Rachel McAdams plays Lisa Reisert, a manager at a prominent Miami Hotel. She's returning home on a late night flight when she meets up with a charming guy by the name of Jackson Rippner (Cillian Murphy). The two flirt back and forth in line and an airport bar before eventually winding up sitting next to each other on the flight. Jackson seems like a nice guy, right up until take off, when he reveals his true motive. Jackson and Lisa's meeting was no chance of fate. He had been following Lisa and is now threatening her, using the life of her father (Brian Cox) as bait. If Lisa doesn't call her hotel and switch the rooms of the U.S. Director of Homeland Security, who is arriving early that morning, her father will be killed.
IGN FilmForce recently spoke with Craven, McAdams and Murphy about their work on the intense thriller.
Craven has carried the title "Master of Horror" for a number of years now. We asked him what he thought of this. "It's great to be thought of as the master of anything. Even idiocy. Master of idiocy, Wes Craven. But if it's master of horror or fear or whatever, that's great. But at a certain point, if there's more to you, more that you'd like putting out there, then it's fun to be known as, say, the master of suspense which it kind of shifted in the last three or four years. So on this one, one of the reasons I took the movie was that it was clearly a thriller and a psychological thriller... I could show more chops than just having people jump out of doorways with a knife."
For Red Eye, Craven chose two talented up-and-coming actors instead of going for A-list talent. "I kind of like the idea that by the end of the year they're going to be huge stars, I'm convinced. Just with the films they have in the can including this one. But when we cast them, it was just people that were really studying who's coming up were aware of them… I like the idea that the broad audience wouldn't know who Cillian was physically. They wouldn't know who the actor was. They wouldn't know quite what to expect from him. So I liked that and I think it says in the press notes, we met with Cillian. Once I believed that he could get the American accent in time, which was remarkably quickly, within a matter of five weeks I think, we just went with him, made the commitment…
"Rachel was the only female actress we looked at… When I sat down with her in a room, I thought, 'That's her.' I loved The Notebook and saw this is an actress who can obviously do the first part of the movie where she's falling in love and she's beautiful. I looked at Mean Girls and I said this is somebody who can disappear into a role and be totally different. So she's not just one thing in every role."
For the actors, the chance to work with Craven was a no-brainer. "That's the thing, his films just speak for themselves," says Murphy. "He is just unbelievably fluent in that language of tension and suspense and how to create that and how to manipulate an audience and people want to be manipulated by him, they want to come out altered from a screening and he can do that like no one else."
Be it master of horror or suspense, McAdams says Craven is pleasant to work for. "He's, he's very, very good natured, very quiet and has a wonderfully wicked sense of humor – and you have to listen really closely to hear it. But he's so clever, so witty, and he brings that to his films, which I love, because they're so heavy and so, you know, dark sometimes, and then, you know, he throws in these twists… It's just such a nice opposition."