Tagline: If you want to live, you will obey.
At the National Military Command Center at the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Geoff Callister is at the center of a critical decision: whether to bomb an important target, a wanted Afghan terrorist. Without total confirmation of his identity, the President orders the attack to proceed at what appears to be a funeral. The bombing triggers a rise in terrorist animosity against the U.S. from overseas, as well as a possible threat from within…
In Chicago, a 23-year-old slacker named Jerry Shaw (Shia LaBeouf), an employee at the local Copy Cabana shop, is suddenly called home – his identical twin brother, Ethan, an Air Force public relations officer and pride of the family, has been killed in a car accident. Meanwhile, single mom Rachel Holloman is sending her 8-year-old son, Sam, off to Washington, to play trumpet with his school band at the Kennedy Center – their first separation. During a night out with the girls, she receives an odd call on her cell phone: a strange woman telling Rachel to follow her instructions or Sam – now visible on a wall of TV screens across the street – will die.
Upon his return to Chicago, Jerry finds his normally empty bank account now contains $750,000, and his sparsely furnished apartment is crammed with do-it-yourself terrorist supplies. He, too, receives a call from the same woman, warning him to run or he’ll be arrested. Before he can leave, he is apprehended. In an FBI interrogation room, Agent Thomas Morgan questions the young man, who insists he has been framed. When he is left alone in an office, Jerry is once again contacted by the mysterious woman, who frees him by swinging a nearby construction crane to crash through the window and instructs him to jump.
He is led by the woman to a Porsche Cayenne – where Rachel, whom he has never met, is waiting for him. Suspicious of each other from the start, they soon realize they are both at the mercy of this strangely disembodied voice, who is tracking their every move, and has seemingly limitless control over their fates.
About the Production
The idea for “Eagle Eye” was hatched several years ago from the mind of executive producer Steven Spielberg. “Steven’s initial concept focused on the idea that technology is everywhere,” says co-producer Pete Chiarelli. “It’s all around us – what would happen if it turned against you? What if the technology that surrounds us, that we love and depend on, suddenly was used on us in ways that could cause harm and was completely out of our control?”
“Steven always wanted people to walk out of the theater and turn off their cell phones and BlackBerrys, because they were so scared,” writer/producer Alex Kurtzman recalls – much in the way audiences feared swimming in the ocean after they saw Spielberg’s summer blockbuster “Jaws” in 1975.
The story was in development for several years, because at the time Spielberg first conceived the idea, “he thought that it would seem too much like science fiction,” Kurtzman adds. “It would have stretched credibility because the technology wasn’t yet as integrated into our society as it is today.”
In early 2006, Spielberg brought the project to Kurtzman and his writing partner, Robert Orci, the creative team behind “Mission: Impossible III,” the upcoming “Star Trek” and another Spielberg project, “Transformers” and its upcoming sequel, “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.”
“The trick now was figuring out a way into the story,” says Kurtzman, “making a film that would be more than simply an action picture with chase scenes and explosions. Ultimately, it was about bringing a human perspective to the whole story.”
The story is about two strangers who are thrown together, framed for crimes they didn’t commit, who are fighting for their lives while trying to prove their innocence. Its non-stop suspense is driven like a speeding locomotive as Jerry and Rachel become the pawns of a faceless enemy who seems to have limitless power to manipulate everything they do.
Such an approach, Kurtzman notes, “makes the film timeless, because the characters could be in any time period, and the audience can relate to them no matter when or where they’re from. They’re just ordinary people thrown into a totally extraordinary circumstance way beyond their control, forced to do things they don’t understand and have to find out why they have been chosen as the movie goes along – which the audience does along with them.”
“Eagle Eye” marks Kurtzman’s and Orci’s first foray into producing. “It’s been amazing to see this story evolve from an idea Steven brought to us two years ago. Watching the expanding scope of this movie has been tremendous.”
The film’s star, Shia LaBeouf, expresses similar feelings. “I’ve never been this close to the formation of an entire project. The writing and rewriting is all very new to me. It’s like raising a puppy. There’s a lot of pride attached, especially when you’re working with friends and everyone’s rooting for each other.”
While Spielberg originally intended to direct the film himself, he eventually changed course to focus on other projects, especially the large-scale action adventure “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.”
Meanwhile, director D.J. Caruso was shooting his 2007 hit, “Disturbia,” for Spielberg’s DreamWorks SKG. “I showed him the rough cut of `Disturbia,’ and he said, `You know, we have something for you.’ I read the script, and I could see why, when he initially thought of the idea, it was way ahead of its time. I loved it immediately.”
For many young directors, shooting a film with a master like Spielberg looking over your shoulder might seem a little intimidating. “There’s always the added pressure of knowing this was a story Steven had gestating up in his brain for several years,” Caruso notes. “But he really made me feel at ease. He told me it was important that a filmmaker make every project his own. He said `I want you to take this idea and make it yours.’ He trusted me to go in there and do it and make it my own, and still honor his story. I’ve never enjoyed a more fruitful collaboration.”
With a story as complex as “Eagle Eye,” it was important to have a director who could bring balance to a film that featured not only intense action, but rich characters. “D.J. brings an incredible sense of history to a project like this,” notes executive producer Edward L. McDonnell. “He’s worked in a variety of genres already. This is more than just a character piece, or just an action piece, it has complexity in the storytelling. His ability to streamline a story for us, to make it understandable and accessible, comes from his previous experience.”
“D.J. has shot so much over his life as a director as he came up through the ranks,” adds co-producer Chiarelli. “It’s great for us, because we got to take advantage of somebody who had so much experience who knew what he was doing and made the movie look great, made the action huge, but still managed to pull amazing performances out of the actors.”
Cast and Characters
Shia LaBeouf plays Jerry Shaw, the less accomplished half of a set of identical twins. “When we first meet him, he’s in the thick of what his life has become,” LaBeouf explains. “He’s an underachiever in a family of seeming overachievers. His twin brother was this overachieving perfectionist, who had a real easy way with life and was extremely bright, efficient, and dependable and secure – everything Jerry is not.”
Jerry had, much to the chagrin of his demanding father, left Stanford to travel and is, at present, working at a low-end copy store. “He’s the sort of guy who exercises his freedom and doesn’t necessarily believe that you need to go to college and do what everyone in society says you need to do,” notes Caruso. “He’s exploring himself right now and trying to learn what he wants to do with his life – he’s the complete opposite of his twin brother.”
An average guy, Jerry is suddenly forced to develop a great deal of character – and fast.“He’s forced to confront some things in his life over the course of the movie – which takes place over about a day and a half – that makes him grow from being a kid to being a man,” says Chiarelli.
The filmmakers certainly felt the character and their star shared such everyman qualities. “At the time D.J. first mentioned the project to me, we were in Germany doing promotions for `Disturbia,’” recalls LaBeouf, who was about to tackle two other Spielberg projects – “Transformers” and “Indiana Jones.” The role is LaBeouf’s first truly adult portrayal.
“It’s been great to see his progression,” Caruso says. “He was 19 when we started `Disturbia,’ and now he’s 21. I look at that film, then I look at `Transformers,’ and now `Eagle Eye,’ and I realize they were all only a year or so apart in his life, but he looks five or six years older. I have him playing a 23-year-old and here he is, a mature young man who, at certain times in the movie has discussions with a young mother in her early 30s about what she should do and how important life is. I think that’s amazing for someone like Shia, who a year ago was playing a teenager. He is definitely mature beyond his years.”
“I think this is a defining role for Shia,” adds producer Patrick Crowley. “It marks his emergence as a leading man.”
LaBeouf also won over his co-star. “I love Shia,” says Michelle Monaghan “He’s just a dynamite actor and so passionate about his work; I respect him deeply and we had a lot of fun together.”
Of course, having an actor and director who had already worked together was an added benefit. “They have a shorthand,” says Chiarelli. “They’re like an old married couple. They’ll just look at each other, like, `I want a take that’s more like. . . .,’ and Shia would nod, like, `Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know.’ Nobody else quite understood them in the same way.”
Adds LaBeouf, “We’d communicate with a finger point or a hand movement, and then we’d be back to the scene again.”
Jerry’s counterpart, Rachel, is a single mom with an ex-husband who spends some time with his son, but has left all of the real responsibilities of parenting to Rachel. “She’s just trying to get through her day-to-day life with her son while working hard,” Monaghan explains.
Rachel sends her eight-year-old son, Sam, off on a trip to Washington, and finally has a day off, which includes a night out with the girls at a bar. But the day off turns into the worst day off ever, notes Monaghan. “She steps out of the bar to take a phone call she thinks is from her son but the voice on the other end is a woman, who asks `What would you do to save your son’s life?’ I obviously have no idea what she’s talking about, and am completely bewildered.”
Then she is instructed to look up at the TV monitors in a store across the street, and sees live surveillance footage of Sam on the train. “The idea of seeing your child on a train, where you thought he was safe and you suddenly realize he’s not, is just chilling,” the actress says.
The producers were looking for an actress who could be both sweet and tough, as needed, and Monaghan fit the bill. “We had worked with her on `Mission: Impossible III,’ and we just found that she had all the qualities that we needed Rachel to be,” says Kurtzman. “We also had a sense of what her voice was like, which helped us a lot. Plus, she was very honest about the things that she liked and what she wanted to adjust, something we find invaluable when we want to tailor the voice precisely to the performer.”
Rachel’s resolve to do what it takes to protect Sam from disaster puts her in spots which, like the Secretary of Defense (Michael Chiklis) in the film’s opening, require her to choose between two terrible options. “It’s a very helpless situation for her,” Caruso comments, adding, “I wouldn’t mess with a mother who has been separated from her kid.”
When Jerry and Rachel meet for the first time, they immediately think the other is the source of their troubles and begin battling for their freedom. “It’s a story about people who bring certain assumptions into a situation,” says Kurtzman. “But they’re not necessarily right about what they perceive.”
They quickly realize they are both victims in a larger scenario over which they have no control, and that if they are to survive, must learn to trust one another. “It becomes apparent that the only people they can rely on to get them out of the trouble they’re in is each other,” says Crowley. “And there’s this kind of dance as they figure out how much to trust the other.”
Interestingly, their relationship is not a romantic one. “If this was an `80s action movie, of course, they’d sleep together in the middle of the movie, and bullets would be flying,” jokes Caruso. “But their relationship is based on the mutual respect they come to have for one another. It wasn’t a conscious choice to make it a non-romantic film. I wanted the story to unfold naturally.”
“The beautiful thing about it is that it’s not all answered here,” adds LaBeouf. “It was more powerful to be sweet than it was to be overtly sexual, which would have cheapened it. It would have been the average film. Sometimes lovers aren’t allowed to be together. That happens in life, but you rarely see it in film.” And besides, he adds, with all the action going on – to quote another Spielberg action picture – “There’s no time for romance.”
The mysterious woman’s voice whose direction Jerry and Rachel must follow or face the consequences is as confounding as her commands. “We have no idea why we’re being told to do these things, although we do know that she has significant power over us, and that we are in danger, and that people we love are also in danger if we don’t adhere to her requests,” Monaghan explains.
The voice continues to request bizarre, incredible – and sometimes diabolical – behavior from Jerry and Rachel. “Where it’s coming from, we have no idea. She seems to be in every phone, car, airport screen – anything you could possibly imagine, she’s plugged into.”
The voice apparently has control over everything around them – from traffic signals that send pursuing police crashing into each other, to cranes, boats, subway cars – you name it. “Jerry doesn’t know exactly why he’s following this voice on the phone,” says Chiarelli. “He just knows that this voice is a very powerful one because it has somehow jacked into all the technology around us and is able to control things it shouldn’t be able to control.”
“There is a degree of gameplay,” adds Kurtzman. “Whoever the person is behind this mystery, she is controlling them without telling them anything other than exactly what they need to know at any given moment. So, as characters, they’re required to take huge leaps of faith. They have no idea what’s going to happen next.”
One thing they do know is that they are being pursued – doggedly – by an FBI agent named Thomas Morgan (Billy Bob Thornton). Thornton was clear that his character had to walk a fine line. “I’m a good guy, yet the audience is going to view me as a bad guy initially because I’m pursuing Jerry and Rachel,” says the actor. “You really have to tow the line as an actor. You have to be a guy who’s just doing his job.”
“Billy Bob is one of the most dynamic, unusual, cool guys I’ve ever met in my life,” says Caruso. “He comes to work in the morning, still a little bit groggy – he’s a night guy, a musician – and literally, by the time the makeup gets on, he comes out ready to roll. He’s also one of the funniest men I’ve ever met.”
Thornton brings a Texan sensibility to Morgan, something which fit the agent perfectly. “He brings all the qualities of being from the South, which you hear and feel in his performance when you listen to his language,” says Crowley.
The writers, in fact, took full advantage of Thornton’s Southern sensibilities, spending time with the actor to get a full gauge of the character. “He’s got a story for everything,” notes Kurtzman. “You get through a couple of sentences, and he says, `You know, that reminds me of…’ and he starts talking about some amazing experience. The more time you spend with an actor, the better it is for the filmmaker, because there is something about who they are that should saturate into the character they’re playing.”
Thornton’s enjoyable knack for ad libs was used to full advantage. “He’s so inventive, it’s never the same. It’s always a different take,” says LaBeouf. “He’s very aware and very spontaneous. The camera is able to pick up things that I can’t see sitting next to him.”
Supporting Morgan’s search – though sometimes it doesn’t appear that way – is Air Force Office of Special Investigation (OSI) Special Agent Zoe Perez, played by Rosario Dawson, who becomes involved because of Ethan, Jerry’s deceased brother, who was associated with the Air Force. “She’s a younger agent who nobody quite takes seriously,” says Chiarelli. “She has to really fight for respect from everybody, from the FBI, from people in the Air Force, in the Pentagon. So we needed somebody who is a fighter.”
She and Morgan eventually find they must cooperate with each other in uncovering the truth behind Ethan Shaw’s death. “Morgan is a guy who is immediately dismissive of Zoe,” says Kurtzman. “But she gets his attention very quickly. And, like Jerry and Rachel, they have to find a way to start trusting each other. Finding an actress who can hold her own against Billy Bob is a rare commodity.”
“Rosario is a terrific actor,” says Thornton who explains that in order to reflect the interagency competition, their challenge was to create an adversarial male-female relationship along the lines of the old Spencer Tracy-Katharine Hepburn movies. The on-screen antagonism between the Arkansas native and the New York City-born Dawson belied an off-screen connection between the two actors. “She’s a New Yorker,” explains Thornton, “but she lived in Austin. So she’s a Texas girl, too.” Dawson’s mother won Thornton over by bringing home-cooked Southern meals to the set. “Her mom’s a great cook and she understands that guys from the South like things.”
Secretary of Defense Geoff Callister is played by Michael Chiklis, best known to audiences as rogue cop Vic Mackey on FX’s “The Shield.” “Callister is described as a man with a look of permanent burden on his face,” Chiklis says. “I remember growing up, with every single President, Secretary of State or other cabinet member, seeing before and after pictures of them, and every single one of them went from relatively fresh and healthy looking to gray and aged from what they’d learned and the weight of the office on them. So to play a Secretary of Defense who bears the weight of the world in his eyes was very, very interesting to me.”
“Chiklis is just wonderful,” says Kurtzman. “He’s this incredible tough guy, but even with his character on `The Shield,’ you can see that he has such soul. And we knew that we would need that with a character like Callister. Michael brought such humanity to the part; we needed somebody who could play that kind of arc, not a one-note performance.”
Rounding out the cast were Ethan Embry as FBI Agent Grant and Anthony Mackie as Major Bowman. “Ethan’s fantastic,” says Caruso. “Grant is an underling agent to Morgan in the FBI. He’s a guy who keeps providing the information and keeps the movie going forward. But Ethan gave Grant this wonderful life and character trait, because he’s a guy who’s a little bit nervous around his boss; he knows his boss is a hothead.”
Mackie’s Bowman is an Army intelligence officer – one of a handful of “minutemen” whose service – and previous working relationship with Jerry’s brother, Ethan – may hold the key to the mystery of what’s happening to Jerry and Rachel. The actor enjoyed his scenes with his old friend, Dawson, but was particularly tickled at working with Chiklis. “The funny thing about `Chick’ is that on his show, his character’s name is Mackey, so it’s cool to finally work with him,” he laughs.
Did Somebody Say “Action?”
From the start, the filmmakers were intent on making a different kind of action film. As Kurtzman points out “the audience can only be as invested in the action sequences as they are in the people who are in danger. What you rarely see in action movies is time carved out for character. If you’re not somehow in love with the characters you’re watching, you don’t really care if their lives are in danger. These two people are very normal, very down to earth. And that’s something different from your generic action movie.”
“D.J. really cares about the beats,” says LaBeouf. “And that’s rare in action films. Usually the emotion comes secondary when you have big set pieces, because that’s not what the director feels is going to sell the movie or makes for a good trailer moment. But D.J. knows the only way the action is going to work is if you feel for the characters and their situation.”
Which is not to imply that audiences won’t be getting a gigantic bang for their buck. “The first hour is like an incredible video game,” says Caruso. “Every corner you turn, you don’t really know what’s going to happen.” Adds veteran stunt coordinator Gregg Smrz, “It starts out with a bang and never slows down.”
Caruso set out to fill the film with spectacular “set pieces” – mind-blowing stunt sequences that keep audiences on the edge of their seats. As much as possible, the filmmakers went for the real McCoy, avoiding computer-generated imagery that might otherwise take the audience out of the visceral experience of the scene.
“I wanted the action to be real, because I’m a connoisseur of the old `70s car chases, with just plain real action,” says Caruso. “When cars crash and things blow up, I like it when it really happens and you can photograph it. I wanted to stay away from digital technology as much as I could. So when that crane comes through that building, it’s a practical crane coming through a set we built.”
Classic car chases, as in “The French Connection,” served as models for how to keep the action real. “The thing about those car chases is they never defy the laws of physics,” notes Kurtzman. “You actually feel that when a car is being hit, the people who are in the car are hurting. It feels vivid.”
Surprisingly, doing such scenes “old school” is what helps set the action in “Eagle Eye” apart from other films in the genre. “Today’s audiences compare every set piece with set pieces they’ve seen in other movies,” says veteran action producer Crowley. “So each time you do something spectacular, you raise the bar for those who come after you. I’ve done a lot of car chases. And the way to make a car chase appealing, to make it one of those stand-up-and-cheer moments, is something we spent months and months figuring out.”
The spectacular car chase involves the FBI and the Chicago police who are trying to nab Jerry and Rachel immediately after they meet, while the mysterious voice clears a path for their fast-moving Porsche Cayenne through the streets of Chicago, while their pursuers find nothing but obstacles and mayhem. The massive sequence was filmed over several weeks with a crew of 100, with downtown Los Angeles ably subbing in for Chicago.
The sequence was carefully planned, storyboarded and executed by director Caruso along with Brian and Gregg Smrz, part of a family of stunt men with three decades of experience working in film. Together they have over three hundred credits on their resume, including “Jurassic Park,” “Minority Report,” “X-Men 2,” “Live Free or Die Hard,” “Signs,” “Unbreakable,” “Superman Returns,” “Fantastic Four,” “Mission: Impossible II,” and “Transformers.” For “Eagle Eye,” Brian Smrz was enlisted as the film’s second unit director and stunt coordinator, responsible for crashing cranes, cars and cargo containers, as well as the film’s punishing car chase, while his brother Gregg worked with the main unit.
For the chase scene, Gregg Smrz estimates the production went through 38 cars. “We did four cannon rolls, two sidewinders, a bunch of hits everywhere. Every night, it was no less than five or ten cars getting into a pileup.”
Caruso also had to shoot some second unit work himself. “A lot of our action involves our characters having to be involved in the second unit shoot,” he explains. “So not only did I get to crash or flip cars, but I got to take the actors and put them in those situations.”
Both the film’s stars performed most of their own stunts. Driving, diving, jumping with their share of bumps and bruises, the two actors worked closely with the stunt coordinator and his team to ensure everything was safe. “They did 80% of their own stunts,” says Smrz, “and they did a great job.”
In many shots featuring the Porsche, it is indeed Michelle Monaghan at the wheel. “For the part she’s playing, she’s not supposed to be a great driver,” says Smrz, “so she had to be erratic with the Porsche. She did a great job, but I have to be honest with you – I was trembling when she took off!”
“She’s a warrior,” LaBeouf says of his co-star. “I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a woman do stunts like she does. And then she gets up and is all friendly and giggly and goes over and eats a cookie. And I’d be sitting there, my elbow hurting and she’d just turn to me and say, `Why don’t you just man up?’”
LaBeouf himself also took a beating – literally and figuratively – during a fight scene that takes place under the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. and was filmed under the Hall of Records in downtown Los Angeles. “He did 90% of that entire fight,” notes Smrz. “I’m a huge UFC fan – I like all that fight stuff,” says the actor. “For a small, little Jewish kid to come to the set and be a superhero for five minutes – that’s great!”
The two actually relished doing stunt work. In another sequence, the pair is seen falling from their car, which has been hoisted skyward by a crane, and land in a pile of rubbish on a barge. “It was probably 72 feet up, and when they saw the stunt people do the big jump, they were actually disappointed that they were not able to do the stunts themselves,” says Caruso. “So I got them up on the stage and we jumped them out of a car about 22 feet down into an airbag.”
In a scene affectionately known to the crew as “Chutes and Ladders,” Agent Morgan pursues Jerry and Rachel through a parcel-handling facility at the airport, which was actually shot at a DHL plant in Riverside, California. Built more for boxes than bodies, the action unfolds on the three-story system of conveyor belts and chutes that wind through the massive plant. The actors and cameramen crawled along the moving belts and tumbled down the chutes, over and over for four days. “It was pretty difficult going down the big chutes,” says Monaghan. “We came out with a few bruises, but it was also a lot of fun.”
Monaghan finished filming the sequence with one resolution: “I think it’s convinced me to go to stunt school so I can learn how to better pad myself and take a fall and a tumble – and have my husband join me so we can learn to have fake fights and surprise people at dinner parties.”
Like Jerry and Rachel, the production company hit the ground running on day one. While the story unfolds over only a couple of days, it stretches across dozens of locations in several cities and around the world. From the film’s opening sequences, at the National Military Command Center in the Pentagon, with the Secretary of Defense watching a real-time surveillance of suspicious activity in a small village on the border between Iran and Pakistan, to the relentless pursuit of Jerry and Rachel, the making of this fast-paced thriller demanded the most of everyone.
Shooting over 200 scenes, with more than 100 moves in 77 days, put the cast and crew through their paces. As Shia LaBeouf testifies, “It was a hard movie to make – in the best ways,” says the young actor. “It looks hard, with tough locations and we didn’t stop moving for 60 or 70 days. It was a caravan of human beings. There were 120 of us moving all the time.” For co-star Michelle Monaghan, the constant moving helped mirror her character’s story. “It really does keep you on the edge, getting in that car and not really knowing where you’re going every day. Every day felt bigger than the next and that proved to be very, very exciting.”
“It became sort of like an independent road picture,” says Caruso, “because we always spent one or two days in different locations and kept moving, because the characters keep moving. It actually kept the film in perspective.”
Principal photography commenced in rural Kendall County, Illinois, outside of Chicago. The company received special permission, not only to shoot underneath Commonwealth Edison’s huge high-voltage aerial transmission towers, but to shoot the scene – in which Jerry and Rachel meet an unknown man who hands them keys to a van before getting electrocuted before their eyes – with a camera mounted on a helicopter skillfully flying around the towers.
From there, the company moved to Chicago to shoot at more than a dozen locations in the course of ten days: outside Jerry’s apartment building, at the ATM that spews out Jerry’s unexpected rise in fortune, in front of Chicago’s famed “Rock n’ Roll” McDonalds, where Rachel looks up in horror to see the images of her son projected on the restaurant’s wall of monitors, and on Chicago’s elevated mass transit system.
The company shot several scenes on the nation’s third busiest mass transit system with tremendous help and cooperation from the Chicago Transit Authority. Both first and second units also shot several parts of the heart stopping car chase in the city, including the start of the chase with Monaghan behind the wheel of the Porsche Cayenne.
There was no letting up when the company came home to Southern California. The filmmakers artfully used dozens of locations in and around Los Angeles to double for everything from an airport in Indiana to a small village in the Middle East.
Moving from location to location was labor intensive for all concerned. Each location had to be dressed and built in some cases. Production designer Tom Sanders and his team spent four weeks in Riverside, California, some 80 miles northeast of Los Angeles, creating the realistic replica of a desert commune in a remote province of Pakistan where some of the opening sequences for the film take place.
One of the more unusual locations was a scrap yard located on Terminal Island at Los Angeles Harbor. There, the company shot a scene in which Jerry and Rachel weave around 20-foot-high piles of crushed cars and heavy twisted metal as their pursuers crash or get plucked up like insects by giant cranes.
Originally the company was scheduled to shoot at the location for a couple of days. But that changed when Caruso and his team scouted the scrap yard. Caruso saw this location and created the sequence. As location manager Craig Van Gundy explains, “D. J. liked the location so much, he created an entire sequence around it with cinematographer Dariusz Wolski and the stunt and special effects teams.” By the time they were finished, between first and second units, the company shot at the site for 14 nights.
The water truck the company brought to Terminal Island to wet the area down before shooting turned out to be completely unnecessary as the area was hit with a heavy downpour that lasted through the night’s shoot. The storm actually required the company to stop for a short time after a tornado warning was issued for the area just south of the location (the tornado, a highly unusual event for Southern California, touched down a few hours later several miles north of Los Angeles).
Home base for the production was the old Hughes Aircraft plant, in Playa Vista not far from Los Angeles International airport. Two hangars housed an ongoing rotation of over 50 sets including the floor of the House of Representatives and all the interior Pentagon sets. Secretary of Defense Geoffrey Callister’s office and the Pentagon hallways, as well as several other key Pentagon sets, were designed and constructed in the hangars where Hughes built his Spruce Goose, a fact that was remarkable for actor Billy Bob Thornton. “It’s nice when you come to work every day and you think `Wow, look at the history in this place.’”
Keeping in Real
In order to keep audiences along for the ride with Jerry and Rachel in a world where an unknown entity seems to be able to control everything in their lives, the filmmakers stuck to a single mantra: keep it real. “There is a little bit of science fiction at the center of this movie,” explains co-producer Chiarelli, “and the way to sell that idea is to have everything around it be as real as possible. Whether it’s the Pentagon hallway or Capitol Building, we worked really hard to re-create everything as accurately as possible.”
“We were very careful while developing the script to make sure that every event they experienced was somehow possible,” says Kurtzman. “If even one of them felt fake, the whole thing would fall apart.”
With audiences overly familiar with military and criminal investigation through news and procedural television shows, it was paramount to make those aspects as authentic as possible. To assure that the military met audience expectations, the filmmakers enlisted the help of the Pentagon. “It’s very difficult to get the Department of Defense in cooperation,” says producer Ed McDonnell. “But they worked closely with us on the script. They were fully onboard with us on this movie, in order to give it a sense of genuineness and realness that you couldn’t get without their help.” Everything from the semantics of speech, body posture and attitude were kept in check. “D.J. and Shia both relished having the advisers on set on a daily basis.”
Adds LaBeouf, “There was a guy there for everything – monitoring the mannerisms, the way you hold your gun, the way you speak to a certain officer.”
Rosario Dawson actually traveled to the Air Force’s OSI headquarters in Washington, D.C. to learn what her real-life counterparts’ lives were like. “We arranged for her to meet with them to learn about what they do,” explains Air Force technical advisor Vince Aragona. Dawson also spoke with a female agent similar to her own character at L.A. Air Force Base. “That person actually ended up as an extra in the movie,” appearing as Dawson’s sidekick in some scenes. Other active duty military also appear in the film as extras. “When you get active duty people in here wearing uniform,” Aragona says, “they already know how to walk, how to carry themselves, how to wear the uniforms properly. They’re active duty, they know what they’re doing. Plus, they love doing it.”
Technical assistance for the criminal investigation side came in the form of adviser Tom Knowles, a recently retired 22-year veteran of the FBI. Among other tasks, Knowles worked with Thornton and Ethan Embry, and reviewed the script for authenticity. “They asked me to help, for example, on a `crime scene,’ to help the actors with the kinds of things they should be focusing on, what evidence is critical and what is not – things of that sort,” he explains. In one crime scene, a body wearing a small earpiece is found, surrounded by footprints. “They were initially focusing on the footprints,” Knowles says. “Footprints are good as evidence. But microphones or anything that’s manmade has a manufacturing code, information that can be traced back to the manufacturer or who it was sold to. That can lead you to a potential suspect.”
One of Knowles’ own commendation plaques even ended up as set decoration on the walls of Agent Thomas Morgan’s office. “He had the same first name as Morgan,” says Carr. “So if you’re looking at it real quickly, it could have been Thomas Morgan’s stuff.”
Knowles himself appears in one scene, doing one of the things he does best – driving like a cop. “You know, one of those high-paced stops that anyone in law enforcement’s done a thousand times. I was just trying not to wreck their cars,” he says, adding, “I have had a reputation for wrecking a few government vehicles here and there in my career.”
The task of creating a credible world for the story fell to production designer Tom Sanders and his team. “We wanted everything to be as realistic as possible,” says Sanders. Even with over 90 different sets and an expedited production schedule, Sanders, who has received numerous awards for his work on films like “Saving Private Ryan,” “Braveheart” and “Dracula,” was excited to meet the particular challenges of “Eagle Eye.” It was a nice change of pace: “I’ve done a lot of period pieces, so it was fun too, to jump into the present day.”
To reproduce environments such as the Floor of the House of Representatives in the U.S. Capitol for a scene in which the President is to deliver the State of the Union address – an event familiar to American audiences – the filmmakers took several trips to Washington for research. Built nearly to scale on a soundstage by Sanders and his team, the set was furnished with enough details to impress even the most seasoned critics. “Frankly, the research that’s been done prior to my even getting here has been outstanding and phenomenal,” says Congressional technical consultant Bryn Forhan. “I think they’ve done 110%.”
Not only did set decorator Carr reproduce the silver “mace” – a rarelyseen silver staff carried by the House Sergeant-at-Arms when introducing the President – but also a famous portrait of French General Lafayette, the first foreign statesperson to speak in the House, which hangs in the chamber. “I found a wonderful portrait artist named Marian Westall, who did quite a bit of research about Lafayette and found portraits of him,” Carr explains.
Some government facilities were off-limits for research visits. The National Military Command Center had to be designed and created purely from imagination. “We really don’t know exactly what it looks like.” says Carr. “We had no visual reference for that. You can imagine that it’s a space with people working, with a lot of monitors and desks. But no one was allowed to visit there, so that’s a set we had to take some artistic license with – it was an educated guess.”
With the Department of Defense’s cooperation, the production had the rare opportunity to actually film at the Pentagon, landing a Blackhawk helicopter on the lawn outside the building. The shoot required the cooperation of several departments, says Vince Ogilvie, Deputy Special Assistant for Entertainment Media at the D.O.D. “We’ve filmed several aerial scenes at the Pentagon, and that of course entails bringing together the Department of Transportation, Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense, in order to make those aerial scenes take place in a very restrictive and specialized air corridor in our nation’s capital.”
The impact of the experience was not lost on actor Michael Chiklis. “Being able to actually fly into the Pentagon on a Blackhawk helicopter and land on the front lawn really fascinated me,” he says. “There’s nothing else like being able see that space and go into some of the places where civilians don’t get to go and feel some of that weight officials like the Secretary of Defense feel. It’s a terrific thing for an actor to be able to do.”
In addition to overseeing the relationship between the production and the D.O.D, Ogilvie made use of his 28 years of military service to help Chiklis shape a credible character. “He has combined characteristics of all four Secretaries of Defense I have personally worked for into his portrayal of Secretary of Defense Geoff Callister,” says Ogilvie.
Big Brother Is Watching
It’s the end of your workday. You log off your computer and the network lets your boss know exactly how much progress you’ve made on that report that’s due on Friday. Driving home, you receive a message on your PDA from your “smart” house: you need milk. The GPS system in your car tells you the best place to get it. Your son calls and says he’s having dinner at his friend’s house and you know where he is because the GPS device on the family car tells you. You remind him to take his asthma medication thanks to a message from your family’s computerized personal health record, which also tells you it’s time to schedule your next check-up. It’s not the future any more.
Our days are filled with a vast array of technological conveniences from cell phones to global positioning systems, ATMs, computers, home security units, CCTV, traffic cams, magnetic strips on credit cards, buyers’ clubs, IDs and licenses, created to make our lives easier and safer. Computers have simplified the organization and control of information, communication, transportation, military hardware, financial systems and power grids – the things that form the backbone of our daily existence. “These are all things we have a lot invested in,” says Shia LaBeouf, “they were built to make our lives easier.”
“However,” as LaBeouf points out, “not many people stop to think about how it all works.” Everyday, virtually unnoticed, our world is digitally recorded and stored: our image, name, social security number, shopping preferences, where we go in this world and the virtual world. Who we are, our likes, our dislikes, our secrets, what we do and what we don’t do, is all part of a new digital landscape. Our faces, our eyes, our voices, our gaits are all capable of being measured, digitized, recorded and stored for tracking. And as computer power and storage capacity increases, so does the possibility to control it all.
“Everything that we’re doing in this movie,” says Kurtzman, “in one way or another reflects the world we live in.”
The question the film asks is: What if…? What if someone discovered the means to access and utilize all that information, all that technology? What if it was used against you?
The premise at the center of this nightmare scenario of innocent people framed and hunted is certainly closer than it was when the idea first came to Spielberg. In the years since he conceived the idea for the film, technology has grown exponentially. A world where you are watched, your movements tracked, recorded and filed, has moved from science fiction to reality. “What’s incredible about this,” explains LaBeouf, “is the fact that Steven Spielberg had the foresight to see this happening almost ten years ago.”
As Kurtzman points out, innovation is accelerating so quickly that in the time he and producer Roberto Orci have been working on the screenplay the premise has moved much closer to reality. “What Steven told us was that at the time he conceived of the idea it would have been science fiction,” says Kurtzman, “it would’ve stretched beyond plausibility. And what’s really exciting about doing it now is that it isn’t sci-fi anymore. Technology is changing so rapidly, it’s actually changed in our favor over the course of the last two years. Because every morning we wake up, everything becomes more and more possible.”
What is most terrifying about whoever is controlling Jerry and Rachel is their ability to orchestrate the manipulation of a sea of seemingly benign technologies. Monaghan’s interest in the project was piqued by this frightening prospect of everyday technology used as a weapon. “It takes care of us and we depend on it so much,” she says. “The idea of it actually turning on us, having it used against us, I found that really terrifying – and that’s one of the things that really intrigued me when I read the script.”
During his interrogation, Jerry is sprung from an FBI office by a giant crane arm that comes crashing through a window. Rachel watches as the video monitors at McDonalds turn into a live-feed from a moving train of her son. A voice on the phone tells them exactly what to do next or they will suffer dire consequences. Jerry and Rachel are pawns in this new digital landscape.
“All we know is there’s a very powerful voice,” says LaBeouf, “it’s in every car, airport screen, anything you could possibly imagine that’s plugged in. We really have no idea why we’re being told to do these things. We only know that the voice has a significant amount of power and that we, and the people we love, are in danger if we don’t adhere to its demands. We have no idea where it’s coming from, all we know is that it’s got tabs on us from every direction and there’s no way of escaping it.”
Production notes provided by DreamWorks Pictures.
Eagle Eye
Starring: Shia LaBeouf, Michellle Monaghan, Rosario Dawson, Billy Bob Thornton, Michael Chiklis, Anthony Azizi, Anthony Mackie
Directed by: D.J. Caruso
Screenplay by: Hillary Seitz
Release: September 26, 2008
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for intense sequences of action and violence, and for language.
Studio: DreamWorks Pictures
Box Office Totals
Domestic: $101,440,743 (57.0%)
Foreign: $76,625,826 (43.0%)
Total: $178,066,569 (Worldwide)