Like many of us speed-walking up a sweat, a young, shaggy-haired Steven Spielberg found himself victim to parking woes, 10 minutes too late during his first go-around pursuing a bachelor’s degree in English at California State University, Long Beach.
“I remember I was late for my very first class on my very first day because, you know, the only parking spaces available was in the most distant parking lot,” the Arizona transplant said. “The campus has changed a lot since I went through it in the ‘60s, but I hope the parking situation has improved.”
…Maybe in another 50 years, Spielberg.
In a conference call with 21 other college-media journalists, Spielberg shared director’s cut decisions that led to his most recent historical drama-thriller “Bridge of Spies” and personal reflections on his professional life with the Daily 49er.
The Oct. 16 release recounts real-life happenings that transpired in a court case trial based in Brooklyn, New York, that was catapulted onto an international stage; the story of such a sensationalized case occupied by war tensions channels precedents set by ‘60s-era film interpretations such as Stanley Kramer’s “Inherit the Wind” and Robert Mulligan’s “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
In the midst of the Cold War, the tension thickens as insurance lawyer James B. Donovan (Tom Hanks) falls victim to moral obligation in defending convicted Soviet spy Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance). With the American Constitution in his breast pocket, Donovan challenges institutionalized bias embedded in the justice system during the Red Scare. In the film, the nationwide nuclear anxiety manifests as bullet holes in Donovan’s home.
Before he can settle Abel’s fate, Donovan finds himself leading transatlantic negotiations after an American U-2 spy pilot is captured by the Soviet Union and an American economics graduate student is caught on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain as its erection divides Germany.
“Bridge of Spies” marks Spielberg’s 15th collaboration with cinematographer Janusz Kamiński and his fourth collaboration with actor Tom Hanks. Thomas Newman stepped in to write the score, making this the first work by Spielberg in the last 30 years absent of John Williams’ music direction.
The Daily 49er and other college-media agencies phoned in to collaborate on an interview with the accomplished alumnus.
What originally lead you to highlighting the life of James Donovan and why is this story worth telling?
Well, I think this story is only as relevant as the people who, you know, find that kind of story interesting. I don’t ever want to impose what I find relevant on others. I feel, just speaking personally, that somebody that has the talent to negotiate and not intimidate; to cajole, not threaten; to basically compromise rather than [demand] is something that this world needs a lot more of but we’re just not getting.
We find ourselves in a lot of bad situations diplomatically and with nations all over this world. I just find that Donovan, the real James Donovan, played very authentically by Tom Hanks, is a great example of what we need more of today not only in the diplomatic world but on Capitol Hill and just the way people would be, should be, more patient with each other in trying to figure out or trying to celebrate what makes us different and not being so quick to judge someone who is not the same as us.
You have an impressive portfolio of tying in music to evoke the audience and enhance the brand of your films—“Jaws,” “Jurassic Park,” “Indiana Jones”—what was the approach for “Bridge of Spies?”
The music is really important. I’ve had a 40-year collaboration with the great John Williams and he’s done all of my movies except two: “The Color Purple” and this one. He only didn’t do this one because he had slight medical procedure right as he was supposed to write the music and he had to take a seven-week break before coming back to finish the score for J.J. Abrams on “Star Wars.”
I decided not to have any music for the first 35 minutes of “Bridge of Spies” and I rarely do that. I usually have a lot of wall-to-wall music in my movies because I think movies tell a second story. They help us perform our own emotions. The intention between John and myself was not to have music in the first half hour of this film so when I hired Thomas Newman to do the score, he agreed that we should see if we can allow New York City and the sounds of New York to be the musical score for the first half hour.
What was the most challenging scene that you had to film?
The most challenging film for “Bridge of Spies” by far was the scene on the Glienicke Bridge. We actually shot on the real bridge where the spy swap occurred all those many decades ago. That was the most difficult part because I’m faced with a scene that must pay off, that must culminate in the drama of everyone’s stories, especially on one location, which happened to be—symbolically—a bridge. There was a lot of pressure for me to perform and do a good job and get the actors to do equally good jobs because it pays off every single storyline we established in “Bridge of Spies.” It was a difficult scene not just because it was so cold and we were all freezing, but because there was a lot of weight on all of us to make that the best scene in the movie.
How do you define a balance between creative license and accurate portrayal when you make your films?
At the beginning of “Bridge of Spies” we don’t say that it’s a true story. We say “inspired by true events” and I make a distinction between a story like “Schindler’s List,” which is virtually true from cover to cover to a film like “Bridge of Spies,” where every single event is true and it actually happened, but in order to make it more tense and more suspenseful I needed to take license with the order of sequences in order to truncate or to condense a five-year story into something that only feels like it’s taking place over six or seven months.
The second we get involved in a movie we forget all the history. A movie casts a spell. All movies cast spells. All audiences, if they get involved enough in the characters and the story, they suspend their disbelief; part of that suspension of disbelief means cancelling what you know about what really happened in the world.
What do you think has changed about the types of stories and characters that draw you in over time?
In the early part of my career, characters always drew me in. Everything I ever did was character based. All of my movies have really been about the characters but throughout my earlier concepts or big notions for movies in the ‘70s and ‘80s sometimes upstaged the characters that were really making those stories believable and yet a lot of credit was going just for the concept—you know, dinosaurs, aliens landing in Wyoming, sharks hunting the waters of Amenity Island. I mean, those were big broad movie concepts but none of those films would have succeeded without the characters that populated them.
My feeling today as I’ve gotten older, the concepts have maybe gotten smaller, but they’ve only gotten smaller because the characters have gotten bigger and I’m much more interested in focusing my attention on really interesting people like the character of Rudolf Abel and the character of James Donovan. Those are the kinds of stories that really interest me today.
Given that you’ve been an acclaimed director for nearly 40 years, how often do you have those “Wow, I’ve never done that before!” moments?
Quite often I do a movie of a genre that I’ve never done before. I never did anything like “Saving Private Ryan” before. I never did anything like “Schindler’s List” before. I never made a movie like ”Jaws” before or “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”
I mean there were so many movies that for me were complete firsts. There were other movies like the sequels to the adventure movies or the sequels to the dinosaur movies that are no less challenging but the originality and concept is not as exciting as or as dangerous as the first ones were. I’m more challenged by something like “Bridge of Spies” than I am by something that I’ve done versions of several times in my career.
What makes Tom Hanks a uniquely talented individual to work with?
Tom is an honest actor, which means that he doesn’t have to act. If he understands the character he exists in clothing and in the persona of that character without having to work very hard. It doesn’t mean he’s not a hard worker. It just means when Tom knows a character, he becomes that person the same way Daniel Day-Lewis became Abraham Lincoln, and I’m just blessed to work with actors like that. They can completely drop who we think they are and become totally different people.
How do you manage to keep people’s attention without conforming to cookie-cutter style movies that are becoming big?
Sometimes I will conform to it, like when I produced a movie like “Jurassic World.” For instance, we’ll conform to the first “Jurassic Park” and design a film which is tonally very much like the movie I directed in 1993 [to] trade up on the nostalgic factor. But for the most part, I never compare my stories to movies that are being made today or even were being made a hundred years ago.
If a story speaks to me, even if it doesn’t speak to any of my collaborators or any of my partners who look at me and scratch their heads and say ‘Gee, are you sure you want to get into that trench for a year and a half?’ I love people challenging me that way because it’s a real test of my own convictions. The more I can stand up [in this way], the more I can be the standing man of my own life and take a stand on a subject that may not be popular. I see it in a certain way: that I would be proud to add that to the body of my work. That’s pretty much the litmus test that gets me to say yeah, I’ll direct that one.