“Amelia is a love story and an action-adventure for the whole family, about a young woman who broke the boundaries and gave a lot to many different people,” says Nair. “I wanted the film to be a living, pulsating portrait of this woman who dared to dream of things that no one had ever done before. Amelia lived life as fully as possible and didn’t put a lid on her emotions or her ambitions. She left behind a legend that I hope will continue to fuel a passion in people to accept no limits.”
The most vivid and adventuresome period in Earhart’s life – from her sudden exposure to global fame in 1928 to her shocking disappearance mid-flight less than ten years later – comes alive on the screen thanks largely to the dogged passion of Avalon Pictures CEO (and the pioneering co-founder of the technology company, Gateway, Inc.) Ted Waitt. An aviation and exploration aficionado in his own right, Waitt had long been fascinated by Amelia’s story.
“Ever since I was a little kid, I was fascinated with Amelia’s disappearance. As I began reading about her, I became even more fascinated with her life than her disappearance,” explains Waitt. “Hers is an incredible story of courage and she was a real pioneer for women as well as aviation.” He continues: “Everyone today knows about Amelia’s disappearance, but very few people understand her life. I thought her tale could be an inspiration, as well as very entertaining. She still ranks as one of the 10 most famous Americans of all time, and people are naturally interested in her – yet not many know her real story.”
Avalon purchased two seminal biographies of Earhart: Susan Butler’s East To The Dawn, which explores little-known aspects of Earhart’s life, including her friendship with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and became the first book to document a secret affair with the aviator and businessman Gene Vidal; and Mary Lovell’s The Sound of Wings, which focuses on Amelia’s intricate relationship with her publicist husband and the intense promotional machinery that surrounded her. “I read all the biographies of Amelia — and Sue Butler’s was incredibly well researched and well written. Mary Lovell’s book was great as well,” comments Waitt.
Waitt also brought in Elgen M. Long, co-author with Marie K. Long of Amelia Earhart: Mystery Solved, as a consultant. Long is an expert on the flight logs that reveal, moment by moment, what happened on Amelia’s final flight from New Guinea en route to Howland Island – as what Long calls “multiple failures of navigation and communication” put her plane in insurmountable peril.
Using these heavily-researched sources as the backbone of their story, two award-winning writers — Academy Award nominee Anna Hamilton Phelan (GORILLAS IN THE MIST) and Academy Award winner Ron Bass (RAIN MAN) – were brought in to forge a screenplay that hinges on authentic, documented history, yet soars beyond the facts to get to the heart of the woman beating. After an intensive examination of her life and times, Phelan and Bass emerged with a portrait of an Amelia so in love with what she saw and felt in the sky that it influenced her every move on earth. Compressing ten years into a couple of hours, Phelan and Bass reveal the many faces of Amelia – businesswoman, daredevil, fashion icon, promoter of women’s rights, wife, lover, die-hard individualist – but most of all as a woman whose palpable humanity is just as moving as her record-setting feats.
What especially struck Mira Nair in reading the screenplay was the idea that Amelia was, in many ways, America’s first true modern celebrity. She was not merely famous but so internationally idolized that her very name and image became a money-making machine. This fame granted her influence that she never imagined and, ultimately, she learned to use it to advance both women’s rights and the age of aviation.
“No matter how you come at it, Amelia’s story is a fascinating tale of mystery and tragedy,” says Nair. “But what intrigued me about the screenplay for AMELIA is seeing her as the first real American icon that also became a brand name. Here was a woman who loved just one thing – flying – but because that was so revolutionary in her time, she came to stand for all kinds of other things including women’s rights and felt a responsibility to be something more to people. Amelia tried to reconcile what she needed to do for money and society against what she felt she had to do to be herself. That’s a game that modern women are still playing.”
The director of such culturally and emotionally rich films as SALAAM BOMBAY!, MONSOON WEDDING, VANITY FAIR and THE NAMESAKE, Nair was born in India and lived in Africa before building her distinctive Hollywood career as one of a handful of woman directors at the forefront of cinema today. Nair fell in love with the forward-thinking American pilot and her fearless vision of life as she read the AMELIA screenplay. Although Nair grew up in an utterly different time and place, she instantly related to Amelia’s strength, optimism and hunger to get things done — on a deeply personal level. “I was born in a small town in India,” the director notes, “and Amelia was from a small-town in Kansas. I felt a great sense of affinity for her dreams to experience the bigger world around her. Those were my dreams, too.”
Nair liked that the script’s portrait was honest, exposing Amelia’s human flaws along with her zeal and bravery. She continues: “The way Amelia trained herself to overcome fear and to go after the impossible is a lesson that I think we all aspire to. And yet I was drawn to a portrait of her that went beyond the iconic, that looks at her quirkiness, her need for love, her capacity to make mistakes and even to be so brave as to be reckless.”
The screenplay spurred Nair to dive into her own research, screening hours of newsreels and documentaries, reading Amelia’s diaries and documentation of her life collected over the years. “The more I learned about her, the more I was struck by the kind of sweet humility Amelia maintained through it all,” she says. “I think humility and passion make such a lovely combination and is so rarely seen. That really interested me as a filmmaker.”
Finally, Nair was attracted, like Amelia herself, to exploring the lure of flight in the thrilling early days of aviation – when human beings first began to attain a vast freedom over the landscape that only birds previously had known. “I saw in Amelia’s tale someone who is ecstatic in the sky, but also very earth bound,” comments Nair. “She loved nature, and believed in its power, so it’s especially moving that, ultimately, it was the ocean or the skies that swallowed her.”
The screenplay also introduced Nair to the two dashing, fascinating men who grew closest to Amelia: her savvy business partner and eventual husband, George Putnam; and the accomplished pilot and pioneer of the American airline industry, Gene Vidal.
Nair found herself compelled by both men. “George was the first person in this country to create what is now known as public relations. He was also an adventurer in his own right, but he knew he didn’t have what it takes to be an Amelia Earhart or Charles Lindbergh, so he threw his support behind Amelia in his own way, financing her trips with sponsorships and publicity events. Yes, it was Putnam who packaged Amelia, but he was the one who allowed her to explore her passion by finding a way to make money out of it,” she notes.
“Gene was also a huge force in Amelia’s life because they were both very much the public faces of American aviation,” Nair continues. “I think they were deeply attracted to each other, but Gene was the one person who told Amelia the blunt truth, who told her that her adventures were getting reckless, and I think she felt that hampered her dreams. There was both love and conflict driving the three of them.”
“My journey through AMELIA amassed an unforgettable history rich with detail- from newsreel footage, to artifacts to biographies and first-person accounts. Amelia’s life spanned decades of love, loss, heartbreak, and success,” said Nair. “Throughout the making of this film, I had the privilege to become acquainted with not only Amelia’s history in the skies, but also her history on the ground – with characters like Amy Guest and Dorothy Putnam and Mabel Boll – and others surrounding her close-knit group. Despite shooting the world around Amelia, I had to make choices that sharpened the journey of this utterly modern woman as she lived the seesaw between the ecstasy she felt in the sky and the responsibility she assumed towards the earth. Ultimately, my film began to soar as a study of one woman’s `ecstasy of the sky’. I hope AMELIA sheds new light on this fascinating individual and encourages audiences to further discover the woman, the history, and the individuals who made that history.”
Amelia’s Spirit: Hilary Swank
Amelia Earhart became a larger-than-life celebrity not only because of what she did – although her record-breaking flights in an age when flying over oceans certainly grabbed international headlines — but because of who she was. It was her spunk, smarts, can-do optimism, coolness under pressure and unflagging tenacity that defined a vivid new picture of the American woman, indeed of a nation emerging from the Great Depression. Tall and slim with short, windswept hair, the very image of her became synonymous with the soaring ideals of adventure, belief and accomplishment, all accompanied by sweetness and joie de vivre.
It went without saying that any actress willing to take on the role of Amelia would have to bring all of these qualities to the table – and one woman seemed, from the get-go, to be a dead-on match with the fearless, freedom-loving vagabond of the air: Hilary Swank. Having garnered two Academy Awards for transformative roles in BOYS DON’T CRY and MILLION DOLLAR BABY, Swank is no stranger at going to great depths for her roles. But she also possessed something more than just the technical skills and physical attributes to play Earhart. “What’s most extraordinary about Hilary is that she masters all the outward stuff, but then she does something more and communicates the inner workings of Amelia – her humility, her self-effacing goofiness, her sort of unexpected girlishness,” states Nair. “Hilary is a spiritual actor -she really acts from within – and she took great joy in finding Amelia in every way, spending close to a month just getting the look right. The hair, the walk, and especially the speech – her performance was very particular and very deeply Amelia.”
Swank also stunned the director with her talent for flying – and daring deeds. “Hilary is an intuitive daredevil,” observes Nair. “She loves the roller-coaster of life. She would happily jump out in a parachute and come down just like Amelia, with legs swinging wildly!”
For Swank, the role was irresistible. “Amelia was such a trailblazer and I think we have Amelia to thank for girls today feeling like it’s OK to follow a dream,” she says. “She had a quality that I admire: the drive to follow her heart, no matter what, even in a man’s world. What I think the movie shows is that she lived life on her own terms, she believed in having fun and doing what you love and also in helping other people, and she accomplished a lot because of all of that.”
Yet, Swank also knew the role was a risk. “There’s not a lot of liberty you can take with a character like Amelia, because she is such an icon and we have seen so many images of her that they are almost burned into our psyches,” she admits. “I think the challenge for me was to just fully commit to what I believed she was like.”
Part of that commitment meant taking to the skies, and as Swank began flying lessons, she had an eye-opening, personal insight into what drew Amelia towards the heavens. “I realized that she loved flying because she loved feeling free of the constraints she felt on the ground,” the actress muses. “I think she also loved being able to see the world – and you have to understand in those days very few people had that chance – and experiencing new cultures. Most of all, she was driven by the promise of always trying something new. That’s why she was always going after a new record or heading to a new place, and that’s something I could relate to.”
She soon discovered how much Amelia has meant to today’s thousands of women pilots. “Almost every female pilot I met said Amelia was an inspiration to her,” Swank offers. “Amelia would have loved that and she would have really loved to see that women are now flying commercial planes across the Atlantic.”
Swank was also moved by the central romance of AMELIA – the relationship between Earhart and her husband, the public relations vanguard, George P. Putnam, who kept Amelia’s flights financed via a constant spate of public appearances, advertisements and sponsorships. “I think they have a beautiful love story because George really did everything he could to see Amelia’s dreams through,” she explains. “I think she understood that this was a part of her job, a part of being able to fly.”
She also admired Amelia’s brutal honesty with George. “He asked her to marry him many times and she always told him that she didn’t want to be held to the conventional restraints of a marriage, which was so ahead of its time,” Swank says. “But at the same time, she also expressed a great deal of love for him.”
Working with Richard Gere in the role brought all the tenderness and conflict of their relationship to the fore. “Richard is an old soul who walks around with his heart on his sleeve, and I think those are also the characteristics of George Putnam,” she observes.
Once Amelia and George did marry, biographers believe that Earhart carried on an affair with the aviator Gene Vidal, who would, with Amelia’s support, soon join the Roosevelt administration as head of the brand new Bureau of Air Commerce. Swank says it was easy to understand the attraction between them. “With Gene, she had this shared passion, they both loved to fly and both wanted to advance the business of aviation in America and they saw the world in a similar way because of that,” she explains. “Ewan brought a richness to the character that made him the complete opposite of Richard. Both men were an embodiment of what Amelia wanted in life, and yet they were so different.”
For Swank, the international production filled with flights both real and simulated was a nonstop adventure, but throughout, she says she had another heroine, aside from Amelia, keeping her grounded: Mira Nair. “I think Mira is a kindred spirit of Amelia,” Swank concludes. “She’s a force of nature, a very strong woman who doesn’t apologize for being strong. It’s wonderful to see a woman command respect the way she does and have such a clear vision. It’s a breath of fresh air.”
Amelia’s Loves
The whole world fell in love with Amelia Earhart, but her relationships with two men in particular would help to further her career and drive her fame. The first was the man who helped to forge her public image and would become her husband: George Palmer Putnam. Born to the founder of the publishing house G.P Putnam’s Sons, George led his own life of adventure before he met Amelia. He studied at Harvard, led National Geographic expeditions, served as the Mayor of Bend, Oregon and managed several newspapers, then took over the family publishing business with a bang: releasing Charles Lindbergh’s autobiography We. It was in 1928, while looking for a woman to become the first to fly across the Atlantic, that George met a then unknown Amelia Earhart. They were married in 1931, by which time she was already one of the most famous people in the world.
Golden Globe winner Richard Gere found Putnam a fascinating historical personality. “He was one of those controversial characters a lot of people disliked, but Amelia didn’t. She obviously loved this guy and that interested me,” he explains. “I wanted to know more about their bond. What did they see in each other in their private lives that maybe nobody else could see? What made them fit together? They were two very self-directed, strong, focused people and one of the quirks of fate is that they happened to run into each other at just the right time.”
Gere was also intrigued by the way Putnam seemed to intuit how Earhart’s personality could take on a life of its own – becoming the tool that would finance her record-setting flights and keep the public always wanting to see and know more about her. “There was a kind of Barnum & Bailey aspect to him, the way he plucked Amelia from obscurity and came up with this whole `Lady Lindy’ image,” he says. “There were other women flyers who may have been better or more beautiful, but I think what George saw in Amelia was that she was so genuine in her love of flying and so approachable, that she would be embraced as a role model for all women.”
Mira Nair says that she saw a new quality emerging in Gere in the role of George. “Of course Richard always has great charisma,” she observes, “but I think he also now exudes a real sense of calm and authority which was a great match for this role. He gave a very meditative type of performance – and there was a palpable chemistry that emerged between him and Hilary.”
Once on the set, the highlight for Gere became working with Swank. “She’s so perfect for this part because her instincts are the same as Amelia’s – it’s just natural for her to take risks and avoid clichés. She also has that basic trustworthiness, that way of saying `I might be a little goofy, but that’s me.’”
That helped in recreating the unique link that Amelia and George shared, no matter how unconventional their marriage. Says Gere: “The scenes between us have a subtle, emotional vibration. These were two people who were trying to be the best they could but still sometimes hurt each other.” Some of that hurt emerged from Amelia’s free spirit, which she warned George about openly before marrying him. Nevertheless, her close relationship with the pilot Gene Vidal, with whom she would found Northeastern Airlines, further complicated their marriage.
Vidal was another intriguing early 20th century character. Now best known as the father of famed writer Gore Vidal, Gene taught Aeronautics at West Point, founded three American airlines and served as the Director of the Bureau of Air Commerce from 1933-1937. To play him, Nair chose Ewan McGregor, the Scottish actor known for a diversity of roles, ranging from the gritty indie hit TRAINSPOTTING to Obi Wan-Kanobi in the STAR WARS prequels. “Ewan is so dashing,” says Nair. “He exudes that kind of cool Cary Grant grace and formality that you don’t see anymore, yet at the same he’s very hip and modern, which is what we wanted for Gene Vidal.”
McGregor says the first thing that drew him to AMELIA was the chance to act with Swank. “I’ve wanted to work with her since BOY’S DON’T CRY,” he says. “Her work is passionate, detailed and committed. I’ve always liked working that way myself, so I knew it would be great fun.”
But once he took on the role of Vidal, he also became compelled by the challenges of the character. “It was an interesting task to try to create this relationship on screen that is quite ambiguous. It’s understood that Gene and Amelia had some kind of a love affair, but the details are unknown,” he explains. “In the film, it becomes a kind of unspoken love triangle, where nobody is quite talking about what’s going on, which I found really fascinating.”
As much as he was anticipating working with Swank, McGregor says he still was taken aback by her. “It seemed that Amelia was alive and well and living inside Hilary Swank,” he notes. “The way Hilary plays her, you get a sense of how extraordinary she was. I realize that my daughters are living a life of freedom and opportunity because of women like Amelia.”
Rounding out the main cast is another man who figured prominently in Amelia’s story: the talented aerial navigator, Fred Noonan, who would disappear with Amelia over the Western Pacific. Having made his reputation navigating the pioneering “Manila Clipper” transatlantic route for Pan American Airlines, Noonan had impeccable credentials, yet was also known as a heavy drinker, a contradiction brought to light in the performance by the English actor Christopher Eccleston.
“I’ve adored Chris Eccleston since his first roles in JUDE and SHALLOW GRAVE and I think he’s one of the most extraordinary actors,” says Nair. “He looks blindingly like Fred Noonan and has sex appeal, but most of all Chris just has an absolute natural ease with the camera and with himself. He’s very earthy and independent, yet without ego, as Fred was. Fred had all sides to him: he was both a hard drinker and the best navigator in the world – and Chris nailed that contrast. I think the scenes with Fred and Amelia at the end of the film are truly moving and memorable.”
Amelia’s Plane: The Electra
One of the main characters in AMELIA is made of metal not flesh, but nevertheless was one of the great loves of Amelia Earhart’s life. This was her famed, twin-engine, silver-and-orange Lockheed L-10 Electra airplane, in which she would ultimately disappear. An innovative design by Hal Hibbard, the plane was first flown in 1934 and soon became one of the fledgling airline industry’s state-of-the-art, long-distance vehicles, as well as coveted by Earhart. When she purchased the plane, it gave her the chance to go after her greatest dream: to become the first woman pilot to circumnavigate the globe.
Since only a handful of Electra planes still exist in the world, the film production launched a global search for one that was ready for some serious action. “Finding our Electra was like casting one of the stars of the movie,” says Mira Nair. “The plane is so vital to Amelia’s story, it led to an amazing journey. We found our Electra in the South of France, and flew it across the entire African continent, in Amelia’s footsteps. It was an incredible trip that nourished us through the course of shooting. I think people can relate to the plane because it reminds one of all the beauty and potential of flying.”
The film’s Electra is owned by veteran pilot and French journalist, Bernard Chabbert, whose own aviator father met Amelia Earhart briefly in Senegal, giving him a unique link to the story.
Chabbert says the Electra is the kind of plane that sparks deep passion in all aviation fans. “The Electra is a masterpiece of a flying machine, an Art Deco, sophisticated, refined airplane with a seemingly magical potential for adventures,” he muses. “If you own an Electra – and only a dozen are still in existence – you dream of the day a movie company will call and ask if they can use your aircraft in a film about Amelia Earhart.”
But when that day came for Chabbert, it brought, with the honor and excitement, a massive logistical challenge. After all, his plane was in France and it needed to be in South Africa where much of the production was taking place. Mira Nair wanted not only to transport the plane to Cape Town but to capture its long sweep across the African continent, mirroring Amelia’s remarkable travels.
This would be no minor feat. The Electra Chabbert owns — known as “Hazy Lily” or just “Lily” for short — had already been in operation for more than 6 decades, had served as a flying limousine during World War II and was flown by the British pilot and alleged spy Sydney Cotton, one of the inspirations for James Bond. After all that, the plane was now sitting in a hanger without an engine or propeller and damaged from a belly landing.
“Now we had just four months to fix everything, find two new engines, have new propellers made, and more,” recalls Chabbert. “We then had to plan a very unusual trip around Africa. In 1937 such a voyage would have made us front page news! We duplicated a flight equivalent to what Amelia had done in her time, allowing the film to honor her travels with shots of ours.”
Chabbert emphasizes: “The difference is that we were a thing of the past – flying this old, lowflying, gasoline-burning, strange machine across Africa — while Amelia had been flying a thing of the future.”
With barely enough time for a test flight, the refurbished Electra took off from Annemasse Airfield near Geneva and headed towards the coast of Spain. Two days later, it landed in Morocco, then on to Bamako, Mali through rows of thunderstorms. “The old beast turned out to be a real adventurer,” enthuses Chabbert. The journey continued as the plane hopped across Africa, often in search of the increasingly rare fuel known as Avgas (most modern planes use kerosene gas.) The Electra flew over the shark-infested waters of the Gulf of Guinea, was grounded for several days after landing to fuel on the island of Malabo, crossed Angola and Namibia and at last landed in Cape Town with just 24 hours to spare before it had to be painted and ready for its closeup.
The emotions of watching the cast and crew interact with the plane made the long, hard trek worth it for Chabbert, who served on the flight crew. “That old, graceful lady of the skies really became part of the cast,” he says. “Hilary acted right away as if she were Amelia and this was her Electra.”
Most of all, Chabbert was proud of how the plane performed, covering the kind of miles it hadn’t seen in decades. “The old aircraft never coughed,” he notes. “We flew difficult scenes, like Amelia’s last takeoff from Lae, in New Guinea, when her Electra was so overloaded that she had to make a dive towards the sea to desperately grab some airspeed. We did that 22 times. We filmed Amelia’s night take off from Calcutta under monsoon rains, four times in a row, from an unlit dust strip lost in the high grounds north of Capetown. We did many unique things, flying the old machine low above Victoria Falls, skimming the Okavango Delta desert, slipping between vertical mountain slopes, caressing endless soft beige sand dunes near Port Elizabeth. Through it all, it seemed the aircraft became a real actor, far more than a piece of décor.”
In the end, “Hazy Lily” would have to make the long, slow reverse journey back to Europe – but Chabbert says the journey was part of the reward. He summarizes: “Lily had flown a total of 170 hours in eight weeks and never missed a beat. She had been in the hands of seven aviators, not mere pilots, who had lived with her the adventure of their lives. She had brought all of us deep into a time-warp trip, and helped us understand in the flesh what had been Amelia Earhart’s personal truth.”
Amelia’s World: The Design
When it came to the look of AMELIA, Mira Nair was most inspired by the things in life that inspired Earhart herself – vibrant style, the spirit of adventure, and most of all, the call of nature’s wide open spaces. “Amelia was wedded to nature, to the elements, to the skies, to the ocean. These were the elements she loved and these were the elements that swallowed her — so I wanted to use landscape to capture the part of the world she was drawn to the most,” says Nair. “Shooting in South Africa, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland allowed us to really do that.”
Nair collaborated closely in creating the film’s look with cinematographer Stuart Dryburgh, who garnered an Academy Award nomination for the stunning, rustic imagery of Jane Campion’s THE PIANO. “Stuart is a boy’s boy who loves action, loves nature, loves planes and photographs them all beautifully,” says Nair. “He is so well suited to this story.”
Dryburgh drew inspiration from the extensive documentation that has been amassed of Amelia’s life and times – screening newsreels and pouring through period photography. Yet one of the first decisions he and Nair made was to keep the film’s visual atmosphere fresh and modern. “Amelia was, after all, a thoroughly modern woman,” says Dryburgh. “The idea was not to go for a period look, but to let the people, landscapes and aircraft really speak for themselves.” Shot in widescreen anamorphic to emphasize the vastness of Amelia’s story, Dryburgh’s other primary goal was to capture the raw thrills of solo aviation. “We wanted the audience to be able to share in her yearning for adventure,” he explains, “and her intense love of flight which overpowers all of her earthly loves.”
To achieve this, Dryburgh put together a crack aerial unit led by 2nd Unit Director Marc Wolff, a veteran helicopter pilot in his own right and a leading expert in aerial photography. “Marc covered every airplane we had that could actually fly, including vintage acrobatic bi-planes, a beautifully restored Ford Trimotor and of course Amelia’s beloved Electra,” says Dryburgh. “These are scenes that really convey the joy that Amelia felt in flying and the motivation for her whole lifestyle.”
For those planes the production could not find in a flight-worthy state – in particular the Fokker seaplane named “Friendship,” in which Amelia first crossed the Atlantic, and the Lockheed Vega in which she set many of her records – the production built replicas. In turn, these replicas were then flown “virtually” via computer animation, overseen by the film’s visual effects team at Mr. X in Toronto. Says Dryburgh: “With so much exhilaratingly real flying in the movie, our visual effects powered flights had a lot to live up to — but I think our VFX team at Mr X succeeded magnificently.”
The global landscapes that Dryburgh shot, from both above and on the ground, were largely brought to life in just one, enormously diverse country: South Africa, where Nair lived for three years, and which provided the production not only with vintage art deco airports and unending skies but also the means to forge eight different countries through which Amelia traveled, without ever crossing a border.
Nair was thrilled to have this chance to shoot in South Africa. “It was very moving for me to shoot there,” she confesses. “It was a chance to pay homage to a continent I love and it gave us the extraordinary breadth we needed to show Amelia’s travels around the world.”
The task of turning one county into several fell to production designer Stephanie Carroll, with whom Nair has repeatedly worked with since THE PEREZ FAMILY. “Stephanie rock and rolls between India and America with me with great ease and great love. She has an eye like no other, a sensibility like no other — deeply informed by art and always seeing with fresh eyes,” says the director. “In South Africa, she just bloomed, giving us a true diversity of international looks and merging natural elements with high design, much like Amelia did in life.”
Carroll faced a daunting task ahead. “There was a lot of research that had to be done in very little time,” she explains. “Mira and I both believe in creating sets and props with as much accuracy as possible – and then drawing from that the answers to what might have really happened or what things really looked like when no one was there to document them. Making the film was very much like Amelia’s life – she was always moving from location to location and so were we – it was go, go, go all the time in quick and exciting movements.”
Each set that Carroll created is layered with details she gleaned out of reading about Amelia’s itinerant life, details chosen to further reveal the inner territory of the ever-exploring character. “Every element you see on screen should, I believe, reflect the emotions of the script and somehow, subliminally the audience should feel it’s about Amelia or about flight,” she explains. “Mira really appreciates beauty and design, so it’s very creatively rewarding to work with her.”
In South Africa, Carroll’s work was about transformation. For example, one of her biggest challenges was turning a grassy airfield in the Transkei into the Lae airstrip in New Guinea, where Amelia was last seen before disappearing. “Finding the right airfield was much harder than you might think because flying the Electra has certain demands, so we had to find just the right balance between historical accuracy, what the plane needed and what we could afford,” she points out. “We ended up using an old military airport and turning it into a far more tropical locale.”
Equally key was overseeing the design of numerous historical planes. “We were basically fabricating planes that don’t exist any longer,” says Carroll. “But we knew that many aviation enthusiasts would be seeing the film so we felt a real responsibility to be authentic.”
To help recreate the Fokker F7 seaplane and Lockheed Vega, the filmmakers recruited visual consultant Paul Austerberry, who oversaw the fabrication and construction of all the vintage planes. “Paul did a fabulous job and the film could not have happened without him,” says Carroll. Austerberry tracked down the original Dutch drawings of the F7 from the Fokker factory in Holland to match up the airframe structure and fuselage – and drew from photographic evidence to forge the plane’s 29 foot-long pontoons used for water landings. He also was able to use the wrecked fuselage of a Lockheed Vega to rebuild the plane’s structure replete with its original gauges. In addition, Austerberry created an interior mock-up of Amelia’s Electra that was used for some scenes in addition to the “Hazy Lily.”
The whole process, Austerberry says, was like a history course in how modern aviation first got off the ground. “Amelia’s life spanned the birth and development of human flight,” he notes. “Her first plane had a wooden fuselage and her last plane was a gleaming Art Deco wonder. In her few short years, there were incredible changes and we had the chance to reflect all of that on screen.”
More changes are reflected in the costume work of Kasia Walicka Maimone, who says “the period and character of Amelia were a dream come true for a costume designer.” Walicka Maimone, who previously collaborated with Nair on HYSTERICAL BLINDNESS, began with the thousands of archival photographs of Earhart, literally lining her walls with them for months as she began her artistic process. “I surrounded myself with these pictures and really studied and from that emerged a feeling of knowing this incredible woman intimately,” she says.
In contrast to period films that sometimes suffer from a scarcity of information, AMELIA deluged Walicka Maimone with real-life input. After all, the more Amelia was photographed, the more she began to forge her own image that evoked strength, capability and adventurousness, along with a dash of feminine glamour. “We had pictures of Amelia in every kind of outfit, from her flight stuff to her press conference outfits to her glamorous evening outfits and there was such a massive range,” observes the designer. “So Mira and I really had to sift through and find the essential looks that would define our character. It was a constant collaboration between me, Mira and Hilary Swank.”
Walicka Maimone especially enjoyed researching the history of flight uniforms – and discovering that, in the 1930s, there was no standard outfit for women pilots, which turned Amelia into a fashion pioneer as well. “A lot of Amelia’s flight outfits she designed herself,” she notes. “She brought in so many interesting twists: the French cuffed shirts, the perfectly tailored slacks and a custom-made, short leather jacket modeled after military jackets of the time. With that jacket, she started her own fashion trend.”
By 1934, Amelia had started Amelia Earhart Fashion Designs, with a line of clothing at Macy’s. Her look was instantly recognizable — streamlined, ready-for-action with a powerful, unfussy elegance – and that was the essence at which Walicka Maimone aimed.
The designer’s team ultimately created many of the film’s outfits from scratch because vintage items were too fragile to withstand the intense production. In doing so, Walicka Maimone kept one eye on the authentic past and another on women’s fashion of the present.
“We wanted to create a modern, relevant take on the period fashion of the 20s and 30s, which means you sometimes have to avoid the more extreme details,” she explains. “For example, we tried some real 30s hats that were just so outrageous and loud they were distracting. So the fun was figuring out how to create a bridge between the reality of what Amelia wore and the beauty of Mira’s film design.”
Nair says that Walicka Maimone walked that razor’s edge with impressive balance. “Kasia is an extraordinary artist, uncompromising and always deeply educated in the period she’s working in. The costumes for AMELIA are not only authentic, they are also something a modern girl can really relate to and want to wear, which is everything I wanted,” she comments. “I didn’t want this movie to feel like a museum, but to be completely alive.”
Further enhancing the costume work is the work of Hilary Swank’s makeup artist, Vivian Baker, and hair designer, Anne Morgan. Sums up Swank: “Without the collaboration of these two artists — Vivian who gave me Amelia’s beautiful freckles and Anne Morgan who did my short hair — there would have been no character.”
Character. That’s what lies at the heart of all of AMELIA’s elements, says Mira Nair, whether emerging via the design, the performances or the score by Gabriel Yared. She concludes: “AMELIA is about a life-loving, passionate, strong, unpredictable woman who had enormous loves in her life, both on the ground and in the air. As a visualist, I loved the possibilities that making AMELIA gave me, to form a real tapestry of the world, and to do action in a way that I hadn’t been asked to do it before. Most of all, I enjoyed in making this movie being able to show the core of what Amelia believed: that really we can do anything.”
“I hope that people are as inspired by Amelia as I was. If you have a dream, don’t be afraid to pursue it. Believe in yourself. But don’t forget to have fun along the way,” says Hilary Swank.
Amelia: Timeline
July 24, 1897 – Amelia Mary Earhart is born in Atchison, Kansas. Her father is a lawyer and inventor, but also an alcoholic. Her mother is the first woman to summit Pike’s Peak in Colorado.
January 3, 1921 – Just a few months after American women win the right to vote, Amelia starts taking flying lessons from woman pilot Neta Snook.
December 15, 1921 – Amelia receives her flying license.
October 22, 1922 – Amelia breaks the women’s altitude record, rising to 14,000 feet.
June 17-18, 1928 – Amelia becomes the first woman to fly across the Atlantic (as a passenger) in a Fokker F7 piloted by Wilmer Stultz. Upon her return to New York, she is honored with a parade, handed the key to the city and invited to meet the President of the United States.
October, 1928 – Amelia begins a series of lecture tours organized by George Putnam to promote her first book: 20 Hrs. 40 Min, which establishes her full-fledged celebrity.
August 1929 – Amelia places third in the First Women’s Air Derby, aka the Powder Puff Derby, in her brand new Lockheed Vega. As America falls into the tough times of the Great Depression, Amelia becomes a symbol of can-do optimism and American spirit.
November, 1929 – Amelia helps to organize The Ninety-Nines, the first women pilots’ organization.
July 5, 1930 – Amelia sets the women’s world speed record of 181.18mph over a 3K course.
February 7, 1931 – George Putnam and Amelia Earhart are married in Connecticut.
April 8, 1931 – Amelia sets the woman’s autogiro altitude record of 18,415 feet.
May 20-21, 1932 – Amelia becomes the first woman and second person to fly solo across the Atlantic. She receives the National Geographic Society’s gold medal from President Hoover and the Distinguished Flying Cross from Congress. She writes her second book, The Fun of It, about her journey.
August 24-25, 1932 – Amelia sets the women’s record for fastest non-stop transcontinental flight.
April, 1933 – Amelia is invited to dinner at the White House with Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. – and famously takes the First Lady on her first-ever night flight, sparking a lasting friendship.
January, 1934 – Amelia turns to the Pacific Ocean and becomes the first pilot to fly solo from Hawaii to California. Soon after, she debuts her own brand-name fashion line at Macy’s.
January 11, 1935 – Amelia pioneers the first solo flight across the Pacific Ocean, between Honolulu and Oakland, and uses the first civilian plane equipped with a two-way radio.
April 19 – 20, 1935 – Amelia is the 1st person to fly solo from Los Angeles to Mexico City.
June 1, 1937 – Amelia and Fred Noonan take off from Miami, Florida on an around-the-world flight. After 22,000 miles of flying, Earhart and Noonan are last seen in Lae, New Guinea. On July 2nd, en route to tiny Howland Island for refueling, the U.S. Coast Guard cutter “Itasca” loses contact with Earhart and she is not heard from again. President Roosevelt orders a massive search, which is called off on July 18, 1937. Two years later she is declared legally dead.
Production notes provided by 20th Century Fox.
Amelia
Starring by: Hilary Swank, Richard Gere, Ewan McGregor, Christopher Eccleston, Mia Wasikowska
Directed by: Mira Nair
Screenplay by: Ronald Bass
Release Date: October 23, 2009
MPAA Rating: PG for some sensuality, language, thematic elements and smoking.
Studio: 20th Century Fox
Box Office Totals
Domestic: $14,245,415 (74.1%)
Foreign: $4,988,493 (25.9%)
Total: $19,233,908 (Worldwide)