Peril at great heights is the basis for an increasing number of action movies and thrillers, with the latest being Claudio Fäh’s newly released Turbulence. Set during a married couple’s attempted adventure in a hot air balloon in the Italian Dolomites, what should be a recreational trip to the clouds becomes a fight for survival when the balloon’s navigational tools are damaged, leaving the four passengers adrift thousands of feet off the ground. The term “turbulence” might be more recognizable as an inconvenience of commercial air travel for most, but in Turbulence, it is both the thematic backstory of the love triangle unfolding in the hot air balloon, and the all-too-real gravitational force that they must battle in order to make it down in one piece.
Today, we speak to director Claudio Fäh on the making of Turbulence and the challenges of crafting such a suspense-filled movie in a single location thousands of feet off the ground.
Fortress of Solitude: How did you come aboard Turbulence as the movie’s director?
Claudio Fäh: So, it was a very easy process. It was just a phone call from Andy Mason, who I made this previous movie with, No Way Up, and we had such a great time on No Way Up together. He said, “You know, we were at the bottom of the ocean on this one. how about we go high up in the air on the next one?” So, he came up with this idea of placing a movie pretty much the entirety of the movie on a hot air balloon, and I said, “Andy, you’re crazy, I love you, I’m in!”
What were some of the logistical challenges of filming the movie with its setting in an adrift air balloon with four people?
Yeah, yeah, certainly logistical challenges were aplenty in this one, because naturally you can’t, with a whole film crew, go up in the air, let alone in a hot air balloon that is very difficult to predict where it exactly goes and where it lands and stuff. So, we knew that this movie needed quite a bit of trickery. So, we did go into the Dolomites with a helicopter, shot 360-degree high-res, background plates of the path that the balloon flies of the whole journey going close to cliffs and so on and so forth, which, by the way, was really stunning. It was absolutely amazing to do, eye-popping. And then we took all this footage, and shot the rest of the movie, the foreground of the movie, with the actors against blue screen on a soundstage in London, but that allowed us to look every which way at every given time, so that freed up the camera to, you know, shoot the actors the way that you would normally want to shoot actors, and then fill in the background after the fact.
What were some of the challenges in maintaining the suspenseful nature of the premise of Turbulence with the movie’s relatively single location setting?
Yeah, exactly, so it’s sort of, it’s interesting if you think about it, it’s very much a story that is about the characters, and it’s all about, you know, peeling away the layers of lies that they hold, against each other, and finding out who they are to each other in truth. So, making that as intriguing as possible, I think, was the goal. It’s almost like, this needs to work without any of the mountains. This needs to work as a stage play. And then, of course, having these four exceptional actors, and being lucky to work with the four of them, made this job you know, much easier than it seems to be on the face of it, because they came to fill in their parts with life, and with three-dimensionality, and layers and depth, so that was sort of the approach. But yeah, it’s 70 minutes, you can’t look away, and you had to come up with cool ideas to hopefully engage the audience throughout.
What was your favorite memory or experience from the making of Turbulence?
My favorite one? I know there’s so many, there’s so many, I mean, oh my God! I wish I had a specific… well, it’s a spoiler, I can’t say that. It’s the end. Oh, my God, how the one person gets his or her comeuppance at the end was the favorite moment, and people actually looked at me and said, “Are you really gonna do that to the other actor-actress?” And I said, “Yes!” And that actor-actress was very much on board doing that, and it’s a glorious moment, and I love it. I don’t know, this is an answer because I couldn’t say anything, but yeah, there you go!
People will have to see the movie to know your favorite scene in that case! So, Turbulence has been marketed and somewhat presented as a kind of spiritual cousin or follow-up to 2022’s Fall. Was that your intention with the making of Turbulence, and did Fall influence the movie in any major way?
Well, I mean, I see the comparison. It’s about vertigo, and what Steven Soderbergh calls “box movies”, where you’re inside a box and you don’t leave the box for the running time of the movie. So that’s probably the comparison. And, and then, you know, this idea of, yeah, people falling to their death being something that is not, you know, pleasant! And the visual, you know, splendor of it all.
What would be another survival story premise you’d like to make into a movie after Turbulence?
Oh, that’s a question for Andy Mason, he comes up with those things. I just go, “Andy, this is impossible, but okay, let’s figure it out.” He probably could answer that better than I can.
So, what other projects do you have coming up after Turbulence?
So. I do have a thriller, a whodunit, that actually has people just on the ground. But it’s a really great script that Peter Iiliff wrote, who was executive producer and a great writer in his own right. And, it’s sort of a Rashomon tale of murder that’s being told from four different perspectives, and we don’t know until the very end which one is the right one, or if none of them is the right one, and it’s a very exciting thriller!
RELATED: Turbulence Movie Review – Takes To The Skies In A Routine But Decent Airborne Riff On Fall
Turbulence is now playing in select theaters and is available on VOD platforms.
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