Denzel Washington as an airline pilot with a dark secret in Robert Zemeckisâs new film, âFlight.â  “EVERYONE keeps thinking I haven’t made a movie in 12 years,” the director Robert Zemeckis said, nursing a Coca-Cola in a remote corner of the Four Seasons Hotel in Midtown Manhattan, a few hours before his new film, “Flight,” received its world premiere as the closing-night feature at this year’s New York Film Festival. “It’s like I’ve gone off and done opera or something.”  “Flight,” which stars Denzel Washington as an airline pilot whose assured, unflappable demeanor masks a major substance abuse problem, is Mr. Zemeckis’s first live-action film since “Cast Away” in 2000. But this filmmaker — who won an Oscar for “Forrest Gump” (1994) and is responsible for enduring favorites like “Back to the Future” (1985) and “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” (1988) — has not been off riding with the Valkyries.  Instead Mr. Zemeckis has spent the last decade conducting some very public experiments with new digital technologies. Over the course of three animated features — “The Polar Express” (2004), “Beowulf” (2007) and “A Christmas Carol” (2009) — he has set out to explore the new century’s alliance of computing and filmmaking, and in the process has done a great deal to push that relationship along.  His reluctance to advertise himself as an auteur may account for the sense of surprise that has greeted his new film. Few members, if any, of the Internet’s legions of Oscarologists had “Flight” on their radar for the coming award season, but the film’s strong reception at its festival screening is most likely to force some recalibration.  At 61 Mr. Zemeckis is a soft-spoken, solidly built man whose hard consonants contain faint traces of his upbringing in a working-class neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago. In conversation he often seems hesitant to discuss his work in terms of themes and structure, but he dives into the details of craft and technique with enthusiasm.  His determination to bring the softly naturalistic, fully dimensional look of Chris Van Allsburg’s illustrations for the beloved children’s book “The Polar Express” to the screen led him to investigate the emerging field of motion-capture technology. The process, known as mo-cap, uses scanners rather than cameras to track the movements of performers and convert them into three-dimensional models, bypassing traditional forms of animation. In effect the technology transforms a human actor into a data field that the filmmaker can manipulate to his heart’s content. In the completed film Tom Hanks was able to portray six characters, from a train conductor to a rather sinister Santa Claus.  Mr. Zemeckis also discovered that the resulting digital imagery could be rendered as a 3-D film by converting the data into left-eye and right-eye perspectives, a process that made “The Polar Express” the first feature-length hit for Imax 3-D.  In its early days the mo-cap process wasn’t perfect. Some reviewers complained about the “dead eyes” of the characters in “The Polar Express,” or of a vague sense of coldness and creepiness. As Mr. Zemeckis acknowledges today he may have been pushing the envelope a little too hard. “The computers weren’t fast enough,” he said, during a public “Directors Dialogue” session at the New York Film Festival.  And while all three motion-capture films made money, the mere fact that they were animated meant, to many reviewers, that Mr. Zemeckis had abandoned his prestigious position in Hollywood to spend “12 years mucking about in the motion-capture playpen,” as Todd McCarthy of The Hollywood Reporter recently wrote.  And yet Mr. Zemeckis changed the game. It is difficult to imagine the mo-cap-dominated 3-D blockbusters of the last several years — films like James Cameron’s “Avatar” or Joss Whedon’s “Avengers” — without the innovations that Mr. Zemeckis and his collaborators nursed along through those three movies.  With “Flight,” Mr. McCarthy wrote, “Robert Zemeckis parachutes back to where he belongs, in big-time, big-star, live-action filmmaking.”  Mr. Zemeckis, though, sees no break with his standard practice, which is to use state-of-the-art technology in the service of classic cinematic storytelling.  “It’s the same,” he said of “Flight,” which opens nationally Friday. Short of 3-D, the movie makes use of the full spectrum of digital techniques that have emerged in the last decade, from three-dimensional, digital storyboarding in the preproduction phase to the touching up of details in postproduction. The computers are still there, though this time they are churning away in the service of naturalism rather than fantasy.  There’s only one spectacular special-effects sequence — an early scene in which Mr. Washington’s character, Whip Whitaker, manages to land a malfunctioning plane despite a raging storm and the three mini-bottles of vodka he’s consumed to take the edge off his drug-induced hangover. And yet the film contains more than 300 shots in which the image has been digitally manipulated.
The director Robert Zemeckis, who has been making motion-capture films for a decade or so, talks about âFlight,â his first live-action movie since âCast Away.â