Trailer
Plot summary
The MiG-31 Firefox, a Soviet fighter built for hypersonic flight, is invisible to radar and fires its weapons by the pilot's thoughts. The plane is nearing completion at the airbase at Bilyarsk, and putting it into production would give the Soviets an advantage over the West. Britain and the United States choose Mitchell Gant, a retired US Air Force major who flew in Vietnam, was held as a prisoner of war, and learned Russian from his mother. He is judged suited to the task despite delayed stress syndrome. Captain Buckholz comes by helicopter to Gant's home in Alaska with the mission, and Kenneth Aubrey briefs him in London. Gant's way in runs through a network of Soviet dissidents, three of them scientists on the Firefox project.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Firefox (1982)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- As special effects supervisor, John Dykstra pioneered a technique called reverse blue-screen photography for the flying sequences: the model was coated in phosphorus paint and photographed first under strong lighting against black, then under ultraviolet light, to create the mattes that separated model from background.
- For filming, four large-scale replicas were made along with one full-size model 66 ft long, 44 ft wide and 20 ft high, built from the skeleton of a radio station broadcast antenna and able to taxi under its own power at 30-40 mph.
- Hollywood aerial cinematographer Clay Lacy flew the second unit aerial sequences in a Learjet 23, at a cost of "$1,200 an hour, across the western U.S. and to the Thule Air Force Base in Greenland, with $150,000 worth of computer and camera equipment on board".
- The film was also inspired by a real defection: in 1976 Soviet Air Defense pilot Viktor Belenko flew his MiG-25 Foxbat to Japan, an escape that happened shortly before the source novel was finished.
- President Ronald Reagan screened the film at Camp David in 1982 and wrote in his diary on 18 June that it was "darn good", applauding it as "a one man job-act, direct, produce".
- The effects team spent fifteen months and "several million dollars" on 250 optical effects shots, and the original scale model, made by Greg Jein for the bluescreen work, is now on display at the Warner Bros. Museum.
