An original in a remake

It took the persistent enthusiasm of director John Moore to persuade Australian-born actress Miranda Otto to finally sign on and head to Namibia for “Flight of the Phoenix.”

“To be honest, I didn’t really feel up to doing four months in Africa,” said Otto, who played Eowyn in two “Lord of the Rings” films. A remake of the 1965 Jimmy Stewart picture about a group of plane crash survivors, the new version also stars Dennis Quaid and Giovanni Ribisi. The movie is due out Dec. 22. When mentioning the project to friends, Otto was continually surprised by how many people had a strong affection for the original. She watched it for the first time during the shoot.

“Normally I wouldn’t do that,” she said, “but there was no character that was really comparable to my character. There were no women in the original.... And whenever you’re shooting something you go through a period about halfway through where you lose track of what you’re up to, what originally appealed to you, and having a look at the original film reminded me of what I liked when I first read the script.”

The addition of a woman usually means a romantic subplot. The movie eschews that convention, although Otto reports that nearly wasn’t so.

“There was originally, like any script, a little bit of romance in there. Dennis and I read that scene and looked at each other and said, ‘I don’t think so.’ ... So we ended up cutting all of that.”