![]() Phillips tells his version of the gripping story in the 2010 book he coauthored with Stephan Talty, titled A Captain’s Duty: Somali Pirates, Navy SEALs, and Dangerous Days at Sea. The company has called their claims “meritless.”) As of last year, 11 had filed suit against Maersk for endangering their lives. (Some crewmembers alleged later that Phillips ignored warnings to keep his ship at least 600 miles from shore. ship since the early 19th century to be overtaken by pirates. The Maersk Alabama had the dubious distinction of being the first U.S. Somali pirates netted millions using this technique, but had generally avoided vessels flying American flags. All they want is the money and then release the ship. “They didn’t have the infrastructure to bring it to a port, discharge it, sell the cargo. “The modus operandi was: Take control of the ship, hijack the ship, control the people and then ransom the people,” Phillips explained within view of pirate-free Lake Champlain. The pirates weren’t after the Alabama’s cargo - five tons of which was food aid for the region. In the same week, there were 39 pirate sightings and five other attacks in those same waters around the Horn of Africa. The Maersk Alabama was 380 miles off the coast of Somalia, a country known for its losing combination of lawlessness and poverty. Phillips had been a merchant mariner for 30 years, 19 of them as a captain, when four pirates wielding AK-47s climbed aboard his ship on April 8, 2009. I was just trying to figure out a way to slow things down.” That’s the way it was in the beginning with me. “At times, you could see almost into his brain, trying to grasp things. (He does.)īut he saw himself in the actor’s eyes. What does Phillips think of the way Hanks portrayed him? The Massachusetts accent didn’t sound right to him, because Phillips doesn’t think he has one. And he gives props to the director of United 93 and Bloody Sunday for “portraying the scenes on the ship well” - particularly his crew, “and how instrumental they were in ensuring the ship was never hijacked, never controlled, due to their actions.” The captain said he knew his adventure would be simplified and abbreviated for the film format. He saw it for the first time at a private screening in Los Angeles, where everyone was worried that he’d have “flashbacks or something.” Phillips also had plenty to say about the 134-minute cinematic “story of a guy at sea in peril,” as he sums up the Greengrass docudrama. A fourth, who was not in the vessel at the time, is being held in a U.S. ![]() He too made fun of the media - “I have a deadline! I have a deadline!” he mocked the reporters who covered his ordeal - but patiently answered questions about the “incident,” as he refers to it, that came to an end when Navy SEAL sharpshooters killed three of the captors with whom Phillips shared a lifeboat. On the day of our interview, Phillips was just back from three months at sea and two days out from the celeb-studded, black-tie event. ‘What was it like? What did you feel?’ You don’t want to ask questions like most journalists do.” In the event you get to meet that person face-to-face, “You don’t want to be the idiot. You have to read a lot,” the Los Angeles Times quoted Hanks as saying. “You have to load up on an awful lot of facts. At the New York Film Festival premiere last Friday, which Phillips and his family attended, the actor talked about the burden of playing a true-life character. That might have made it harder for Hanks. His background and training - growing up Irish in the Boston area, attending the militaristic Massachusetts Maritime Academy, guiding giant ships loaded with crew and cargo through the world’s most perilous waters - prepared Phillips to survive a life-threatening event, but not necessarily to psychoanalyze it. That guy would be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, and Phillips doesn’t appear to be - he says he hasn’t even dreamt about his high-seas misadventure, which included several mock executions. Phillips may look like your average Joe, but he’s not. It’s no wonder Tom Hanks, who portrays Phillips in the new reality-based film from director Paul Greengrass, came to Vermont three times to study the longtime merchant mariner who sacrificed himself as a hostage to save his 18-man crew - then endured five days of psychological torture in a lifeboat. ![]() Then came a belly laugh - the first of many - that seemed totally incongruous with the Vermonter’s harrowing experience as a hostage in the hands of trigger-happy Somali pirates. How does the real Captain Phillips rate the movie version of his private pirate drama? “It was worse living it than watching it,” the 58-year-old Underhill resident said matter-of-factly last Wednesday on the deck of Burlington’s Ice House.
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