Making “Hijack,” the ambitious AppleTV+ thriller that unfolds over a seven-hour flight from Dubai to London in seven hour-long episodes, meant breaking established traditions.
When terrorists take control of the plane, Idris Elba’s Sam Newman is the wild card in the sky: A professional negotiator who is able to control his fears and rightly gauge the dynamics as violence, intimidation and murder add to the horror.
The “Hijack” team had a novel notion about to make it all real.
“The biggest thing for us,” said director Jim Field Smith, like Elba also an executive producer, “was we’ve got a show that’s set almost exclusively inside of an airplane. There’s two problems with that!
“One is to make it engaging dramatically and not dull and flat. The other is to make it feel like you are actually in an airplane moving through the sky.
“It was definitely very challenging but we figured out how to solve both issues. We didn’t really want to break this plane apart [for individual scenes]. We wanted to move around the plane and never break through the skin of it. And we didn’t.
“Sometimes you see onscreen where everything gets scaled up. The plane you see in here is a millimeter for millimeter replication of an airliner. That made it as hard for ourselves as we possibly could and I hope that translates into something that feels really convincing.
“At the same time, we tried to make it look as engaging as much as possible to pull you into the drama.
“That meant,” he noted, “everybody was boarding a long-haul flight every single day for a 120 days.”
“In the middle of summer! With no AC,” Elba added.
The advantage was worth the added stress levels, Smith feels. “It meant we could keep going more, stay in the moment and let the scene play out.
“When you’re dealing with a hijacking it’s about people reacting — and trying to live, to get through the next second. And we were able to bring some of that into the actual making of it.
“We used a lot of unbroken shots. We moved often with Idris’ character, Sam, moving with him through the plane. A lot of that is for real.
“There was also,” he said, “a lot of, literally, people having to hand the camera to each other and stuff like that.
“As Idris says, that was all about wanting to feel engaged in the drama and not feel like it was artifice or that we were sitting aback watching it from afar. I wanted it to feel like you are in that hijack.”
“Hijack” streams on Apple TV+