Brow Beat

Tom Hanks Just Spent a Sully Q&A Talking About How Great La La Land Is

Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling in La La Land, Tom Hanks–approved.

Lionsgate/Summit Entertainment

Film festival Q&As usually follow a pretty rigid template, right down to the long-winded audience member who has “more of a statement than a question.” According to Deadline, Tom Hanks broke the pattern Saturday morning at the Telluride Film Festival, interrupting an event for Sully, the Clint Eastwood film Hanks stars in, to talk at length about how much he loved Damien Chazelle’s film La La Land. Clint Eastwood was talking about how he had wanted Sully to be a different sort of film when Hanks interrupted to go off on a tangent:

I like to think we approach movies the same way we approach being members of the audience in that you just want to see something you have never seen before. It’s funny. Who saw La La Land yesterday? When you see something that is brand new, that you can’t imagine, and you think “well thank God this landed,” because I think a movie like La La Land would be anathema to studios. No. 1, it is a musical, and no one knows the songs. … This is not a movie that falls into some sort of trend. I think it is going to be a test of the broader national audience, because it has none of the things that major studios want. Pre-awareness is a big thing they want, which is why a lot of remakes are going on. It is not a sequel, nobody knows who the characters are. … But if the audience doesn’t go and embrace something as wonderful as this then we are all doomed.

Hanks joked that Warner Bros. would be unhappy with him for spending his time on stage plugging a film from Lionsgate/Summit Entertainment. (If anything, Warner Bros. CEO Kevin Tsujihara might be more unhappy at Hanks’ swipes at the studio’s larger strategy, which is built around franchises and superheroes—pre-awareness, in other words.) Hanks’ gushing is the latest in a growing drumbeat of praise for the Los Angeles–based musical since its Venice premiere Tuesday. The preterite souls of the moviegoing public will have to wait until La La Land’s Dec. 2 release to form their own opinions, and, according to Hanks, save us all from doom. Until then, we’ll have to make do with the film’s two trailers. Sully, on the other hand, comes out Sept. 9—and it stars someone who loved La La Land.

Correction, Sept. 4, 2016: This post’s photo caption originally misidentified Emma Stone as Emma Watson.