Fight or Flight star Katee Sackhoff spoke with ComingSoon about her new action movie. The Star Wars actress discussed her character’s past with Josh Hartnett, the challenge of making phone dialogue compelling, and more. The film is now playing in theaters.
“Exiled American agent Lucas Reyes is given one last chance to redeem himself – the assignment is to track down and identify a mysterious, international high-value asset known only as The Ghost on a flight from Bangkok to San Francisco. Complicating matters, the plane is filled with assassins from around the world who are assigned to kill them both. The pair must work together in a fight for their lives. At 37,000 feet, the stakes have never been higher,” says the synopsis for Fight or Flight featuring Katee Sackhoff.
Tyler Treese: Katee, a lot of your key moments in Fight or Flight are correspondence over the phone. How did you approach those scenes and make sure that the indirect back and forth with Josh Hartnett was still entertaining? That’s always a tricky thing for an actor.
Katee Sackhoff: Oh, it is for sure. I mean, especially making sure that you’ve got that relationship with him and, you know, you have fun still on the phone.
I mean, the, the whole movie is such a heightened adrenaline rush that I wanted to make sure that the moments with Katherine in that control room didn’t feel low, didn’t feel like they didn’t belong in the movie, you know what I mean?
So, I think that the biggest thing for that is really just the pace. You know, making sure that her pace is still his pace. Everything is high stakes. Everything comes with risk. Everything comes with terrible, terrible danger associated with it, the decisions that she’s making on a split second. So, just making sure that she was constantly moving and looked like she was always thinking was really important to me.
One of the things I liked about your character, and it gets explored through the film, is that you do have that rocky relationship with Josh’s character in the past to explore. How important was it having that extra layer to the relationship, rather than you just being that voice in a chair?
I think it all provides backstory, which is really great for myself and Josh. He added to it as well. You know, there are scenes where he refers to her as Katie. It shows a familiarity between the two of them that is more than business which allows you to play more texture when people have a history that’s possibly rocky. It allows you to play subtext, and that just adds so much more depth to what is on the page. And that really allowed us to lean into that, which I loved.
I wanted to ask you about working with the director James Madigan because he had done television, but I was really surprised this was his feature debut as a director. I would’ve never guessed. It’s very confidently shot. What stood out about working with him?
Katee Sackhoff: Absolutely. You know, he’s been successful in this industry for so long, it’s no surprise to me that he was able to step in and direct such a wonderful project so quickly. You know, he is concerned about character first and foremost.
He is truly a guerrilla filmmaker, you know. I mean, we had a very conservative budget on this and, you know, you learn tricks when you don’t have money to pull from an endless bag, you know? And that’s when filmmaking gets really, really fun because you are using tricks of the trade that he’d learned throughout his career in order to pull off some wonderful moments.
And there are some crazy deaths in this. Crazy deaths, crazy action. Lots of blood, lots of insanity, lots of weapons, lots of high stakes. And, you know, the way that he chose to shoot that was pivotal to the movie’s thrill, you know?
Thanks to Katee Sackhoff for taking the time to talk about Fight or Flight, which is now in theaters.
