Posted in: Exclusive, Interview, Lionsgate, Movies | Tagged: Turbulence

Turbulence Director Claudio Fäh on Survival Drama, Tension & More

Director Claudio Fäh (No Way Up) spoke to us about his latest survival thriller for Lionsgate in Turbulence, casting, special effects & more.

Director Claudio Fäh is always looking to bring adventure and tension to the human condition, whether it's his memorable survival horror film in No Way Up (2024), Northmen: A Viking Saga (2014), Sniper: Ultimate Kill (2017), or the German TV series Wilder. In his latest survival thriller in Lionsgate's Turbulence, the film follows a married couple, Emmy (Hera Hilmar) and Zach (Jeremy Irvine), as they embark on a hot air balloon ride when a mysterious stranger (Olga Kurylenko) joins them on board. As tensions rise, their journey is at risk. Fäh spoke to Bleeding Cool about the physical challenges of having most of the narrative take place in such a small space, working with writer Andy Mayson, casting, special effects, and more.

Turbulence Director Claudio Fäh on Crafting the Survival Thriller on a Hot Air Balloon

What intrigued you about Turbulence?

Well, so it was an interesting thing, to see if we can make a movie that constrains four characters on a 10×10 box floating in the air for like 70 minutes and see if we can make that intriguing.

What was it like working on that with Andy?

Andy has become a great friend of mine and a close friend of mine ever since we did No Way Up (2024), which we had a great experience on. When he called me after No Way Up, saying, "Well, how about we do a moving hot air balloon?" I was sold immediately, and it's a very collaborative process. He has a superpower of making things happen and willing a movie into existence, because it's increasingly difficult in this marketplace to get anything done, but he has that. At the same time, while he can be a force of nature that way, he's incredibly open to collaboration and collecting the best ideas rather than insisting on, "This is the way," which makes it very pleasant to work with.

Did your experience working on No Way Up in any way influence your work on Turbulence?

Yeah, in a way, you could argue there are certain similarities constricted to one place; it's a group of people who must overcome a tricky situation. What's different, however, is that in No Way Up, you had the external threat of the sharks, which inevitably puts you in a certain corner of a genre and up with certain tropes. Whereas in Turbulence, the threat comes within. You have the characters that are in the basket that infuse the story with drama and propel everything forward, and I thought that was possibly more interesting to me, because it put everything in the actors' hands.

You got such a great mix of roles to fill out. How did you get Hera, Jeremy, Olga, and Kelsey involved, and what made them perfect?

I agree with you. I think all four of them are fantastic, and I love them to death. Jeremy was on board very early on, so was Olga, and then Kelsey came on board, and that helped us get the movie put together. We didn't have Emmy (cast) for a long time, and the movie almost fell apart, came back again, and because of the timetable and schedule constantly shifting, we ended up not having an Emmy like a week before we went to camera.

That's where this lucky moment happened when our casting director, Colin Jones, sent me Hera's materials, and I must admit I was not familiar with her. I thought she was phenomenal, so I discussed with Jeremy and said, "Oh, she is our Emmy!" She came in very late, so that left her with almost no preparation; it was the best decision we made. She was so phenomenal to work with.

Aside from everything to set this up, as far as the scenarios leading up to the balloon ride, how much of the film consists of practical versus CG, and how did you balance that?

It's a tricky question. Once they're airborne at a certain altitude, it's all against the blue screen. You couldn't safely, securely, and in a controlled way shoot anything on an actual hot air balloon. All the backgrounds were filmed with a helicopter that we flew through the Dolomites (in Italy) and required the higher resolution background plates, so we charted the whole path of the balloon through the Dolomites for real, so it was a lot of compositing necessary. To make matters more complicated, the takeoff was shot at Richmond Park in London, with a half balloon that was hanging off a crane that allowed us to live to a certain extent in the air. However, Richmond Park not being close to the Dolomites or not having any mountains, required us to bring the mountains to Richmond Park in post-production to composite in so this multitude of technologies, and then we had drone shots with real baskets hanging high up above London that we flew around, then we replaced the backgrounds with so it was a mix of various things actually that comprised the whole thing.

Turbulence is available in theaters.

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