"When I first heard about their story back in 1992, 1993, I was in my early 20s and I had never heard of them, never knew who they were, never knew nothing," Gooding says of the Tuskegee heroes.
"And it made me frustrated, because it made me realize that my upbringing, my education, had a lack of African American stories in it . . . stories of empowerment, of self-empowerment. . . . And hopefully one of the things Red Tails will do is make a lot of people, a lot of young people, aware of what these black men did. It's good now to be able to celebrate their lives and their accomplishments."
Red Tails, which opened Friday, is a project that Lucas tried to get funded for more than 20 years. The studios were resistant to the idea of an all-black story that required a fairly hefty production budget, and even the man behind the Star Wars saga had to struggle to get the Tuskegee film made.
Finally, though, he has. Anthony Hemingway, an accomplished African American television director (The Wire, True Blood, The Closer), makes his big-screen debut, and a cast that includes Gooding, Nate Parker, David Oyelowo, Elijah Kelley, Tristan Wilds, Method Man, and Terrence Howard is in front of the camera - and in the cockpits of the red-tailed fighter planes.
Like Star Wars, Red Tails features amazing sequences of dogfighting warfare, weapons ablaze, swooping and diving and arcing, with fast cutaways to the pilots, communicating by radio, strapped into their cockpits.
Although Gooding says there were a number of vintage P-51 Mustangs on the movie set - an abandoned Soviet airstrip outside Prague in the Czech Republic - most of the planes and aerial acrobatics depicted in the film are the stuff of CG. The giant air battles were mostly digital.
