Bridge of Spies Press Conference
Posted by Wilson Morales
October 12, 2015
Most recently, Blackfilm.com attended a press conference held for DreamWorks Pictures/Fox 2000 Pictures’ “Bridge of Spies,” a dramatic thriller set against the backdrop of a series of historic events.
Directed by Steven Spielberg from a screenplay written by Matt Charman and Ethan Coen & Joel Coen, the cast includes Tom Hanks, Mark Rylance, Scott Shepherd, Amy Ryan, Sebastian Koch, Eve Hewson, Billy Magnussen, Austin Stowell, Domenick Lombardozzi and Alan Alda.
“Bridge of Spies” is the story of James Donovan (Hanks), a Brooklyn lawyer who finds himself thrust into the center of the Cold War when the CIA sends him on the near-impossible task to negotiate the release of a captured American U-2 pilot. Screenwriters Matt Charman and Ethan Coen & Joel Coen have woven this remarkable experience in Donovan’s life into a story inspired by true events that captures the essence of a man who risked everything and vividly brings his personal journey to life.
“Bridge of Spies” hits theaters on October 16.
Present at the press conference at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in New York City were Spielberg, Tom Hanks (James Donovan), Mark Rylance (Rudolf Abel), Amy Ryan (Mary Donovan), and Alan Alda (Thomas Watters).
Steven, I wanted to ask you how you got involved with this and why do you think it’s taken so long to tell this story? For Tom Hanks, this unsung real life American hero that we’re discovering in this movie, do you see him as part of maybe a bookend or another chapter in men you’ve played before who are similarly heroic?
Steven Spielberg: Well, I just found out that 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, but 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 be, as all I think good stories come to us, in a surprise package because there was no brand preceding Bridge of Spies. It was simply a piece of history that was so compelling personally for me to know that 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 spy.
That was to me a righteous reason to tell the story. I was meeting with the Donovan family. I was meeting with the two daughters and the son this morning. I found out something I never knew before. In 1965, Gregory Peck came after this story. Gregory Peck got Alec Guinness to agree to play Abel. Gregory Peck was going to play Donovan and they got a very good … they got Sterling Silliphant to try to write the script. Then, MGM at the time said, “No, I don’t think we’re going to tell the story.” I didn’t even know that until a couple of hours ago. We weren’t the first.
Tom Hanks: Wow. That’s good.
Alan Alda: Do you know why they didn’t want to tell the story? Was it still politically difficult?
Spielberg: It was 1965 and it was the Bay of Pigs had happened. The Cuban Missile Crisis had been averted a year and a half before and the tensions were too taut between the Soviet Union and the United States of America for MGM to get into the politics of the story.
Greg Peck’s previous movie was soft at the box office.
Spielberg: Yes, it was. Arabesque, which was a spy movie With Sophia Loren.
Hanks: It’s not as though he had no career left in movie making. I don’t view this as a bookend to anything because every movie starts fresh and has to exist on its on auspices. The interesting thing that happens when you play somebody real is you have to have meetings with them if they’re alive and you have to say, “Look, I’m going to say things you never said. I’m going to do things you never did. I’m going to be in places you never were.” Despite that, how do we do this as authentically as possible? Much like the boss, I was fueled by absolutely no preconceived knowledge of James Donovan. I knew nothing about the man. When you’re coming across the guy who is an awfully good insurance lawyer that then ends up being part of such a momentous six days in history, I’m a selfish actor. I’ll lunge at the opportunity, regardless of anything else I’ve done prior.
Steven, you’ve done a lot of movies about fictional heroes, and then you’ve done a lot of movies about real heroes. Which do you find more challenging or compelling? For you, Tom, playing a character like this, how did you find it? What was the heart of this character for you?
Spielberg: I don’t really distinguish between a fictional hero and a real life hero as a basis for any comparison. To me, a hero’s a hero. I like making pictures about people who have a personal mission in life or at least in the story, the life of the story who start out with certain low expectations, and then overachieve our highest expectations for them. That’s the kind of character arc I love dabbling in as a director, as a film maker.
Hanks: As a matter of fact, he wrote a book about his experience with Rudolf Abel that goes so in depth into the trial. I felt like I was a court stenographer after a while. It just goes on and on and on. This motion and that motion, but I ended up not reading it all. Look, you look for some degree of super structure who it is. Outside the fact it’s got a smoking hot wife, you look for something in the past, that he was a prosecutor of the Nuremberg war crimes. That means he wasn’t the type of soldier that went off and wanted to kill as many Nazis as possible.
He was a guy who wanted to nail as many Nazis as possible using the letter of the law. That’s a different kind of man elsewhere. When you take that into account, it pays off in the screenplay. For example, I thought at one point his arguments to the supreme court about … I thought oh, come on. Let’s not gild the lily here. Let’s not turn this into more of an operatic moment than necessary. It turns out it was exactly what he said to the supreme court. It’s a factor that emboldened itself through the process of making the movie and it’s never wrong with playing a guy who’s got a smoking hot wife. That’s always fun, too.
Steven, I thought your depiction of the building and completion of the Berlin Wall was amazing and it’s something all students studying that already should have to see. It should be required, but I felt that way about Lincoln also. You said you spoke to Donovan’s kids this morning. I’m sure more of the families were involved during the whole process. Were you able to talk to Abel’s family from the other side?
Spielberg: No, not at all. Abel went into the obscurity behind the Iron Curtain. At one point toward the end of Donovan’s life, he went to Russia with the hope of meeting Abel again and wasn’t able to find him and get into contact with him. I think there was a little help. There was some obfuscation going on at the time. He was hoping to have one more moment with him, but never had that moment.
This question’s for Steven, but I guess it can be for the whole room as well. Your last movie, Lincoln, came out during the presidential election year. Now, this movie, Bridge of Spies, comes out a few months on the heels of the Iran deal. Obviously, you cannot plan the later. My question is what lessons do you think Donovan and Berlin have for us today and what impact would you hope this movie has on the national conversation?
Spielberg: It’s interesting about the national conversation. It keeps changing every day. 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 the Cold War seems to be 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 Ukraine 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 the story. Those headlines hadn’t been written because those incursions hadn’t taken place yet, but there is so much relevance between I think the story in 1960 and the story today.
The whole idea that spying has reached a technological apogee of almost … it’s just almost open season for anybody that knows how to operate an operating system and can get into somebody else’s operating system. The cyber hacking that’s going on today is just like the spying that went on then. A lot of cyber hacking is sports cyber hacking. It’s not even toward any goal in sight. It’s just to pick through a rubbish heap to see if there’s any actionable information or something that could 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 the way it is today. Today it’s just you don’t know, that when you’re watching television is television actually watching you? You don’t know that.
Those wonderful scenes in East Berlin, especially as the train goes over while they’re building the Berlin Wall, was that just a really big set or was it a practical location somewhere? If it was the later, how difficult was it to shoot there?
Spielberg: Are you talking about when the train is on the overpass going across the wall? You witness the shootings at the wall?
That and some of the other scenes. The bicyclist going from one side to the other and getting caught behind lines.
Spielberg: We shot that on border of Poland and Germany in a town called Breslau. There’s a Polish name for it, but the Germans when they invaded Poland they changed the name to Wroclaw.
Tom Hanks: Wroclaw.
Spielberg: Wroclaw. Thank you, Tom. There’s still bullet holes in all the buildings from World War II there. They never repaired it. We went to the area closest to the east of Berlin that looked just like East Berlin for those two specific scenes that you mentioned. We actually built that wall. That wall was the great … a wonderful production designer, Adam Stockhausen, who does all of Wes Anderson’s movies. He did 12 Years a Slave and won his first Oscar for that. He did our movie and did an incredible, exceptional job really making a modern scenic look exactly the way it looked all those years ago.
Mark. I can probably speak for everyone or maybe just myself, but it was hard to dislike the character, Rudolf Abel. How did you go about portraying him or build a specific persona?
Mark Rylance: I just played what was written down on the page there.
Tom Hanks: There’s your stage training right there.
This is another question for Mark. So much of the movie hinges on your relationship with James Donovan. How did you come to be cast in this movie? You did an amazing performance because we should technically hate you, but it’s hard to hate you. I just would love to hear the audition process. Did you know Steven before?
Mark Rylance: I’m afraid I cast myself. I called Steven and said, “You better put me here.” No. I just had a message that Steven was interested in me playing this part. We had met each other back in the 80s. I had not been able to take part in a wonderful film he made called Empire of the Sun. 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, I think you call it.
This question is specifically for Amy and Alan, but all of you can answer. What showing the work life and the home life does to enhance the story of this negotiation and this trial, what your characters contribute to the overall story.
Amy Ryan: I think what’s so fascinating is this is a happily married couple both devoted to their family. I love that Mary is so outspoken and protective of that and yet, she knows he’s also involved in some other greater good that she’s not quite sure. Yet, here’s a man who even loving his family and as protective can still set forth for the greater good, has the foresight, can push apart fear that the majority of the country is feeling at this time, not able to make maybe such a strong decision between right and wrong, but he does and she knows that. I was privy before we started filming to the family photographs.
All of the images of Mary in these staged photographs of their family every single shot she’s doing this. There’s not one of her looking straight ahead, even their wedding photo with her big glasses. Apparently, she was blind as a bat, but she couldn’t take her eyes off this man. I loved that she can go against him and express her own fears and protect this family. I think then he has that on top of his plate of going to one of the greatest negotiations, pull off the greatest hat trick ever.
Alan Alda: I loved how they were able to develop the home life so believably, so un-movie like, but like two people who were running a family together. That gave resonance, I thought, to the moment where I said to him, “Don’t do this. Think about your family. Think about what it’s going to cost them.” That really would have been a hollow argument if you hadn’t experienced their home life in such an authentic way. I think that’s important to the whole thrust of the move so you can understand what these people were going through, what they were thinking when they did and said things that were not in the interest of justice, but other considerations and you could believe in their point of view a little better which brought you back to the real drama of the situation at that time.
Steven, this is for you and for the cast. Two years ago, you predicted the implosion of the film industry. I’m wondering two years later what your thoughts are on that now. Where do you see it going and for the cast? Where does a film like Bridge of Spies, a serious adult drama, fit into the changing landscape?
Spielberg: To clarify, I didn’t ever predict the implosion of the film industry at all. I simply predicted that a number of blockbusters in one summer, those big sort of tentpole superhero movies, there was going to come a time where 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, but I was also just simply saying that I felt 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 60s. That was the point I was trying to make.
I was also trying to 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’re 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 it’s independent movies as well.
Alan, you were talking a minute ago about the family and the family relationship. It struck me that the law firm that you were head of is a bit like a family relationship as well, maybe you were the father or maybe because they were partners. It just struck me as a different age in the work world. I was wondering what you thought of that because nowadays you’ve got one corporate guy you never see.
Alda: Yeah. That probably added some of the tension and disappointment in the movie as it progresses because those were days when you worked for a company often until you retired, sometimes from the time you started your career. Now, they’re using the revolving door more commonly. When the guy I play, Watters, decides that the business he’s in is more important than the relationship with this guy who is one of his partners that’s a significant moment, but probably as you pointed out, made more significant by the way business was done at the time.
It’s very interesting it was his interest in serving his clients and keeping the company free of public debate was more important than justice and he had the same training in law that Donovan did, but that really puts so much more attention on Donovan’s commitment to justice. He’s an unusual guy because the whole country was not that interested in justice at the time. They wanted to fight the people who they had decided were their enemies without giving them a fair trial to see if they were, which is very reminiscent of what we’re going through now and what we go through every time there’s war or a threat of war. It’s the way people operate. Security and justice are on a seesaw.
This film has a very distinct Coen brothers’ flair and wanted from everyone know how their style affected your direction and your acting.
Spielberg: I wonder what they had to do with any of this. I think that the Coen brothers looked upon this and they’re not here to speak for themselves. 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. I know that they reached out to us because they heard about the story and they expressed their interest in this story. I think when they reached out to us they thought that we just had a treatment and didn’t even have a script yet and were wondering if I wanted to meet with them.
I let them know that we did have a wonderful script by Matt Charman, but I was going to go deep with all the characters and deeper with the story and deeper with the research and they threw their hats in the ring. They really came to us, stepped on board because this was a genre that really peaked their interest. We’re very lucky to have them because that was the script that Tom first read and that Mark first read and that everybody here 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 altogether in a manageable, very taut drama.
Rylance: I took the job on the first script which as Steven says, a wonderful job. It was absolutely fascinating to then see what the Coen brothers’ imagination does to a script and I expect Steven’s as well, working hand in hand with them. My image for it is going to a very good masseur and you feel all the blood and the energy has got right to the fingertips. The kind of core blood of the theme of the piece was now suddenly into all the extremities and details of the story. It wasn’t a different story than what Matt had created. It was Matt’s body, but they had just really got the spine in place and massaged it and clicked a few things and it felt even more alive and whole, I suppose, if you mind thinking about it.
Alda: Did they come up with that wonderful scene early on about, “He’s not my guy”?
Yes.
Alda: That’s such a wonderful opening scene.
Hanks: This is the second time I had been in anything that the Coen’s had done. I call them Joe and Nathan. Their dialogue scans, if you know what that means. It ends up devolving into almost like a percuss of give and take that’s different than other motion picture dialogue in which that it’s mostly text as opposed to subtext. There’s a number of great examples of it throughout, but that first scene which is essentially an insurance negotiation, I think that’s them to a T. I don’t want to say literate in using it in like I don’t want to put too many roses on what they do, but there is a cadence that is individual to each character.
The best scene is that the dialogue scans in a way because a lot of times you read in the screenplays in which one very specific thing is happening in the scene and both characters sound the same after a while. They just lock into the antagonist, protagonist thing and that just never happens with this. It seems as though somebody is either rocking back on their heels in a Coen brothers’ scene, while another person is making arguments that you can’t even begin to imagine. I must say it’s pretty cool when you get to wrap your heads around that.
Mr. Hanks, I was so struck by the way you portrayed the right to counsel and the right to issue defense that we all have allegedly. I was wondering if to prepare for that you thought of folks today or consulted with people who defend say, men and women at Guantanamo Bay.
Hanks: Boy, yeah. It ends up getting fascinating because immediately. Immediately after I read the screenplay I did what everybody does. You just Google the guy you’re going to play. You just Google James Donovan and there was an awful lot. A lot of it was repetitious, but I came across a piece on YouTube in which the real Donovan when he was defending Abel was interviewed at the courthouse. 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 be a traitor. Only American can commit treason against their own country. He’s just a man doing his job in the same way we have men doing their jobs over here.
As soon as you start assassinating … Let’s extrapolate. As soon as you start torturing the people that we have, 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 the Americans stand for at the time when I took ethics in school and I read my Weekly Reader and I learned the lessons of our forefathers. As soon as you start executing anybody against your country, you’re not that far removed from the KGB and the Stasi and that’s not what America was about and this is what Donovan took with him from the get-go and you can’t deny it.