One problem that held the film back is the scale of the story. There is the Tuskegee part with racism in Alabama; the adventure part in the war in Europe and the civil rights movement when they return. “So when you try to make that one big story, it is just is very hard to film,” he said. In the end, the filmmakers opted for a standard two-hour length rather than an epic.

“So we are doing just the action-adventure part of the guys arriving [in Europe]. It was quite ironic; the Italians loved them because they were consummate gentleman. … The Germans had the greatest respect for them; when they were shot down and put into camps they were always treated as officers. But [the Germans] couldn’t believe they would continue to fight for the US when they were treated so badly in their own army,” he said, adding that while the pilots were all officers, they were not allowed to use the officers’ clubs in the US Army because the clubs at that time were for whites only due to segregation rules.

“It’s a low-budget film: $30 million is low budget when you have a film that has 1,500 visual effects shots and they are all aerial shots,” McCallum said. [...] With so many computer-generated visual effects, cost remained an issue. Rather than rely on Industrial Light & Magic, the computer effects firm that has won 15 Oscars, a Czech firm was hired for most of the shots. “Even though [Lucasfilm] owns one of the most famous visual effects companies, I couldn’t afford to use them [for all the shots]. So we are using a [Czech] company called UPP. Francis Coppola introduced me to them; he had made a small film where he needed about 20 to 30 effects. … They are doing a substantial number of the shots [for ‘Red Tails’] and they doing a fantastic, incredible job,” he said. Among UPP’s many previous credits are the World War II aviation film “Dark Blue World” and the TV film “Flight 93” about the one of the planes hijacked on 9/11, as well as more recent films such as “Salt.”

If and when the Star Wars TV series is made — and 50 hours of scripts are now ready — a large part of it will be shot in the Czech Republic, producer Rick McCallum told Czech Position in an interview. The main reason behind the choice is the efficiency of Czech film crews, he says. Right now the cost of special effects is too high, McCallum says, but the project should go forward in a few years.

...McCallum also said that Lucas lobbied for the incentives in relation to his planned Star Wars TV series, asking the government why it wouldn’t want him to come and spend hundreds of millions of dollars over several years, training a whole generation of filmmakers in the process. Once the commitment was made in 2009 to finally adopt incentives, there was a lot of momentum. ...