Henry Winkler Tom Hanks tension resurfaced as Winkler said he is still working on his perspective after being fired 13 days into directing Turner & Hooch. He revisited the split while speaking on In Depth With Graham Bensinger, putting a long-running rift back into the open without adding any new resolution.
13 days on Turner & Hooch
13 days into the 1989 comedy Turner & Hooch, Winkler was out, even though the film starred Tom Hanks. Winkler said he had reservations about taking the directing job from the start and that he was hand-picked by a Paramount executive despite his own doubts.
“I went completely against my tummy, and it hit me in the face with a 2x4,” he said. That is the core business story here: a filmmaker who accepted a high-profile assignment against his instincts and lost the job before the production could settle.
Carmel, California
During a location scout in Carmel, California, Winkler said the friction began to look obvious. He recalled a woman running out of a shop and recognizing him as Fonzie from Happy Days, then not recognizing Tom Hanks standing nearby.
“We were in Carmel, this little seaside wonderful town on the coast of California, looking for a location, and a woman comes, honest to God, comes running out of a shop and says 'Henry, Fonz! Oh, my god!'” Winkler said. He added, “And I say, 'And, of course, you know Tom Hanks.'”
Winkler said a director of photography later told him, “I knew that this was going to happen, on that day in Carmel.” That detail does the work of explaining why the firing became part of the story rather than just the end of a short directing run.
Happy Days and 60 seconds
At a later point, Winkler said the tension carried into a Happy Days retrospective when his team sought 60 seconds of Tom Hanks’s guest appearance. “We did a retrospective of Happy Days, and we wanted 60 seconds of Tom Hanks in his episode and we did not get permission for that,” he said.
Winkler has also said the relationship is not as simple as a feud. In 2020, he told TMZ, “I don't have a feud with Tom Hanks. What everybody says and what is true are two different things.” He also said he had a warm run-in with Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson at an awards show shortly before the pandemic.
Hanks has never publicly addressed the tension, which leaves Winkler as the only one of the two speaking in public on the record. For readers tracking the dispute, the practical takeaway is that the firing remains the fixed point, while the explanation still comes from Winkler’s side alone.
