Tom Hanks plays Miracle on the Hudson pilot Chesley Sullenberger in Clint Eastwood’s hotly buzzed “Sully” — but he can thank Harrison Ford for the film.
Back in 2010, Sullenberger ran into Ford (who’s crash-landed his own plane) in Washington, DC, where Sullenberger asked Ford for advice on how to get his book, “Highest Duty,” turned into a film, sources told us.
Ford told Sully, “Call my friend, Frank Marshall,” the producer of “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” Marshall came on board, but it took five years to get the movie made.
On Wednesday in New York, Hanks spoke at a lunch on the Intrepid hosted by ex-NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly, and Hanks jokingly recalled Sullenberger going through every page of the script with him during production.
“I said, ‘Do you have any problems with [the script?’] . . . And he had a number of problems on a number of pages — every single page!” Hanks said. But “most of it was procedure and nomenclature and process.”
At the lunch, Sullenberger said of his heroic landing after a bird strike caused both engines to fail that “of the 35 recommendations made . . . only two or three have been adopted by the airline. Very little has changed . . . It could happen again tomorrow.”
Meanwhile, Sullenberger’s wife, Lorrie, told us of the finished film: “The only thing that isn’t accurate? I would never have worn plaid.”