Tom Hanks interrupts his own Sully Q&A at film festival to praise La La Land as the saviour of cinema

'If the audience doesn’t go and embrace something as wonderful as this then we are all doomed'

(Getty)

In a move he joked would probably irk the film’s studio Warner Bros, Tom Hanks went on a tangent in the middle of a Q&A session for Sully at Telluride Film Festival this week to heap praise on Damien Chazelle’s much-talked about La La Land.

“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,” he told the audience, before asking: “Who saw La La Land yesterday?”

Met with applause, Hanks continued: “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 anethema to studios. Number one, 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. (La La) 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.”

La La Land, Chazelle’s next film after the Oscar-winning Whiplash, stars Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling and has attracted some very positive reviews.

Heartened by the musical, Hanks said: “We all understand the business aspects of it. It’s cruel and it’s backbreaking and take-no-prisoners. But there’s always that chance where the audience sees something that is brand new, that they never expected, and embraces it, and celebrates it. “We might be in the luxurious position that we can say we don’t have to pay attention to the trends, but there are other people whose parking spaces with their names on them are paid to follow these trends.

“I don’t take anything away from them and there are some good movies that come out of that. But we all go to the cinema for the same thing, that is to be transported to someplace we have never been before.”

It all amounted to a bit of a dig at his own movie - Sully might not be a sequel, but the Clint Eastwood film does trade off the popularity of its real life hero protagonist, Chesley Sullenberger.