Synopsis

Nick Falzone (John Cusack) is a happy man with a charming wife Connie (Cate Blanchett) and father of two kids. He "pushes tin" at New York's Terminal Radar Approach Control (TRACON) center. Part catacomb, part frat house, TRACON is the chaotic air traffic facility on Long Island that handles up to 7,000 flights a day into and out of the finite airspace above Kennedy, LaGuardia and Newark airports. Nick works the Newark radar scopes, the busiest of them all, and he is the best of the best.

That is, until Russell Bell (Billy Bob Thornton) comes to town. Russell - a cross between a motorcycle-riding cowboy and a Zen master - has come to New York looking for heavier traffic. Fueled by caffeine and machismo, a rivalry ensues between Nick and Russell. The one-upmanship becomes a contest of wits and wills, where stress is the great equalizer and bravado is the lowest common denominator, a game where the winner - not the loser - could lose it all…his job, his marriage, his mind.

Mike Newell, director
"It is a dynamic exploration of a high stress work process, and work and stress are absolutely at the core of this story. I love that aspect of it because work and stress is universal. Everyone believes that their job is uniquely stressful. Whether you talk to an insurance salesman or a steelworker or a gardener, they all will tell you that what they do is more stressful than anything else. That idea, that everyone's job is stressing them to death, made me laugh."

"In the world of air traffic controllers, it is no different. It's a frantic, chaotic job in which there are enormous dangers and very disruptive energies. It's an outlandish, almost secret world that not many people know about. When you watch them work, organizing blips on a radar screen, controlling pilots and aircraft that don't really want to be controlled, you see that these guys are all silver-backed gorillas. There is not one of them who doesn't think that he's the biggest and the best. With that kind of attitude, you can see how superheated, dangerous rivalries could spring up all over the place if you get them positioned where one locks horns with another."

Britain's Mike Newell most recently directed the highly acclaimed mob tale Donnie Brasco, which was Oscar-nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay. His other celebrated feature film credits include Four Weddings and a Funeral, which was honored with two Academy Award nominations, Enchanted April, which won Golden Globe Awards for Miranda Richardson and Joan Plowright, Into the West, a script by Jim Sheridan which starred Gabriel Byrne and Ellen Barkin, The Good Father, which starred Anthony Hopkins and won the Prix Italia in 1985, and the 1985 Cannes Film Festival winner Dance with a Stranger, starring Miranda Richardson, Rupert Everett and Ian Holm.