The Making of "Flightplan"

In Theaters September 23

Jodie Foster headlines Flightplan with her face on the poster and her name above the title. Indeed, her presence in the film attracted much of the ensemble cast. As the mother of a child who goes missing on a double decker airplane, her frantic search involves flight attendants, the pilot and an air marshal who all tell her there never was a little girl.

As the air marshal, Sarsgaard has the most interaction with Foster’s character. He appreciated her no frills approach to acting. “She's such a pro,” he said. “’More cow, less moo,’ as she would say. She's not a lot of talking about it. She's not a dilettante about it. She just does it. She comes in. She does it, doesn't make a fuss about it. She pieces it together in the most logical way, and then you just do it. It's so freeing because I still consider myself a young actor. I'm 34. I still view it as the beginning of my career. You can get infatuated with acting in a way that makes you less an actor than an acting appreciator. The great thing about Jodie is that she spends very little time mulling over how she does her craft or talking to you about it or anything like that. I think there's really something to doing that. To talk about it is to make it less urgent to do it. Just do it. It's so much better than talking about it.”

Foster recalled getting along with Sarsgaard, but never discussing their craft in depth. “We’re the no muss actors,” she said. “We like to talk about music and board games before they yell action and we absolutely never talk about our characters or acting or anything like that.”

Erika Christensen plays a flight attendant who sympathizes with Foster’s character, but honestly cannot remember seeing her daughter. The role only has a few scenes, but that was enough for the young actress given the company. “I wanted to do this movie for one main reason,” Christensen said. “That was Jodie Foster. She's an amazing actress with such a career that's admirable. Starting young, she's got this nobility about her that makes her such a leading lady. So it was really nice to watch her work. Everybody has their own way of working but I learned from her the way she works. She is such a pro. They say action, and then come the tears. I'm observing that because I'm not a method actor at all. To see someone else do really well in pulling something out of their hat is really impressive, inspiring and validating and the way that I like to work.”

Of course, Flightplan isn’t all about screaming and crying for Foster. Though that’s a big part, she never wanted to be a downer. “When you're a dramatic actor, you want dramatic situations because that's where you find yourself,” Foster said. “Those are the stories you want to tell. There's a socially purposive challenge to that. You tell a story a way that people will be better and not worse. You look for dramatic situations that hit you in this very primal place.”

That intensity, however, made supporting actors like Christensen’s job a lot easier. “All I had to do was watch her and empathize with her situation,” she said. “It's hard to ignore that. You can't help it. You just watch her and react.”

The confined set of the airplane offered some challenges to the veteran Foster. “It’s a bit like theater,” she related. “It’s a bit like doing a play where you can’t rely on set pieces to get you in and out of transitions. So you can’t get from one scene and then cut to Big Ben and cut back to something else. You can’t do that in a film like this. Plus, it’s real time so it has to be character transitions that get you in and out. It’s a much more difficult discipline because you can’t resort to the tricks of filmmaking in order to get in and out of scenes and have the film flow properly.”

Sarsgaard had a more visceral reaction to the setup. “It's challenging for me just because I start looking around, I realize there's 500 people on the airplane and there's just that door and that door,” he said. “That's the challenge for me. Body odor and heat, a lot of people who are very bored and anxious sitting around me. I cannot imagine the experience of the people who sat on Row 26, Seat A for three months while we did this movie. Actually at one point during the movie, I looked over at the woman next to me. She was out of frame, but she was sitting right next to me during the shot. They were off camera but they didn't want us to go back and forth moving people. I looked over during the scene, and I saw that she had one of those DVD players. She was watching Panic Room. I was like, ‘Huh ... Okay.’ I totally dropped my line. It was too weird.”

The film relies on the script to maintain its high concept premise for 90 minutes. As a producer and director herself, Foster recognizes the importance of the script, but as an actor she attends only to her role. “The screenplay is everything,” Foster concluded. “Without a strong screenplay, nobody can ever rescue a film. So I spend a lot of time trying to get a screenplay right. In films that I act in, like a film like this, my real responsibility is just to my character. So I spend a lot of time getting my script right in terms of the character. I can’t control the rest of the movie because I’m not the producer or the writer or the director, but I do spend a lot of time working on the script just for the character so that it does what it’s supposed to do.”

Flightplan opens September 23.