Clint Eastwood has starred in and directed many excellent Hollywood movies. But one script instantly made him fall in love with the project he would go on to direct.
The film in question was Sully: Miracle on the Hudson, the retelling of the 2009 Hudson River plane crash in which the pilot saved 155 lives.
The Tom Hanks movie screenwriter is Todd Komarnicki, the producer of Elf, who most recently wrote, produced and directed the Bonhoeffer biopic.
Eastwood previously told Film Ink: “The script sat on my desk for almost a week. I was going home one night, and my assistant said, ‘Take these scripts with you. Look at the untitled script about the miracle on the Hudson.’ So I went home and I started reading the other scripts. She kept mentioning the script about the Hudson all week, so I thought, ‘I better read this!’ I did, and then I was thinking, ‘Why the hell wasn’t I reading this script instead of those other turkeys?’”
Eastwood continued: “I just fell in love with it right away. I thought that I knew all about the miracle on the Hudson, because I followed the news very carefully when that happened. Then all of a sudden, it made sense. The first thing that I started asking myself was, ‘What’s the conflict there? This guy lands a plane and saves 155 people…where’s the conflict?’ Well, Chesley Sullenberger went through all of these periods of self-doubt inspired by the national transportation society or whatever the hell it’s called. He had to actually prove his decisions, and they came out to be the right decisions. Then it became very dramatic, and that’s what I was looking for.
“My first thought was, ‘Well, this must be a wonderful event, but who wants to see a whole movie about it?’ Then we get to live through it and we have all the various emotions about all the characters and all the different attitudes that you have about that. Then there’s his family life, and how it affects him and his self-reliance. So it became a fascinating story in the end. All I did was add some things, like the dream sequences, so the viewer could see what it was like in his head to make those decisions.”
Daily Express interviewed the Sully screenwriter himself earlier this year, and he claimed that Eastwood, who is almost 95, will never retire.
Todd told us: “Working with Clint Eastwood was a complete dream. Now when you meet your heroes and they far surpass your highest expectation of them, that’s what happened with Clint. And really I got into directing because I stood next to Clint Eastwood. What I saw on his set was the proper way to make a movie. No ego, no rushing, a deep calmness, a deep trust. He also loves writers, so he doesn’t mess with the script. So he shot every word that I had written, which is obviously very nice. But he’s lovely, he’s funny and kind and inclusive, and it was a massive blessing to work with Clint. I can’t imagine him retiring, I think it’s more likely that he would die on set at 102 then retire.”