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Hollywood director Robert Zemeckis calls "Flight" gripping human drama

"Flight", the latest feature film by acclaimed American director Robert Zemeckis, is a film that is "ripe with moral ambiguity" surrounding a troubled pilot hailed as a hero, the filmmaker said Monday.

"The film is ripe with moral ambiguity, which I believe is much more like a real life," the Academy Award-winning 61-year-old, who is visiting Seoul for promoting his first liveaction feature in 12 years, told reporters.

The movie, which opens with a jaw-dropping plane crash scene and develops into a harrowing human drama, portrays the struggle of an alcoholic pilot lionized for saving a flight from crashing.

"My take on (the film) was to see the torment that was going on in this individual where the outside world was heralding him as a hero but he in his heart knew that he was very flawed," Zemeckis said of the film's airline captain Whip Whitaker, played by Denzel Washington,

The director heaped praises on Washington, the Academy Award- winning "Training Day" actor nominated for an Oscar for his performance as a drunken pilot, calling him "magnificent" and " brilliantly talented."

"My process of working with him was very simple. We basically just spoke at great lengths about the characters," Zemeckis said." When we were on set shooting the film everything that he brought to the character was just very much right on the mark."

The "Forrest Gump" and "Cast Away" director is a pilot himself, which he said contributed to a certain degree to "authenticity to what was going on in the cockpit."

"What (the flight crew) were saying and doing was authentic,"he said.

The film, which opens in local theaters on Feb. 28, is also nominated for an Oscar for best screenplay.