Miracle Maker
You’d have thought that half of Hollywood would’ve raced to make a movie about the “Miracle on the Hudson.” On Jan. 15, 2009, Captain Chesley Sullenberger and co-pilot Jeff Skiles successfully set down their bird-damaged airliner on the river next to Manhattan, and all 155 people on board were soon safely off-loaded.
Sullenberger instantly became a national hero whose calm, capable demeanor made him even more admirable. It was the very competence on display during and after the saga of US Airways Flight 1549, though, that may have delayed the story’s filmic fictionalization for more than seven years.
But it’s finally here. Called “Sully” after the pilot’s household nickname, the movie is directed by Clint Eastwood and stars Tom Hanks in the title role and Aaron Eckhart as Skiles.
“There were a few discussions before, but nothing really came of them,” Sullenberger, now 65, explains in his trademark eventoned yet fiercely precise voice. “So when I heard that Clint had read the script, that was very good news.”
Said screenplay, carefully researched by Todd Komarnicki and partially based on the book Sullenberger wrote with Jeffrey Zaslow, “Highest Duty,” about the incident, answered the question that had baffled Eastwood and just about everyone else in town. How do you make a feature film out of a story that had less than five minutes worth of tension from goose-strike engine failure to river landing, and then took New York harbor rescue craft under half an hour to safely rescue all the passengers and crew?
“When Clint first got the script, he said his first question was, ‘Who is the antagonist?’ “Sullenberger reports. “‘Where is the conflict? Where is the drama?’ Because we all think we know the story and that it ends well. Then he began to read, he was like, ‘Aha, it’s the investigation.’ The investigation is inherently an adversarial process.”
The film intercuts flashbacks to events in the air and on the water with the National Transportation Safety Board’s inquiry into whether or not Sully and Sykes made the right decision, as opposed to attempting to return to La Guardia Airport where they’d just taken off from or attempting to land at a field in New Jersey.
The movie sets the NTSB inquiry in the few days right after the incident; it actually began months later in 2009 and was still underway when Sullenberger’s book was published. This bit of temporal creative license allows for scenes inside Sully’s head as he and Sykes cool their heels in a New York hotel.
And that’s when “Sully” turns into a real Eastwood movie, examining the not-always heroic, emotional mindscapes of men who do extraordinary things. That theme runs through many of the director’s most impressive works, from the Oscar-winning “Unforgiven” to his last feature and biggest box-office hit, “American Sniper.”
And that part of the movie is very true, says the only guy who would know.
“First of all, it was a very sudden, shocking event; huge startle factor during the flight after so many decades of routine airline flying where we try so hard to never be surprised by anything,” Sullenberger recalls. “We were very suddenly, in seconds, confronted with what we knew would be the ultimate challenge of our lives.
“It was the worst day of my life, the hardest day of my life, and ultimately it was one of the better days of my life because of the good outcome. But we all had intense response to that, physiologically. I think we were in shock for a couple of days afterward. It interfered with our sleep; our blood pressure and pulse were elevated for months. The intensity of that was just such that it affected everything that we did. It took effort to work through that and process it and come out the other end as a healthy, whole person.
“That part of it is really a story that people don’t know,” Sullenberger says of the film’s revelations. “Not just the investigation, but the effect that this had on everyone on the airplane and their families for some time. They do a great job of capturing the emotional temperature of the flight and aftermath through the whole film.”
While Hanks only spent half a day with Sully at his Bay Area home pre-production, the retired pilot is impressed by how well the actor caught him.
“We talked about the challenges of playing a real person who’s still living, going through the script and those kinds of things,” Sullenberger recalls. “But he never really talked to me about how he was going to portray me; that’s something he did on his own. He did say that he watched a lot of videotape — and there’s a lot out there — to find out how to portray me, and I think that comes across. When I watch the film, it’s such a
nuanced performance, and he’s so good at his craft ... I couldn’t tell you what techniques he used, but it seems genuine; it seems like me.”
When that other major movie star visited the Sullenberger home in Danville, the discussion was mostly about lives and families. And, also, the one thing Eastwood and Sully have most in common.
“I’d learned about it before I’d met Clint, and we did talk about the fact that, when he was an enlisted man in the Army at Fort Ord, he’d gone to Washington state to see his parents and on the way back, flying in a single-engine Navy plane, they’d ditched off Point Reyes,” Sullenberger says. “They had to swim ashore as it was getting dark in what turned out to be shark-infested waters. They didn’t see any out there; it’s what they learned later.”
Sullenberger learned to fly at age 16 in his hometown of Denison, Texas. A graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy, he rose to the rank of captain before starting his commercial pilot career in 1980. Speaking fees and such enabled him to retire from US Airways in 2010, and he continues to work as an aviation safety expert.
“Airline travel in the developed world has never been safer,” he says with authority. “It’s a remarkably safe time. My concern is that the airline industry will not keep trying as hard as they could to continue to make it safer. I don’t want them to rest on their laurels. We have gotten to the point where we can no longer define safety solely as the absence of accidents. We need to be more proactive than that. We need to continue to look for systemic risks and latent conditions that might lead to a bad outcome and mitigate them before they do.
“There are a lot of areas that continue to need attention and we haven’t solved yet,” Sully concludes. “So I’m using my bully pulpit to try to be an advocate for those issues. I’m not done yet.” Contact Bob Strauss at rstrauss@scng.com or @ bscritic on Twitter.