How Tom Hanks and Clint Eastwood found drama in Miracle on the Hudson
The story’s happy ending is well known, but, as director and lead actor explain, their focus is on the months after pilot Chesley Sullenberger’s daring water landing, when he had to justify his actions under intense official questioning
On a cool January afternoon in 2009, people looking out over the Hudson River in New York couldn’t believe their eyes: a US Airways Airbus looked like it was falling out of the sky. Then it descended from the air and landed right in the middle of the water. Within minutes, the 155 traumatised but mostly unhurt passengers and crew were standing on the partially submerged wings, waiting to be taken ashore by emergency rescue crews.
The pilot, Chesley Sullenberger, became a global hero, with the event nicknamed the Miracle on the Hudson.
A flock of birds had flown into both engines of his plane soon after he took off from New York’s LaGuardia Airport for Charlotte in North Carolina – a 90-minute hop he routinely flew. With no power from either engine, he didn’t think he could make it back to an airfield. Dropping into the Hudson was, he thought, his only option.
That split-second decision is at the heart of Sully, an IMAX-shot film directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Tom Hanks as the pilot who became a household name. Because everyone knows how the story ends – no deaths, everyone safe, a miracle of happenstance and skillful execution – Eastwood wasn’t initially sure that it was movie fodder.
“The first thing I was asked when presented with the project was, ‘Where’s the conflict? Where’s the basis of the drama?’” Eastwood says on a recent afternoon in Los Angeles. “But there was a part that the general public never got.”
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In the months after the emergency landing, as Sullenberger was being praised and given all sorts of commendations, and as he was writing what would become a bestselling book, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) launched a complex and intensive investigation. Which meant that Sullenberger, instead of being held up as a model pilot, was forced to defend his actions, and to answer the question: did he, alongside his co-pilot, really have to ditch his plane in a river?