Flashing a movie-star smile and more charm than a snake-handler, Josh Lucas has ascended the Hollywood step-ladder quicker than most.  He has been compared to Steve McQueen on more than one occasion, not only for his looks but that rare innate ability to combine sex appeal, heroic flare & an everyman quality that makes it easy for an audience to root for him.

We at IndependentCritics.com are delighted that he took the time to sit for an interview about his recent experience shooting the action blockbuster, "Stealth".

Question: When I talk to a lot of actors and ask why they did a particular film, they always say ‘the script.’ But one assumes there must be something more about the genre or the location or the filmmakers that draw them in.

Josh Lucas: Look, this is a summer action film. I will be straight. I have done a lot of films that are very good but people have not seen. A film like UNDERTOW is a great example. Part of that is that you want to position yourself of having a film like this as a vehicle to have a big summer action film that is a rollercoaster ride. Audiences will sit down in a theater and have 90 minutes of fun. Within it, the fun is not only visual because I know the kind of films Rob Cohen makes, but also within that idea this technology is happening. The military just ordered their last wave of manned military planes. The next generation will be entirely computer driven planes so the technology is starting to correlate to the fictional sci-fi element of what this film is. When the military people came to see our set, they wanted to know how we had this information. Our pilots told us this would never happen and the military said that it is happening.

Question: It sounds a bit similar to the movie business with digital actors.

JL: It is a little bit of a similar thing except in warfare they don’t want to be losing pilots. In films, they really just don’t want to deal with the egos (laugh).

Question: Actors always talk about the experience of doing a film like this where they get to learn a craft that they never would have been exposed to otherwise.

JL: I didn’t really have a big sense of that. I think every young man has that thought of being a fighter pilot because it is the ultimate adrenalin mindset. Some may jump from planes or climb mountains but nothing compares to being a fighter pilot. The interesting thing is that these guys are multi faceted in their intelligence, having to know all this mathematics, physiology and just their athleticism. They are amazing athletes just in having to deal with the G force. They will lose anywhere between 12 to 15 pounds on a long flight. It is extraordinary. They are soaked in sweat when they come out. I liked that aspect of it but also the experience of living on an aircraft carrier for a period of time, landing on the carrier and being catapulted off the carrier. The research was fascinating. I did the same simulation training that you might have seen in AN OFFICER AND A GENTLEMAN. I was blindfolded in a helicopter that then crashes in water. It gets flipped upside down and you are thus disoriented underwater, still blindfolded and you have to get out. The purpose of that was to let you feel what it would be like at night. When in your life would you ever go through that? I did some extraordinary training for the film because they wanted me to be certified to go up in an F-18 if the military allowed it.

Question: How long did you train for?

JL: For me, it was three weeks of solid military training, which did not include the use of guns or the use of things that this guy knew what to do as being part of the Special Forces. I had some amazing teachers. I did some weapon training with this Special Forces commander in Australia. I learned how one comes into a room and really clear a room with a weapon to make sure they are safe. Many times you see an actor in a film come in with his gun down and that is not the right way. The truth of the matter is that everything is protected. You are carrying a 60-pound automatic rifle and it takes awhile before it becomes physically second nature because it is so uncomfortable but it was an interesting challenge. Then when the cast started coming together, because it wasn’t a typical summer action film cast, it made it that much more exciting. We tried to make a film that was playful and fun at its core but also had some solid realistic sensibility to what we were attempting to do.

Question: How well did you physically do in that plane?

JL: One thing I did was to get trained in the centrifuge. It was to see how many G forces you can withstand. It basically looks like this hammer throw and you are inside this hammer and they spin it as fast as they can to create basically the pressure that happens to your veins and brain and blood because all the blood drops to your feet. So you learn all these breathing techniques, which I used in the film. I thought that level of legitimacy hadn’t been done before in terms of dealing with these fighter pilots. Anyway, in that centrifuge, they monitor your breathing because it is easy to pass out. How does an audience watch that and see that you are about to pass out from the force? It looks cool to them but it is realistic. That to me was where the wonderful challenge was. It was not just put an actor in it and we will make it look cool later.

Question: Even though you did all of this training, much of this film will be created through computers. How well could you visualize that as you sat in the pilot’s seat?

JL: What is interesting about this movie is that literally you are living in the creativity of a director’s mind, his vision. Primarily the chunk of my time making this movie was, imagine a 200 ton human egg beater, a huge pole coming out of this hydraulic device with the end of a cockpit coming out of it. I had to climb 30 feet into this thing and spent about 90% of my time in this film wearing a helmet and a visor with a canopy above me shooting with multiple cameras moving all over the place. I was speaking dialogue with nothing, no images around me. It was an entire blue room with this massive set-up of light. It was $6 million worth of lights that simulated and emulated the clouds and the movement of clouds and the movement of the landscape when you were upside down. You are physically being oriented in the cockpit in such ways where you at one moment are being flipped around and yet still having to do dialogue while moving and dealing with G forces. This is just what the pilots are doing because that egg beater we are in can do a 5 G roll.

Question: Where was this?

JL: We shot this in Sydney, Australia. The fighter pilots themselves doing nothing above 7 or 8 G’s and so we were almost at that level of movement. There was this extraordinary symbiotic relationship to this gimble and what the actual fighter pilot would be doing. I have heard that we created this genuine sense of movement and flying that hasn’t been created before particularly that I was being ripped and jerked as I was giving speeches. Imagine two Russian MIG fighters, one coming from the left and one from the right and I am orienting myself and very quickly I realized that I had to have such specific images in my mind of these passing. In my training, I worked with F-18 fighter pilots who did actual search and rescue training and so I was able to see their movements inside the cockpit. The movement is amazing. They are like little jackrabbits. Even though they are strapped down, contained with seatbelt and breathing oxygen, they are actually being pummeled by the movement of this plane, jerking and knocking from side to side. And you have to orient yourself to the scene of this plane coming towards you. For instance in one sequence, Jamie Foxx’s plane is over on one side and we are having a conversation, just as the plane takes a 30 degree bank going what feels like 3000 miles an hour (laugh). Here I am trying to communicate what is going on behind me, which could be a missile launched towards me, but really knowing that all that actually surrounds me will only exist in a computer ten months later. The idea of that, the director sees in his mind. He can’t tell you to find the little green ball on set because things are moving too fast. I have to spit out this technical jargon and make it seem extremely natural in a circumstance that is extremely unnatural. It was a remarkable complex challenge. We only got out during lunch because it was so difficult to get us in and out that we had to keep cohesive in the filming and not get out for twenty minutes.

Question: You mentioned working with these actual fighter pilots. Many police officers or fire fighters complain how Hollywood always gets their profession wrong. What were their concerns about capturing the authenticity of what they really do?

JL: I think it is what I said before. They sense that everyone makes it look incredibly easy while in reality; you are losing 12 pounds of water weight during the flight. It is like an Olympic athlete in terms of their physical power yet they also have to be working their mind in this incredible mathematical and scientific way as they are dealing with exercises of war. All of these things are happening at the exact same time while they are going 700 miles an hour with someone chasing them. If we were really going to attempt to do this, we had to recreate a sequence where we were watching someone deal with these incredible challenges at that same time. That is what makes these guys so unique, so unique and very elite. One tenth of one hundredth of one percent ever make it to that level.

Question: Did you get a sense of what type of person can make that journey?

JL: I think it comes down to focus. There is also a personal ability to challenge themselves and deal with extremely high stress and intense situations and stay calm. Any emotion or physical upheaval in your body would throw you and you could crash your plane. There is extraordinary confidence and a level of commitment and focus. They are athletes physically and mentally in their singular vision. To me, it was about meshing those things into a character, who at the same time was about to fall apart. Here was a man who was on one hand being physically damaged by the sheer force of his job as the movie goes on. On the other hand, he was being mentally challenged as well, going so far as to questioning his commander, a confrontation that he has never done before. There were these nuances and emotional integrity to it. Not to put these guys down, but this wasn’t the Stallone, Schwarzenegger and Dolph Lundgren films that we have seen before. It wasn’t what these movies have been in the past. What Hollywood is doing now is using actors like Matt Damon, Sam Rockwell and Jamie Foxx in this film. These guys are smart and creative actors as opposed to low talking muscle men (laugh).

Question: Not many people get the experience of living on an aircraft carrier. I can only presume it is not the Four Seasons.

JL: The aircraft carrier was the hardest thing about making this film because you are literally in some ways in a prison like environment. It is incredibly toxic in just terms of the noise level alone. It is so intense to be on those flight decks as those planes come and go. It is one of the loudest environments on Earth. These guys after a number of weeks learn to sleep through it and just be comfortable in it. But while you are there, there is an adjustment period.

Question: If I am correct, you actually shot on active carriers.

JL: Yes. We were not a crew on board for a few days. We were shooting during the war in Iraq. Our ship was on war maneuvers. I was on the Reagan for training and the Lincoln for shooting. We were totally at the whim of the military. They were doing exercises and we were shooting around those exercises. They only included us as a favor. They were not working around us. We were working around them and the intensity of that was incredible. The quarters were so small and yet the ship was running in the finest tuned clockwork. Here we put a Hollywood crew on board and though they begrudgingly accommodated, that challenge was tough. It was so claustrophobic.

Question: What was the difference for you from the training in the simulator to actually being up in the F 18?

JL: It was much more jarring than any rollercoaster that you would actual go on. I recall the first time I did a catapult take-off from a carrier, where the plane goes from 0 to 300 miles per hour in a second and a half. I strapped myself in but I really didn’t pay too much attention and they kept saying to really strap myself down. When we started, I slammed forward and almost cracked my two kneecaps. The guy next to me says, “I told you so.” It is not anything you can really prepare for. It was also one of the childlike dreams I got to accomplish by making this film.

Question: How much of the real technology were you allowed to have while filming?

JL: We had no real military equipment until we got to the aircraft carrier. That was real but still we had a two scale version of the plane with us. I heard that the Chinese government saw satellite images and immediately contacted the American government asking about those planes. They were told it was only a film prop but people thought they were real. Rob Cohen likes to up the ante. We did one explosion in Australia that was so big, it would be seen from outer space, it had to be registered so governments would know what was going on.

Question: The film is not just a war film but it is also about the dangers of relying too much on technology.

JL: One of the fascinating things about this movie is that they have created this computer intelligence to such an Nth degree that it begins to have an ego. It sees my ego and so it emulates me. It sees my roguish decision challenging behavior and takes that to another degree. It thinks that, “If that is human, I am smarter than that because I can actually advance this and advance my own programming because I can be smarter than the people who created me.” We see that now how any computer can beat someone playing chess. A computer-controlled aircraft can handle three times what a human body can handle. When the computer sees that that is possible, he wants to take over. In that sense, the whole idea of this technology is fascinating because we are there. They are now at a point that many of the bombers are computer driven and the decisions happening are made by the computers. If computers start to have their own sense of intelligence, and that might be thirty years in the future, if they can beat us at chess who knows what else is next.

Question: Are you a technologically proficient guy?

JL: No. I did not grow up with video games. The military talks about how a lot of these guys who turn out to be fantastic pilots are great video game players. It takes a great minutia for the eye coordination and these guys have that.

Question: Speaking of growing up, let’s go back to your beginnings in Arkansas. Were you the popular kid in school?

JL: I think I am an actor because I was part of this nomadic family that moved around a lot. My parents were very politically active and felt the need to go into communities in the south and start an organization to protest the development of nuclear warheads. I am very interested to see what my parents will think of this film. Oddly enough, my character himself is having a moral dilemma about what he is doing and what the plane is doing and I had certain relationships to that in regard to the way I grew up. I would go into schools and sort of recreate my personality as to what I liked at the last school. If some guy was cool or an interesting nerd, I would find that interesting personality and emulate those.

Question: How many schools did you go to?

JL: I went to 30 by the time I was 13. Then I went to one high school and everything sort of stopped. That is when I started acting. I didn’t like stability at all. I didn’t like the fact we stopped moving and acting provided this interesting outlet for me to play with character building within developing elements of my own personality.

Question: Was there a particular play that set you off? Was it to meet girls?

JL: I did BLYTHE SPIRIT when I was 14. There was a guy at the high school I went to who was the cool guy at the school and I liked him a lot. He was a football player, did drama and debate. He was very smart at developing these aspects of his personality. He also had the most beautiful girlfriend, named Daniella. I was smitten with her, even though she was a senior and I was a freshman. I liked how he did all these sports and then did drama and so I thought I should try that as well. I just wanted to emulate him. I did love it though.

Question: Did you pursue it beyond school?

JL: I started driving up to Seattle and doing little plays and started to try and get jobs in commercials. Upon graduation I moved to LA and immediately got cast on my first feature, which was ALIVE. I was 19 years old.

Question: Fresh from school, how prepared were you for the big time? Did you think about acting class or school?

JL: I had a couple of years in Hollywood where I kind of realized that I had no technique. I felt I had talent and I felt I had worked with people who knew I had talent but they were all theater trained actors and they did both. George C. Scott told me that I had talent but I needed to get on stage and learn technique and different aspects of what this job is. I then moved to New York. I didn’t even attempt to enter Julliard because they don’t allow you to work and go to school and I still needed to make a living. I then took private classes with some of their teachers and sort of put myself through a program similar to class. When you look at actors like Russell Crowe and Sean Penn, they have great training.

Question: How much does instinct come into play?

JL: For me, it was discovering I had instinct first and then realizing that if I had the other as well it would be a combination that would allow me to have a long career. I saw that people I knew were not having long careers. They popped up for a minute and thought they were movie stars but they didn’t have the technique to fall back on. I wanted to actually move from one performance to another and not have the audience get bored or stuck with one type of character. It would have been very easy for me to have stayed with the type of character from SWEET HOME ALABAMA but that was the last thing I wanted to do. That is why I immediately went to show other people and myself that I could do anything else so I could move from one thing to the next. This was so they wouldn’t expect things.

Question: There have been many films in your career that seemed to be the ones that were poised to make you the star, but it just didn’t seem to happen. Then you would switch and play these types of characters that were edgy.

JL: I think I was trying to run away from certain aspects of my personality and then develop my own understanding of what I do. I didn’t want to utilize things that would have been easy to fall back on. Now I want to use elements from SWEET HOME ALABAMA or UNDERTOW and adding things to those types of characters to make them complex. That is what makes someone like Russell Crowe so great. He can be charming and sexy and roguish in his characters but at the same time have this deep, dark emotional undercurrent that makes him be able to do A BEAUTIFUL MIND or CINDERELLA MAN. Actors like him and Sean Penn are the prominent influences on my life.

Question: Those two guys are also quite private in talking about themselves and keep an air of mystery about them. Do you feel that you might need to follow that path as well?

JL: It is a great question because I have stayed away from that. I have not put myself out there in any way to be a paparazzi personality. I have limited certain aspects of my career and that is another reason why I did something like STEALTH, to put myself out there so I am a viable commodity to be someone that the studio knows will be a person who audiences will go see. Russell and Sean both have done that. They do these movies where they can prove that to an extent. I also have not beaten up a photographer yet (laugh). I don’t have a lot of baggage for an audience. Some actors do have that and that paparazzi personality can make you limiting for certain directors who might want to work with you.

Question: In reference to your persona, there have been some who have commented on your quiet masculinity, much in the same way of a Steve McQueen or Robert Mitchum. Do you see that as well?

JL: I absolutely sense that. There was a core of actors that I grew up with, some who became quite famous, but many were quite slight. So when it came to moving on to a strong male presence in the movie star system, they didn’t have the weight underneath them. That is why we have gone to certain European countries for people like Javier Bardem, an actor who comes across on screen as a real man. It is an actor like that whom I admire so I needed myself to get there and fill out as a human being. I knew I wanted to push myself and not make choices that would put me in a position to be famous but be limited.

Question: How did you not get seduced by the great infusion of money that seems to be thrown towards certain actors?

JL: I think I was lucky in that I did not have a lifestyle that needed to be fed that way. I was living decently enough and so I didn’t need that. I saw people jump the gun and so I saw people do bad movies to support a lifestyle. I guess being poor and not building those things up buffered me.

Question: It does seem to be that your characters in film have been all over the place and maybe audiences have had a hard time grasping just who you are. Was there a risk in choosing to be so eclectic?

JL: There is a risk and some might say it didn’t pay off but I think it did. I sort of dropped out of the Hollywood eye after SWEET HOME ALABAMA even though I was working with people like Ang Lee. In my mind, those are the types of directors I wanted to connect with. Some might feel I dropped out because I didn’t utilize that pop but I didn’t need to be the lead yet.

Question: Is it true you have already appeared in 30 films?

JL: I have been in a lot of movies. Someone asked me the other day how I planned to deal with success and I said I have dealt with failure a lot. So I cannot imagine that success can be that much harder. I have had a lot of movies that didn’t work and somewhere I just didn’t work in them either. Walter Matthau said that the best thing that could happen to an actor is to do the rehearsal of a play, have the play open and then let the play fail. What you are doing is learning not only about yourself as an actor, but what doesn’t work. When you see that, then you can switch it. If you are always successful, you might learn what works but you have no risk of failure. I am not afraid of failure. I feel careers are a wave, that come and go and so I am not afraid of that wave anymore. It will just be the next phase.

Question: When you did get that wave of success, how did you position yourself to not become just another product on the shelf?

JL: You have to utilize it and a certain responsibility that way.

Question: In the film, you are advised not to have a relationship with your co-worker because it can complicate things. You are in a profession where people cross that line all the time. Do you see a danger in that?

JL: Yes, I do think so. Actors that have off camera chemistry while they are doing a movie seem to create a wall in regard to what is happening on camera. I was in a great, serious relationship while I was making STEALTH and oddly that enhanced my performance. I do think that actors that have affairs while on set end up not having a great performance (laugh). It comes down to that yearning. Forbidden fruit creates that sparkle that comes across on screen.

Question: You got to shoot in Australia and Thailand. How did that lend itself to the making of the movie?

JL: First of all, that has to be one of the most beautiful countries on Earth. The purity of the people and the Buddhist beauty to them was just amazing. Here we were making this wild movie but we were at the end of our shoot and we needed to be spoiled with a nice hotel and people. I loved the other side to the movie. These characters live in this toxic environment but then they are given this sparkling R and R. It did give us the opportunity to put Jessica in a bikini (laugh). Sydney was great and I loved the people there. For me, I was doing 6 day shoots, 16 hours a day so in my time off, I slept. I lived on Bondi Beach with naked women underneath my porch but I slept (laugh).

Question: As Tom Cruise attested in TOP GUN, do you share the “need for speed?”

JL: Yeah. I have this cool little car I bought recently. I was driving on these back roads in New Mexico and got to 130 miles per hour. I was scared.

Question: How fast did you go in the jets?

JL: I guess about 500 miles per hour but I didn’t enjoy it. I was a bit too nauseous (laugh).

Question: Thank you so much for chatting with us!

JL: Yeah.  Thanks for having me.

"Stealth" is currently available on DVD.
Thanks to Alex at DNA-PR for Permission for this Interview.
© TC Candler - www.independentcritics.com