Steven Spielberg gets personal in ColdWar thriller
The master of stories adds to his mythos with a drama set against the Cold War
For a few weeks filming the
new Cold War drama Bridge of Spies, British actor Mark Rylance would show up in the morning to find director Steven Spielberg already hard at work after yet another sleepless night.
One day, Rylance inquired about the cause of the Oscar-winning filmmaking legend’s insomnia. Spielberg’s reply: “Because I don’t know what this film is about yet.”
Of course he knew what the film (in theaters Friday) was about. He’s Steven Spielberg, after all. But, it was that moment when Rylance, an Emmy nominee for PBS Masterpiece’s Wolf Hall, saw the director as akin to a classic Greek playwright: “When most of us are dreaming, his soul won’t rest because he’s searching for some essential thing.”
Spielberg’s hunt to tell a variety of great myths, iconic plot lines and historical revisits has been going on for more than 40 years and has touched generations of moviegoers, with the adventures of Indiana Jones, the box-office-chomping monsters of Jurassic Park and Jaws, aliens both benevolent ( Close
Encounters of the Third Kind) and malevolent ( War of the Worlds), and retro tales
such as Saving Private Ryan and Schindler’s List set in important time periods. His most recent feature, 2012’s Lin
coln, reminded Spielberg, 68, of his love for history and country, while his latest showcases the courage of a man who simply wants to do the right thing.
Based on real events in the 1950s and ’60s, Bridge of Spies stars Tom Hanks as New York insurance lawyer James B. Donovan, who is asked by the government to defend alleged Soviet spy Rudolf Abel (Rylance) when he’s found and arrested in Brooklyn.
Everyone, from Donovan’s wife (Amy Ryan) to his law partner (Alan Alda) to his kids, doesn’t think it’s a good idea. But constitutional justice is important to Donovan, even at a time when the “RedMenace” fueled American paranoia and “to stand up publicly for a trained enemy was a dangerous thing to do,” Spielberg says. Even with differing ideologies, Donovan and Abel forge a friendship. Later, Donovan brokers a trade in East Germany for captured U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers (Austin Stowell) and jailed American student Frederic Pryor (Will Rogers).
Because an audience spends two-plus hours with Donovan, it’s hard not to internalize his struggle. And reflecting on his own life, Spielberg recalls he has needed that kind of tenacity when he has run into those times where everyone warned him off certainmovies.
“You really test yourself when everybody says this is not a good choice and you persevere,” says Spielberg, dressed comfortably this warm fall day in a purple shirt and gray vest paired with jeans and red-and-blue sneakers. “The greatest satisfaction is when all the naysayers are proven wrong, and of course the worst feeling is when the naysayers turned out to be right.
“But in either case, right or wrong, I need to make these decisions in concert with myself. I can’t tell somebody else’s story if I don’t believe in the story.” His biggest victory over critics? E.T.
The Extra-Terrestrial, the 1982 family classic that several studios turned down because “everybody thought we were making a Saturday-morning cartoon show,” Spielberg says with a chuckle.
“George Lucas went through the same thing on Star Wars because everyone thought he was crazy to do a space opera. You have to listen and you have to weigh it … and the decision has to be made from the place all honest decisions are made, which is as deep as it can be found.”
There is one scene in Bridge of Spies reminiscent of E.T., although instead of a boy riding a bicycle with a basket carrying an alien, it’s a pair of kids riding through a long hallway delivering mail.
Spielberg insists he’s not referencing himself. Instead, he wanted a way for people to get correspondence from one end of the corridor to another quickly. “I just thought about efficiency, and Germany is known for their efficiency.”
Ryan was impressed with the similar ingenuity Spielberg showed crafting a courthouse scene with Donovan and Abel.
In the film, the case has caused a lot of hubbub — and a lot of grief for the lawyer and his family — and Ryan remembers a sequence where the Donovans are rushed out of the building with photographers’ flash bulbs on the floor everywhere. The camera was positioned at floor level to show the glass as it’s crushed by trampling feet while also acting as a cinematic metaphor for the chaos of the time.
“He was so excited about it,” Ryan says of Spielberg. “You just got this glimpse of maybe that’s what he was like (as) an 8-year-old making films in his backyard. That love of telling stories through film doesn’t seem to have ever escaped him or tarnished or seem jaded.”
Spielberg says that every movie he’s ever directed — even ones with globetrotting archaeologists and hungry sharks — became very personal to him. And Bridge of Spies actually started that way, given the Cincinnati-born Spielberg grew up during the Cold War era, when air-raid drills were a part of daily life and he knew to duck and cover in the event of a white atomic flash.
The director added a scene in Spies where Donovan’s son fills bathtubs with water in the event of a nuclear war. It’s exactly what a 15-year-old Spielberg did in October 1962 during the Cuban missile crisis — when he filled not only two tubs, but four sinks and an outside rubber wading pool “because I thought the end of the world was a few days away.”
There was another cause for the future filmmaker’s worries: His grandparents and great-grandparents were Jews from Russia and Ukraine, and Spielberg was concerned someone would overhear his family speaking in rapid Russian and Yiddish and turn them in to the FBI.
“I thought, ‘Is there going to be a knock on the door? Is that going to be the end of the Spielbergs?’ ” he recalls.
The Spielberg clan has grown since then, though the household’s gotten a little less busy lately as the director’s seventh child, 18-year-old daughter Destry, is the last to go off to college.
He’s putting that extra free time to work. He’s currently doing an adaptation of Roald Dahl’s children’s book The BFG — in theaters July 1, and starring Rylance as a friendly giant— and the director starts production on the video-game adventure Ready Player One in June.
“It just seemed like a way to not have an empty nest. Fill it with movies,” Spielberg says.
Even though Spielberg may be past retirement age, Rylance sees a man as fascinated by life as he was ever was.
“That’s the great genius of his: In the center of a multibillion-dollar industry and with all these experts around him, he’s preserved an innocence and a love for what he does,” the actor says.
“If they ever invent something that allows someone to live 1,000 years, I vote for Steven to be the one they give it to. He’d make the most of it.”
“I need to make these decisions in concert with myself. I can’t tell somebody else’s story if I don’t believe in the story.”
Filmmaker Steven Spielberg