It’s not everyday you get to ask your actors to go rushing into a burning building to nail a scene. But for Ladder 49 director Jay Russell, who put his entire cast through a rigorous fire training school with Baltimore’s finest, there simply would be no other way. Russell, who four years ago gave us a resonantly emotional little film named My Dog Skip, stepped out of his—and anyone’s—comfort zone, immersing himself into the personal and professional worlds of the men and women of the Baltimore fire department.

Working with a simple story that tackles some big issues of personal and professional commitment, Russell’s tenacity in pursuing Ladder 49’s large-scale pyrotechnics is matched by his noteworthy attention to the picture’s smaller, though no less brave, family story. We see the evolution of a young recruit—and a family—through nearly a decade in the life of an American fireman.

Lee Shoquist, ReelMovieCritic: Sometimes in films the idea of using a flashback structure becomes routine. Yet it’s used in this film to considerable effect as we’re not sure where the film is actually going. I don’t want to give anything away here, but about half way through I had an idea of where it might be headed and I was pleased that it actually did.

Jay Russell: The original script had this structure and what I thought was interesting and what I was excited about was this idea that one storyline was taking place basically real time, and then another storyline I suppose you could call a flashback. I sort of looked at it more like parallel time frames, where you have one time frame running in almost real time, then the other time frame hop, skip and jumping across a few years. And I was excited about that notion.

What I also hoped would be the case was that every time you went back to the real time situation, you were going to know a little bit more about who this guy is. So that by the time you hit the final sequence, the goal was that you would be invested in him as a character. So he starts off as an almost anonymous player who gets into a tough situation. By the end of the movie, hopefully, you know a lot about him. That was the idea behind it, and that was the script that we started out with. Once we got to Baltimore and did our homework, and spent time with the firefighters and all that, then Terry George…who writes a lot of stuff for Jim Sheridan and himself…Terry came down and helped us incorporate all of the things that we learned in our research into the script. That’s where we started from in the process.

LS: It’s interesting that the movie has the guts to take the characters to their logical conclusions, and not a pat Hollywood ending.

JR: One of our big goals in the film was to attempt to tell the truth. And I think this ending is an unfortunate truth, but it is a truth about this profession. Not everybody dies, obviously, but it is a part of the profession and part of the conflict of the profession. Honestly, when I was shooting, and I hope you won’t spoil the ending for your readers, but while shooting I kept waiting for the shoe to drop. I kept waiting for the studio to call: ‘Why don’t you just shoot an alternate ending?’ I kept waiting for that to happen, but they didn’t do it. I think they knew it would have been bull***t too, and they didn’t make that call. I was very pleased by that.

When I was given the script I was both extremely excited and extremely hesitant about the whole thing. In fact, I passed on it the first time it was given to me. The reason I passed on it is my uncle had been a 30-year veteran firefighter, and I had always been very respectful of that line of work and the people who did the work. I knew if I did it, I would be doing it for the right reasons. But I wanted to know everyone else was doing it for the right reasons too. I was hesitant at first because there’s a great responsibility. You’re not just making up a movie. It’s fictional, it’s a movie, it’s entertainment. But it’s truth. Every sequence that happens in the movie is all based on real incidents—stories from firefighters. If I were going to do this thing, I felt a huge responsibility to tell the truth on the matter.

Finally, I thought about it and thought, ‘Would my uncle want me to do this movie?’ When I decided to do it, then I was by God going to do it, and make sure we did it right. And Joaquin and John and the other cast members felt the same way. And we knew our toughest critic was going to be that individual firefighter sitting in the audience.

About three weeks ago we had a screening down in New Orleans at a national conference for fire chiefs and fire captains around the country. Four hundred firefighters and their families saw the film. They gave it a standing ovation at the end. That was the first moment that I was able to let go. I was so concerned about their reaction to the film because they invited us in. It’s like a subculture, their world. They don’t let a lot of people in. They don’t show their feelings often, and they don’t talk about it a lot. They’re very private about some of those personal issues with the job, and I felt like they let us in. We got to know these firefighters in Baltimore quite well. I felt like they let us into their lives and I just felt a huge responsibility with that. It was an emotional experience for all of us.

The central question of the movie is, ‘How can they do this?’ Even after spending two years with this thing, I don’t have that answer. I have clues and we wanted to present hints of why. Certainly not for the money. It’s not for the glory. They like a thank you every now and then, and we made this movie as a thank you. But that ultimate reason, I don’t know. So the goal was to try to lay in that mystery so that it didn’t just have a pat answer. The ultimate mystery is something that drove us all through the making of the movie.

It’s funny. You make a film and at the end of the film you say, ‘Nice working with you. See you at the premiere.’ All of us who made the film—we all talk to each other like once a week. Everybody. We were all profoundly affected by our experience on the film, and I think we’re all still struggling with the mystery of it—how they do it and how their families deal with it. They say they have two families—a family at the firehouse and a family at home. They just are running in direct opposition with each other. We get up and we go to work. We’re more than likely coming home that night. They don’t talk about this often, or some of them even deny by way of partying hard or different things like that. But if you really get one late at night over a couple of beers or something, they’ll tell you, ‘I know every time I leave the house that may be the last time I see my child, or my friend, or my spouse.’ That’s a hell of a burden to carry around.

LS: Did these guys treat you with kid gloves, so to speak? I mean, how much cooperation and access did they give you their work and lives?

JR: Ultimate. We had them with us all the time. Not only were they there for the firefighter sequences, but they were with me all the time. And even when we were shooting the family scenes, they were there with me. I would turn and say, ‘Did you ever have a conversation like that?’ So I was constantly trying to fact-check all along the way with the firefighters. Again, you’re just going with individual experiences, but they seem to be consistent. I’ve now had the great opportunity to meet firefighters from all over, and these experiences seem to be pretty consistent.

LS: There are so many different facets to directing a film. What’s the most gratifying part of the whole crazy process? When you finally wrap on the last day of shooting?

JR: When a film is finished, then that’s not the best part for me because I want to go back and make it all over again. I have a really hard time watching my work because I only see the flaws. I only see things I would prefer to do differently or what I feel might be better. The best part for me, honestly, is the process of working with the actors. If there’s a moment on the set where we feel like there are no cameras or lights around, and I’m just watching and I see something that I believe to be true happening in front of me ¾ that I maybe gave a little direction and might have helped in that way ¾ then that’s just total orgasm time for me! That’s something that no one can ever take away from you, that moment of that process. I really enjoy it. Not from a manipulative standpoint because I hope to never manipulate actors, but just that idea that you’ve all connected. I started out in music, and there’s no greater feeling than when you’re playing music with other people, and it hits what I call that resonant tone, where you just feel it reverberating in your body—that’s kind of that same thing. Each actor and yourself—you’re playing exactly the same piece of music at exactly the same rhythm.

LS: Ladder 49 has some technically breathtaking sequences. When you’re dealing with something like fire that is so unpredictable, how do you prepare to handle such technical material?

JR: All those sequences were storyboarded in advance. A lot of that is mechanics, so I approached it in that fashion, and then I storyboarded everything in advance, sat down with the effects coordinator, and I learned early on that digital fire doesn’t work. Forget it. Fire is too random and too erratic to be captured and recreated digitally, so that was out. We knew we were going to have to use real fire and put the actors in the fire, so we literally blueprinted out how we were going to do it.

I subscribe to the theory of making your film in prep, so we tested a lot. There are a couple of sequences that are in the film that we basically shot those entire sequences with just stunt players in advance. None of that footage is in the film. But we shot the entire sequences just to see if it were possible. It was a lot like shooting underwater. With the flames on I could only run the camera 30, 45 seconds at a time because everything would melt otherwise. So we just rehearsed it to the point of once we were shooting those sequences, we’d only do maybe three takes tops. We usually got them in a take or two, because it was all just well planned out in advance and really rehearsed in advance.

One little trick we did, certain explosive scenes in the film, obviously like when the big, tall grain structure blows up in the beginning, you get one take of that—there’s no take two. So we had like ten cameras running. You hit the button and it goes, and then you just hope that it works. The other sequences, like Joaquin’s first fire when he goes in and the apartment in engulfed in flames, I knew I was going to need multiple angles on that and I couldn’t get it all at once. How were we going to do that and not burn the set down on take one? So there’s a little clever thing that we figured out with the production designer is that the entire set was metal. It looks like wooden furniture or different pieces of wood, but it’s actually metal. And that was how we were going to get multiple takes. But then the metal basically became an oven. The temperature would literally go up to 800, 900 degrees when it was all rocking. So the people and the equipment just couldn’t be in there more than just a few seconds at a time. Even the crew—when we would turn the fire on, we had to have oxygen and everything because it would just suck the oxygen out of the place just like that.

It was a complex movie. I didn’t clearly approach it in any different fashion from the others, the scale just simply called for more preparation, more planning in advance than the others, but I prepared it the same way. The effects people live for movies like these. If you tell a guy you want something big, that’s like giving the green light to them. They like to go big. The big explosion, when he hit the button, I thought we had killed everybody in the place. It was f***ing giant! They had told the people on the news, ‘Don’t worry. There’s going to be this big explosion on Saturday night.’ When he hit the button, apparently like 600 911 calls came in! It was crazy!

LS: You say when you look back at your work you always want to makes changes. They say there’s the movie you plan to make, the one you actually shoot, and then the one you cut—which sometimes ends up 180 degrees away from the one you planned. How close is Ladder 49 to what you originally saw?

JR: It’s reasonably close. Now by the way, when I saw I’d want to remake all these movies, that doesn’t mean they necessarily would come out any better. They might even be worse! I wish we had the opportunity to get more into the detail of their lives and these little tales, because those are the films I always love, that are very detail oriented. That kind of filmmaking is not encouraged so much these days in the larger scale sense. So I’m always going to want more of that.

LS: You pull off some pretty emotional domestic scenes in the film, and though I wouldn’t call the film particularly sentimental, it is very affecting in the end.

JR: I feel that’s part of the amazing ability of a film—it is just pictures and sound on a wall, and yet it can move you. It can make you laugh, it can scare the hell out of you, it can move you. And if I’m moved by a film or something I read or a painting I see and all that, I’m in heaven for days.