When America needs a hero, Tom Hanks gets the call. While he might not be a superhero, when cinema needs a grounded everyman to keep a cool head, save the day, and perhaps teach us a little lesson about Main Street values, you generally can’t go wrong with Hanks. And having him play Captain Chelsey Sullenberger almost seems too easy.
“Sully,” the latest Oscar bait from Clint Eastwood, will detail the heroic effort of the titular pilot to save the passengers of US Airways Flight 1549 when the plane hit a flock of birds on takeoff. And if you’re wondering where the drama might be in the story, Hanks explains that the fact that Sully (and other characters he’s played) are ordinary humans in extraordinary situations is the compelling draw for him.
“They are not men with nerves of steel. The thing that has attracted me to all of those characters is they are fighting the terror that is inside them. For example, in all the reading in much of the research that I did for ‘Saving Private Ryan‘ was the terror that men in command felt in combat. … I have this verbatim from a number of people … that they were afraid of making the mistake that was going to get other people killed,” he told NPR. “That is a huge burden of command, and it’s something that you have to fight and tamp down, and you can’t allow yourself a moment of hesitation, and that faith in oneself is a very — that’s the difference between success and failure. It’s not easy to do….”
“All of these guys have some degree of accomplishment, but it has been learned and earned at the same time,” he continued. “No one is made a captain of a cargo ship without an extraordinary amount of experience behind them, and that brand of terror or loss of your own self-confidence, look, that’s something that everybody goes through at some point. My life has never been in jeopardy ever once, but the artistic creative process of one is still based on your ability to fight down those doubts of yourself, and you have to move forward. … And you cannot sweat too much the possibility that you are making a wrong mistake.”
“Sully” arrives on September 9th.
