Given the special place that the air force holds in the Israeli psyche – Israeli Air Force pilots are regarded with reverence as the most elite of all fighters and young recruits dream of joining the IAF, although most can’t make the cut – it’s surprising that until now, there hasn’t been a rousing movie about the IAF, an Israeli Top Gun.
But that has changed with the recent release throughout Israel of Air War, a movie by Roy Hornshtein, which tells an upbeat story of an IAF base on the eve of the Six Day War, featuring handsome stars, romance, rivalry between two hotshot pilots, and, most important, realistic-looking, thrilling aerial battles.
Maor Schwitzer plays Ran Nesher, a brash, fearless daredevil who is appointed to command an IAF squadron in the days leading up to the 1967 war, while Daniel Litman plays Eitan, his rival, who feels threatened by this new commander, and this rivalry drives most of the plot.
The supporting cast includes Gily Itskovitch as a female soldier stationed at the base, while Lihi Kornowski plays the wife of another pilot.
Hornshtein, who worked for 15 years to bring this story to the screen and was interviewed by phone recently on a break from military reserve duty, said he had long wondered why no one had mined the IAF for on-screen drama: “How is it that no one made a movie about the Israeli Air Force? Every day, it’s a screenwriter’s dream, you can’t make this stuff up.”
Until now, oddly, the most famous film about that war was Rafi Barkai’s 1986 movie, Avanti Popolo, about an Egyptian Shakespearean actor trapped behind Israeli lines when the ceasefire is declared, and has nothing to do with Israel’s military triumph.
Knowing he wanted to tell a story about the IAF, he chose Operation Focus, “One of the greatest achievements for any air force, ever,” he said.
In Operation Focus, which began on June 5, 1967, the IAF destroyed much of the Egyptian Air Force on the ground in the morning and then went on to bomb Jordanian and Syrian air bases later in the day. This did much to disable the aerial capabilities of these countries, paving the way for a swift military victory for the Israeli army.
Hornshtein is not a pilot himself, but served in artillery, so he relied on research and experts to help guide him in telling the story.
“I could have done a film about artillery, but it wouldn’t have been as cool as a movie about the air force,” he said.
Inspired by Top Gun
He grew up loving the Star Wars series and 1980s fighter-pilot movies such as Top Gun and Iron Eagle, which starred Louis Gossett Jr., and he dreamed of making such a film here.
But the Tel Aviv-born director and father of three, who makes commercials, didn’t anticipate that it would take him 15 years to realize his vision of bringing Operation Focus to the screen.
He was surprised to learn, when he began working on the film that, “Most people today have no idea what I’m talking about when I tell them about it. I didn’t intend to put a title at the beginning and at the end but when we realized that people don’t know about it today, we added it. I even talk to pilots today who don’t really know about it.”
Most of the characters are based on real people, he said, and all the dogfights depicted in the movie are based on actual battles.
“Everything that is shown in the film happened at some point,” he said, although not every battle depicted took place during the Six Day War.
As he researched the film and interviewed veteran pilots, he was impressed by what he learned.
“These stories are so incredible. Like Giora Epstein, he’s the only one who’s got 17 downed MIGs – the world record.... It’s really an amazing thing to tell these people’s stories.”
One story that stuck with him was the time that Epstein faced 20 enemy MIGs alone.
“I asked, how did you have the guts, how did you have the courage? And he said, ‘It’s not about courage, it’s technical. Behind me there was only room for one of them. To shoot me down, one of them has to get on my tail. And he has to be pretty close and there can be 100 in the sky, there can be a thousand, it doesn’t matter, there’s only one behind me at a time.... And if I have fuel, I’ll keep flying.’ And in that particular engagement, I think he shot down seven planes.”
BUT LEARNING these incredible stories was one thing; bringing them to life was another. “It’s a very technical movie. We had to buy a Kfir jet and we had to cut the cockpit out and it was very complicated. First we had to take off the wings. We had to find guys who were technicians way back when who could tell us how to do it, because first you had to balance the plane and it’s a whole lot of mess.... We had to modify two Mirage jets at the IAF Museum and we had to buy another Kfir and cut out the cockpit so we could shoot the interiors of the dogfight.”
Knowing how to use animation to bring the battles to life was another challenge. “Even though the technology is available, you have to be very precise, you have to know what you want to do. You can’t just go to an animation studio and say, ‘I want to do a big fight sequence and say the planes are going up and are going to bomb the base.’”
It was also important for him to work with the actors and introduce them to pilots who could coach them on how to be authentic playing their parts.
“We took the actors to a real combat squadron to watch the takeoff of four F-15 Eagles, it was explained to them, and they soaked it up. The two [lead] actors Maor Schwitzer and Daniel Litman... are amazing. Both of them have Hollywood leading man A-lister qualities. I was blown away by how nuanced their performances were and how they were larger than life, like Clark Gable, Jimmy Stewart-type performances.”
He also has praise for the supporting cast, including Gily Itskovitch who spoke to female veterans who had worked on air force bases and learned how much of the planning and coordination was done by female soldiers, even though they were not pilots at the time. The movie delves into some of the sexism at that time.
“There were issues back then and not showing [them] would be ignoring history.”
While the idea for the film may seem like a no-brainer now, it took over five years to convince the Israel Film Fund to contribute to the budget.
“It’s patriotic, it’s not the typical Israeli film.”
Eventually, they came on board, as did the Shomron Film Fund and other funds.
Many years before he made the full movie, he made a 3D-pilot version to show off the visual effects to producer Moshe Edery, when Hornshtein was working as a projectionist at Edery’s flagship theater, Cinema City Glilot.
“I had a shot of a plane coming right at the camera and his head went back, and I knew that I had him,” he said. Many years later, Edery became one of the film’s producers.
One sad note as Hornshtein savors the Air War release is that Lior Waitzman, who worked on the sound effects for the film, was killed by Hamas on October 7 in Sderot.
“He did such a great job.... He loved working on this because in most movies in Israel, it’s usually two people talking, he didn’t get too many chances like this.”
Hornshtein said that despite the tragedy that began this war, his movie is appropriate for Israeli audiences right now.
“In Israel, heroes are celebrated usually with grief on Remembrance Day.... It doesn’t have to be like this. Heroes sometimes survive.... We’re going through a tough time now and this is a great time to celebrate heroes.”