Peru native Johnny Derango to have big-budget film ‘Flight Risk’ release Friday

Simply put, Johnny Derango is on a roll right now, and his latest, most challenging, most intricate work may be his best yet.

Derango, a native of Peru and now one of the most sought-after cinematographers in Hollywood, is excited about his newest film “Flight Risk” – a big-budget effort directed by Mel Gibson and starring Mark Wahlberg. It is scheduled for worldwide release Friday, Jan. 24.

The film will open locally at the AMC Peru Mall 8 – the very place Derango’s dream began as a teenage projectionist – as well as at the Roxy in Ottawa and Classic Cinemas Cinema 7 in Sandwich. It will be scheduled at the Streator Eagle 6 theater soon.

“Absolutely, very excited,” said Derango, a 1998 graduate of La Salle-Peru High School. “It’s definitely the biggest one I’ve had. It’s getting the most press. I’ve never had commercials for a film I’ve worked on come up during an NFL playoff game and a college bowl game. It’s been pretty cool to see.”

Derango’s most recent efforts have been “Unsung Hero,” the story of an Australian family that emigrated to America and has two of its children become a four-time Grammy-winning Christian music duo, For King + Country, and a follow-up concert film over the winter, “A Drummer Boy Christmas Live,” featuring that duo and their family.

But while those were very well received, this most recent endeavor is definitely the big time.

Getting the call from Gibson – the highly regarded actor and director of significant films such as “The Passion of the Christ,” “Apocalypto” and “Hacksaw Ridge” – for their second opportunity to work together (after “Fatman” in 2020) is “the biggest honor of my career so far.”

“I love Mel,” Derango said. “He’s intense. He came from that space of being an actor, so his storytelling is very emotional. It’s fascinating because it was like a master class of filmmaking every day.

“One thing I learned from him is that it’s as much about what you don’t say as what you do. He would watch a performance, and if he loved it, he’d say great, let’s move on. But there were times he’d latch on to the smallest, strangest thing that no one else I know would think about, and those are the little flourishes that make it his style, his movie. It’s pretty cool.”

A Lionsgate release, “Flight Risk,” which also stars Topher Grace and Michelle Dockery, is the story of a U.S. marshal transferring a government witness by plane across the Alaskan wilderness to New York, but “tensions start to rise, as not everyone on the flight is who they appear to be.”

Because 90% of the film takes place in such close quarters – a single-engine turbo-prop Cessna 208 Grand Caravan aircraft – it presented a particularly challenging project for Derango.

However, the project’s big budget allowed him to use some of the industry’s most cutting-edge technology.

“I’ve never done a movie that was that contained,” Derango said. “We looked at other movies, and there was one that Mel and I had both seen where a lot of it took place in a small airplane like that, and Mel really didn’t like it. ... It all felt fake at times to him, and it took him out of the story.

“I knew that when I was designing the look of the movie, I knew to get the result that he was after it had to look and feel as real as possible at all times.”

Derango chose to go with LED Volume, a type of stage or performance space that incorporates light-emitting diode technology to create immersive and dynamic visual experiences on screens of all shapes and sizes.

That format really took off after it was used in the Disney film “The Mandalorian,” but it is rarely used for as much of a film as it was in by Derango in this one.

To get the most realistic backgrounds, Derango, Gibson and several others flew through the Sierra Mountains and found it a suitable replica of the Alaskan landscape portrayed in the film. They then used a helicopter hauling a 30-foot line, at the end of which was a huge device containing six 8K cameras, stabilized and recording 360 degrees as it flew through the Sierras.

The technicians took the five hours of footage into their computers and stitched it together into a flawless 360-degree image of 24K resolution. That was projected on the large, curved LED screen behind the stationary but fully gimbaled airplane “studio” where all the action takes place, giving the illusion of the plane in flight.

“It’s pretty amazing,” Derango said. “They make these rigs that are usually made for smaller cameras of lesser resolution, but we knew we had to get the most beautiful, highest-quality place to set the story, and we did it. It took three days to get five hours of footage, but it was incredible.

“It was the first time I’ve done anything on that scale with an LED Volume. It’s real cutting-edge. A movie will use that here and there, but to have a film have 90% of it shot that way is a pretty big deal.”

Such groundbreaking effort will undoubtedly inspire other cinematographers in Hollywood, but Derango hopes it will inspire those sharing his hometown roots, whatever their career choice.

“I was talking to my wife Sarah about this [Shaw Media] interview, and she said I hope that this inspires someone else from the Illinois Valley to follow their dreams. I never thought of it like that,” Derango said. “My dad was all about work ethic, working harder and better than anyone else, but I never, ever thought that I wouldn’t come out here and be successful.

“But after she said that, I looked back and thought it would be great if someone else saw this story and thought, ‘There’s something I want do, and I can do that. It doesn’t matter I’m growing up in a little town.‘”