Henry Winkler has opened up about the on-set clash that ended his directing job on a Tom Hanks film and left him “devastated.”
The “Happy Days” legend, 80, detailed the 1989 “Turner & Hooch” firing in a new interview on “In Depth With Graham Bensinger,” explaining how his working relationship with Hanks, 70, soured during the dog-cop comedy. Winkler had been hired to direct by then-studio executive Jeffrey Katzenberg and initially approached the project with enthusiasm.
“I now meet the puppies, and I meet with Tom [Hanks],” Winkler said of his early days on set.
The actor-turned-director admitted his own insecurity drove him to over-direct. “I, at that time being insecure, I talked too much and I gave them direction,” he continued. “I [did] what I thought was my job, and I wanted to do it over again; and apparently that pissed them off.”
The break came swiftly. Winkler recalled being summoned to Katzenberg’s office after less than two weeks of filming. “I’m called into Jeff Katzenberg’s office and he said, ‘It’s not in the dailies,'” he remembered. From there, the dismissal was abrupt: “I then go to the set. I get my things. I drive home. I’m fired as a director.”
Winkler acknowledged he “didn’t handle it well” at the time, and confessed he may not have been right for the material anyway, noting he wasn’t truly “suited” to direct the screwball comedy.
Before the collapse, there had been gestures of goodwill between the two stars. Winkler revealed that Hanks had built and gifted him a signed model airplane during their pre-production meetings. “While we were having meetings, he built a plastic Piper Cub or something like that,” he divulged.
The pair’s history actually stretched back further, to a time before Hanks became an Oscar-winning movie star. Winkler noted that Hanks had appeared as a guest star on “Happy Days” in 1982, where Winkler had already made his name as “the Fonz.” Years later, when Winkler helped assemble a retrospective of the sitcom, he sought to include Hanks’s brief appearance. “We wanted 60 seconds of Tom Hanks in his episode,” Winkler said, adding that they “did not get permission for that.”
The relationship’s trajectory has puzzled Winkler himself. When Bensinger pressed him on whether the dynamic might ever “repair itself,” Winkler responded with a single word: “Sure.” Yet he also admitted he’s “still working on” his “perspective” about where things stand now.
This candor marks a shift from Winkler’s previous public stance. Back in 2020, he flatly denied any rift existed, saying via Vanity Fair: “I don’t have a feud with Tom Hanks,” He added then: “What everybody says and what is true are two different things.”
The “Barry” and “Arrested Development” alum now frames the episode as a painful professional lesson born from his own overeagerness. The model plane, the 13 days of filming, the dailies meeting with Katzenberg — all became part of a Hollywood cautionary tale that Winkler carried for decades while building his later career as a celebrated character actor and children’s book author.
Winkler’s representatives did not immediately respond to requests for additional comment Wednesday.