<img height="1" width="1" style="display:none" src="https://www.facebook.com/tr?id=192888919167017&amp;ev=PageView&amp;noscript=1">
Wednesday,  September 18 , 2024

Linkedin Pinterest
News / Life / Entertainment

Spielberg tapped childhood fears for ‘Spies’

By Steven Rea, The Philadelphia Inquirer
Published: October 18, 2015, 6:00am

NEW YORK — “Bridge of Spies,” Steven Spielberg’s new Cold War drama, comes with the tag “Inspired by true events.” Most of those events concern a New York lawyer, James Donovan, played by Tom Hanks; his defense of a captured Russian spy, Rudolf Abel, played by Mark Rylance; and the subsequent negotiations to facilitate the release of Francis Gary Powers, the American spy plane pilot shot down and captured by the Soviets in 1960. It would be a swap: the American for the Russian.

But another “true event” in the Oscar-bound picture comes straight out of Spielberg’s life. Flash back to fall 1962, to Phoenix, when the kid with the serious movie bug was 15. That October, the U.S. and the Russians were on the brink of nuclear war: the Cuban Missile Crisis, the tense 13-day confrontation between Kennedy and Khrushchev, all those school warnings about radioactive fallout suddenly looking alarmingly real.

One night, when Spielberg’s parents were at a party, he turned all the faucets on and filled the bathtubs and the sinks.

“When they came home, they saw everything, including the inflatable wading pool in our backyard, filled with water,” recalls the three-time Academy Award-winner. “Because I was convinced that when the war came, all the water would be cut off.”

In “Bridge of Spies,” it is Hanks’ character’s young son, in their Brooklyn house, who fills the tub when his parents step out.

“I took that scene from my own life and put it in this picture because it represented the fear that my generation felt,” Spielberg explains, “that the adults didn’t know what they were doing, that the adults were going to destroy our future.”

“Bridge of Spies” is the 30th feature to be directed by Spielberg, but it’s his first in a genre that has long been among his favorites: the spy film. From the cat-and-mouse opening sequence on the Brooklyn waterfront with Rylance, as the sleeper agent Abel, taking his artist’s easel to paint a scene and retrieving a coded message in the process, the film is steeped in espionage. By the time Hanks’ Donovan — an insurance claims lawyer with no training in espionage — arrives in Berlin to negotiate the swap, the cloak-and-dagger business is rife. Shadows in the alleys, interrogations, stealth meetings, mystery men.

“I was raised on spy movies,” says Spielberg, holding forth in a room in a Manhattan hotel teeming with U.N. diplomats and their security details. “I was raised during the Cold War, so that was very relevant in my formative years. And in movie theaters, I saw ‘The Spy Who Came in From the Cold,’ which is my favorite spy movie, and ‘The Quiller Memorandum,’ and I loved ‘The Ipcress File’; I loved rom Russia With Love.’ ”

Stay informed on what is happening in Clark County, WA and beyond for only
$9.99/mo

Though Spielberg was excited finally to be working in the genre — and working from a screenplay honed by Joel and Ethan Coen — he wanted to avoid the familiar tropes of the spy picture. “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” this was not.

“I didn’t want to create false trapdoors that purposefully lead the audience astray,” he says. “I wanted to take the cloudiness away from the genre. So, I don’t consider this to be deep in the genre. … We didn’t make the history up, even if the Coen brothers tightened the tension by cutting out the fact that the story takes place over a five-year period. When you see the movie, it just feels like one run. … If I took the circuitous route of the spy genre, the movie would be way too long, and then I would be kicking myself for not making it as a miniseries.”

When he was 24, Spielberg traveled through Europe to promote his first feature — the taut trucker-chase movie “Duel,” which debuted on TV in the U.S. but which was released in theaters abroad. It was 1971, his first time out of the country, having spent his childhood in Cincinnati, then Haddon Township, then Phoenix.

“Germany was one of our whistle-stops, and the first thing I wanted to see was Checkpoint Charlie,” he says of the Berlin Wall crossing point — site of a pivotal scene in “Bridge of Spies.

“The fact that a city was divided and a wall was put up to keep the inhabitants of the east inside — and to keep undesirables outside, it was so strange. … I was in high school when the wall went up, and I just remember not really understanding it, and not really understanding why anybody would build a wall like that. And now we’re listening to Donald Trump talking about building a wall. After all the work it took for us to tear that wall down — those famous lines of Ronald Reagan’s, ‘Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!’”

With “Bridge of Spies” positioned for an awards season run (Rylance, especially, looks like a lock for a supporting actor nod), the director is now on “hard-post,” as in postproduction, on his next. It’s an adaptation of the Roald Dahl children’s book “The BFG,” for “big friendly giant.” British actor Rylance stars in the title role. It will be released July 1.

And Spielberg is in “soft preproduction” on “Ready Player One,” which he expects to start shooting in June. It’s based on the Ernest Cline novel about a real world where people choose to escape into virtual ones. “It’s a futuristic story about virtual reality,” says Spielberg, “and the fact that people spend most of their time in a virtual world. It’s a cautionary tale, but also a big adventure movie.”

Beyond that, Spielberg has been talking to Jennifer Lawrence about playing modern-day war photographer Lynsey Addario in “It’s What I Do,” and to Javier Bardem about playing Hernán Cortés in “Montezuma,” about the Spanish conquistador’s epic battle with the Aztec king.

The latter is based on two scripts by the late, great, blacklisted Hollywood scribe Dalton Trumbo.

“I knew Trumbo a little bit, in the early ‘70s,” says Spielberg, once the young upstart, now very much an industry king. “Warren Beatty actually introduced me to him. … And Kirk Douglas optioned both of Trumbo’s scripts to me. Trumbo wrote two scripts — one from Montezuma’s point of view, 210 pages long, and a second script, the same time, from Cortés’ point of view, 220 pages long. I hired Steven Zaillian, who wrote ‘Schindler’s List’ for me, to put the two scripts together into one screenplay.”

Spielberg, sipping gingerly on mint tea, had just gotten got over a weeklong bronchial infection that had kept him in an unfamiliar mode: inactive, in bed. But the upside, he says, is that he was able to watch the coverage — “everything, all of it” — of Pope Francis’ historic visit to Washington, New York and the first half of his stay in Philadelphia.

“He’s been bringing every city together that he visits,” the director said on the Sunday when the pope was bringing Philly together and getting ready to return to the Vatican. “It’s amazing to see people come together with no complaints about the street closures — everybody’s fine with it. He’s a remarkable man.”

 

Loading...