and 4600 m² of MICE space.
Sometimes "cut off from filming", Paris airports are nonetheless popular with many directors, both French and foreign. And they can also steal the show from other hubs, like CDG for a certain Clint Eastwood. Anne Robert, head of operational communications at Paris-Charles de Gaulle, told an ADP Group publication last year: "We welcomed Clint Eastwood in 2018 as director for his film about the Thalys attacks, Le 15h17 pour Paris. He was due to film in Brussels, but wanted to come to Paris-Charles de Gaulle. We had to reconstruct the signage as if we were at Frankfurt airport... It was Clint Eastwood, so we allowed ourselves a little brand deviation!".
Story of a man in correspondence
As for finding the role that could embody the business traveller, with his routine, his rituals and his rhythm of life, we may well have to turn to a certain George Clooney in Up in the Air (2009). Admittedly, there's nothing inherently enviable about the dirty work entrusted to this expert in dismissals. And Ryan Bingham's character, for all Mister George's class, is not above reproach. But this high-flying "plane warrior", this " man in correspondence "which has made the hotel business its own. home sweet home and the aeroplane as a means of daily mobility, has something to appeal to and inspire more than one business traveller. If only for his art of analysis to get through airport security checks as quickly as possible, or for his ability to adapt to any business destination. And what can we say about his compulsive accumulation of loyalty points, with the graal of 10 million miles in the American Airlines frequent flyer programme... If we go too far, Jason Reitman's film is quite revealing about certain aspects of business travel. And the turn taken by Ryan Bingham's employer, who intends to replace the travel that is so dear to him with the use of the video-conferencingMaybe it wasn't a science fiction film... Cut?
