Director Clint Eastwood reportedly admitted that he needed a villain.
When the movie Sully opens in theaters today, Tom Hanks will stand in as the eponymous hero whose 2009 splash-landing in the river—aka the “Miracle on the Hudson”—turned US Airways Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger into an instant celebrity. Directed by Clint Eastwood, it has all the elements of a gripping story: a terrifying near-disaster, in which everyone mercifully survives.
But the filmmakers faced one big problem: Where’s the suspense? The facts are well-known: The flight itself lasted all of four minutes—from take off at New York’s LaGuardia Airport, to that unlucky collision with aflock of geese that took out both engines, after which passengers endured a heart-stopping ride as Sully and his co-pilot Jeff Skiles made the call to ditch the Airbus A320 in an icy Hudson River rather than return to the airport. The evacuation and water rescue took only 24 minutes, as ferries and other vessels in the area quickly came to the rescue. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigation and public hearing that followed were anticlimactic—the crew, including the three flight attendants on board, had done the right thing, according to the board's final report.
That’s, well, kind of boring. Director Eastwood has admitted that he needed a villain. “Where’s the antagonist?” he reportedly asked when approached about the project. Sully’s best-selling book, Highest Duty, was more inspirational than a tell-all, and offered no candidates for the role of black hat. So the filmmakers solved their no-drama problem, in true Hollywood fashion, by making one up.
Actually, they made up an entire band of baddies: a glowering tribunal of investigators who torment Sully and Skiles for days immediately after the accident, not just questioning their decisions, but contradicting their accounts. While they’re identified in the film as NTSB officials, that’s where the resemblance to reality ends. These celluloid NTSB sleuths are fictional characters—an odd twist, given that almost all the other people depicted on screen, like passenger Jim Stefanik, and air traffic controller Patrick Harten, who took Sully’s mayday call, are real people identified by their actual names.
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