Reteaming for the first time in over a decade, Steven Spielberg‘s Bridge of Spies follows Tom Hanks the true story of James B. Donovan as an unblemished Brooklyn lawyer who becomes involved in defending a suspected KGB agent (Mark Rylance). The snappy, propulsive part-courtroom drama, part-international thriller held its world premiere at the New York Film Festival, but shortly before the director and his cast gathered to discuss the making of the project.
We’ve highlighted the most worthwhile discussion points, including an original iteration half-a-century ago that never went into production, the relevance of the film today, collaborating with Joel and Ethan Coen, who co-wrote the script, Spielberg’s updated thoughts on the state of Hollywood, and much more. Check it out below.
Steven Spielberg on Finding the Story and Gregory Peck’s Original Iteration
Upon coming to the material, Spielberg said, “I knew nothing about this story two years ago. I knew about Gary Powers because that was big news and it was national news when he was shot down and taken prisoner in the Soviet Union. I knew nothing about how he got out of the Soviet Union. I knew nothing about Rudolf Abel. I knew nothing about James B. Donovan. That all came to me, as all I think all good stories come to us, in a surprise package. There was no brand preceding Bridge of Spies. It was simply a piece of history that was so compelling, personally for me, to know something like this — a man who stood on his principles and defied everybody hating him and his family for what he thought he needed to do — equal protection under the law even for an alien in this country, even for a Soviet accused to be a spy — that was to me a righteous reason to tell this story.”
In a fascinating tidbit, there was an early iteration of the project. Spielberg said, “I was meeting with the Donovan family. I was meeting with the two daughters and the son this morning and I found out something I had never knew before. In 1965, Gregory Peck came after the story and [he] got Alec Guinness to agree to play Abel. Gregory Peck was going to play Donovan and they got Stirling Silliphant to write the script. Then MGM said at the time, ‘No. I don’t think we’re going to tell this story.’ I didn’t even know that a couple of hours ago. So we weren’t the first. As to why the studio didn’t want to move forward, he answers, “It was 1965 and Bay of Pigs had happened and the Cuban Missile Crisis has been averted about a year and a half before and the tensions were too taut between the Soviets and the United States of America for MGM to get into the politics of the story.”
Mary Rylance on Meeting Steven Spielberg for Empire of the Sun
In my review, I noted that “it’s clear why Spielberg went on to cast Mark Rylance as the title character in his forthcoming adaptation of The BFG. His character, Rudolf Abel, primarily factors into the first half of the story and is shrouded in mystery. Yet Rylance brings forth physical ticks and gestures that keep one on edge, never outright stating his allegiance as he cheekily plays off Donovan, thus giving the character unexpected likability.”
While Rylance was coy about forming his character, he did talk about coming on board and an earlier meeting with Spielberg a few decades back. “I just heard a message that Steven was interested in me playing this part,” Rylance said. “We had met each other back in the ’80’s and I had not been able to take part in the wonderful film he made called Empire of the Sun so I was very delighted that he came to me again and asked me to take part in this and I could work with these people. It was a no brainer.”
Steven Spielberg on the Relevance of Bridge of Spies Today
After Lincoln was released around the presidential election back in 2012, Spielberg was asked about the relevance of his most recent film. “It’s interesting about the national conversation. It keeps changing everyday,” he said. “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make the national conversation your priority. It just doesn’t work that way. You make a movie that is relevant to our times because it seems like the Cold War is coming back. I wouldn’t call what’s happening right now between Vladimir Putin and the Obama administration a Cold War, but there’s certainly a frost in the air. With the recent incursion into Crimea and ambitions further into Ukraina — and what’s happening right now in Syria — it seems like history is repeating itself. That was not the case when we first set out to tell this story. Those headlines hadn’t been written because those incursions hadn’t taken place yet.”
The director goes on to say, “There is so much relevance between the story in 1960 and the story today. The whole idea that spying has reached a technological apogee of almost an open season for anybody that knows how to operate an operating system and get into somebody else’s operating system. The cyber hacking that is going on today is just like the spying that went on then. A lot of cyber hacking is sport cyber hacking. It’s not even with any goal in sight. It’s just picking through a rubbish heap to see if there’s any actionable information or something that can be bartered with. There’s just so many eyes on all of us and we have eyes on all of them. What started then almost in a polite context — the Cold War was polite in terms of the way we were spying on each other — isn’t the way it is today. Today you just don’t know that when you’re watching television, is television actually watching you? You don’t know that.”
Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks on Collaborating with the Coen Brothers
Eager to hear what specific contributions Joel and Ethan Coen made to Matt Charman‘s script, Spielberg and cast were more than ready to open up. “I think that the Coen brothers looked upon this — and they are not here to speak for themselves so I’m just going to hazard a guess — that this was a genre they were very compelled by from their early years as lovers of movies and genres, like the spy genre,” Spielberg said. “I know that they reached out to us because they heard about the story and they expressed their interest in the story. I think that when they reached out to us they thought we just had a treatment and we didn’t even have a script yet and were wondering if we wanted to meet with them. I let them know that we did have a script — a wonderful script by Matt Charman — that I was going to go deep with all the characters, deeper with the story, deeper with the research, and they threw their hats into the ring. They really came to us and stepped on board because this was a genre that really piqued their interest. We were very lucky to have them. That was the script that [the main cast] first read. They made a huge contribution while always acknowledging the heavy lifting that Matt Charman did when he first found the story and put it all together in a manageable, very taut drama.”
Rylance adds, “I took the job on the first script, which was as Steven says, a wonderful job. It was absolutely fascinating to then see what the Coen brothers’ imagination then does to the script — and I expect Steven’s as well working hand and hand with them. My image for it is going to a very good masseur and you feel all the blood and energy has gone right to the fingertips. The core of the blood, the theme of the piece, is now suddenly into all of the extremities and details of the story. So it wasn’t a different story than what Matt had created. It was Matt’s body. They had just kind of really got the spine into place and massaged it and clicked a few things and it felt even more alive and whole, I suppose.”
“This is the second time I’ve been in anything the Coens have done,” Hanks said, referencing their work on The Ladykillers. “Their dialogue scans, if you know what that means. It ends up devolving into an almost percussive give and take that’s different from other motion picture dialogue, in which there is mostly text as opposed to subtext. There’s a number of great examples throughout, but that first scene, which is essentially an insurance negotiation, that’s them to a T. I don’t want to put too many roses on what they do, but there is a cadence that is individual to each character that the dialogue scans in a way. A lot of time you read screenplays in which one very specific thing is happening in the scene and both characters sound the same after awhile. They just lock into protagonist-antagonist thing and that just never happens with this. It seems as though someone is rocking back on their heels in a Coen brothers scene while another person is making arguments you can’t even begin to imagine. I must say it’s pretty cool when you get to wrap your hands around that.” Along with the “It’s not my guy” exchange Hanks’ character has, Spielberg confirmed the Coens were responsible for the go-to responses of “Would it help?” that Rylance’s character has to Donovan when questioned about his background.
Tom Hanks on Morality of James B. Donovan
“Immediately after I read the screenplay, I did what everybody does, I just Google the guy I was going to play,” Hanks said. “I came across a piece on YouTube in which the real Donovan, when he was defending Abel, was interviewed at the court house and he literally stated the reason why he took the case and the reason why he carried it all the way to the extremes of the Supreme Court. He said, ‘You can’t accuse this man of treason. He’s not a traitor. He’s actually a patriot to his cause. Only an American can be a traitor. Only can an American can commit treason to their own country. He’s just a man doing his job in the same we have men doing their jobs over here. As soon as you start assassinating and let’s extrapolate — as soon as you start torturing the people that we have, well then you give the other side permission and cause to do the same exact thing and that’s not what America stands for. At least not what America stands for in the time I took ethics in school and read by Weekly Reader and I learned the lessons of our forefathers. As soon as you start executing anybody that you think is going against your country, well you’re not that far removed from the KGB and the Stasi and that’s not what America is about. This what Donovan took with him from the get-go and you can’t deny it.”
Steven Spielberg Clarifies the His Thoughts on the State of Hollywood
Two years ago, Spielberg and George Lucas shared some incisive thoughts about where Hollywood was heading, but now the former director clarified them slightly. “I didn’t ever predict the implosion of the film industry at all,” he says. “I simply predicted that a number of blockbusters in one summer — those big sort of tentpole super hero movies — there was going to come a time when two or three or four of them in a row didn’t work. That’s really all I said. I didn’t say the film industry was ever going to end because of it. I was also just simply saying that I felt that that particular genre doesn’t have the legs or the longevity of the western, which was around since the beginning of film and only started to wither and shrivel in the ’60’s. That’s the point I was trying to make. I was also trying to make a point that there was room for every kind of movie today because there seems to be an audience for everything. Even five years ago there wasn’t an audience for everything, but now these little movies are squeezing in and finding a birth next to these huge Queen Mary-type movies and they are able to find an audience, enough of an audience to encourage the distributor and the film companies to finance more of them. These are not just films like Bridge of Spies, but independent movies as well.”
Bridge of Spies premiered at New York Film Festival and opens on October 16th.