Eastwood's 'Sully': 'People Are Ready' For This
“I wanted that sense of our common humanity to be a big, underlying current in the film, and it really is."
9.2.2016
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Variety reported earlier this week about director Clint Eastwood's upcoming movie Sully, based on the real-life heroism of pilot Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger, whose cool head and steady hand saved a planeload of passengers from frozen death in the Hudson River in 2009. The Hollywood trade paper called the film "more unapologetically optimistic than anything the 86-year-old veteran filmmaker has directed in recent memory."
Two-time Oscar winner Tom Hanks, who portrays Sully, said of the movie,
“In the political atmosphere we’re in, there are an awful lot of points being made on [the notion that] you can’t count on people and institutions because they’re all broken — that none of them work. Well, that’s nonsense. They’re not all broken. And you can still have faith in them. And, in that regard, I think this movie makes a really strong case.”
The retired Sullenberger himself, now mostly a motivational speaker, is “thrilled” over the movie Eastwood, Hanks, and company have created:
“I wanted that sense of our common humanity to be a big, underlying current in the film, and it really is. This happened at a time, after the 2008-2009 financial meltdown, when it seemed like everything was going wrong. People were wondering if everything was about self-interest and greed. They were doubting human nature. Then all these people acted together, selflessly, to get something really important done. In a way, I think it gave everyone a chance to have hope, at a time when we all needed it.”
The film, of course, will center on the pilot’s split-second decisions after the Airbus A320’s engines flame out following a collision with a flock of Canadian geese. But the film also captures the can-do spirit of other everyday heroes as well, from the co-pilot and flight attendants to ferry boat captains and even the passengers. That drama is interspersed with scenes of a teenage Sullenberger learning to fly a crop duster in Texas, then graduating to the Air Force.
The $60 million movie began as an adaptation of Sullenberger’s memoir Highest Duty: My Search for What Really Matters. It was shot over five weeks on location in New York, Atlanta, and on the Warners and Universal lots. A real Airbus jet was floated atop Falls Lake at Universal, with green-screen images of the Hudson added later.
As Variety notes, Eastwood included some of the real-life rescuers in the river scenes. “That was in the spirit of Sully saying, ‘Everyone did their job that day,’” said Hanks. “If you were there that day, you could come and be part of the shoot, and what was going to be a part of the popular record of what happened that day.”
“For me, the real conflict came after,” Eastwood said, “with the investigative board questioning his decisions, even though he’d saved so many lives.”
“If ‘Sully’ resonates in the broader sociological sense,” Hanks said, “I think it’s because it’s an example of our institutions actually living up to their responsibilities. I think people are ready for that.”
Eastwood's most recent film was the blockbuster American Sniper, about another American hero, the late Chris Kyle.Sully opens September 9.
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