"Something important has come up." "We've got a Soviet spy."
"We want you to defend him." "I'm an insurance lawyer, I haven't done criminal
work in years."
"Tell me what happened." "They got our spy pilot with a head-full of
classified information. We've got their guy. We want you to negotiate the swap."
"What first caught my attention was just the bizarre series of events that led up to this
possible spy-swap. Here's an insurance lawyer who is talked into taking the case of a Soviet
spy, he hasn't done any prosecution work since he worked at the Nuremberg war crime trials
and so he immediately is a bit of a fish out of water. But he decides to take the case.
And then he finds himself defending someone he is quite fond of, or grows quite fond of,
and vice versa. Which creates a great deal of ambiguity. Now that kernel is what attracted
me to the story."
"Oftentimes you play films with someone who has no idea of what they're doing, and is
thrust into a circumstance where they have to figure things out very well. The truth
is James B Donovan was very very sure of his talents and abilities as a negotiator. So
therefore the stress and the place for the nail-biting tension in a movie like this,
in a story like this, is how good the other side is at their skills of negotiation. And
that's just the stuff of great drama."
"You're agent Hoffman, yeah?" "Yeah."
"German extraction." "Yeah, so?"
"My name's Donovan. Irish, both sides, mother and father. I'm Irish, you're German, but
what makes us both Americans? Just one thing. One, one, one. The rulebook. We call it the
constitution. And we agree to the rules, and that's what makes us Americans. It's all that
makes us Americans, so don't tell me there's no rulebook. And don't nod at me like that,
you son of a bitch."
"I think Tom's performance is just wonderful and I don't know many people who can do that
kind of thing of a heroic quality in a very normal good man, found in a place in society
where you would least expect to find it, amongst insurance lawyers. But do you know what I
mean, I think most people, Americans certainly and I think maybe even English people, and
European people, can connect with Tom because he plays things just straight down the line."
"Have you represented many accused spies?" "This'll be a first for the both of us."
"I wanted to show the audience there's going to be an inevitability about the shoot down
of Gary Powers and the Soviet spy and the character of James Donovan that Tom Hanks
plays, he actually just comes out and says that some day we may need an insurance policy
in our hip pocket, somebody to trade with the Soviets."
"And so all of those are signposted in front of the audience to kind of see where the story
was going but then there's a whole other story that you cannot predict and that's where the
Coen brothers and Matt Charman were very deft, in erasing all of the corners and taking all
of the signs out so you don't know quite where the story is going."
"Bridge of Spies really is the story of a draw. It's a tie, both sides get what they
want. But without any real knowledge about the logic or the motivations of the other
side. We don't know if it's going to happen or not."
"We need this to be an exchange." "No!"
"I'd pretty much come to the set and say 'here's where you should stand and here's where you
should enter and here's where the camera's gonna be and often I'd put it together right
there in the room, I don't come in with a shot-list, I don't come in with a schematic
of arrows pointing to dolly track, I just want to come in, look at the set, sometimes
I do it the night before, sometimes I get in early, before the crew shows up and I walk
the set with a work-light on and I figure out my day or I figure out the first shot.
And Tom's used to that. On Private Ryan nobody knew where the camera was going except me
and Janusz, so everyone's pretty much used to rolling with the punches. And this was
no different."
"He's just so enthusiastic about film. Whenever we weren't filming something, we were talking
about films and he would go home and on the weekend he would have watched five films and
every night he can hardly sleep he's so excited and he'd get up and be watching films at three
or four in the morning and he'd come in and I'd say 'why can't you sleep, Stephen?' and
he'd say 'I still don't know what this film's about, what's it about?' And I'd say 'what
do you mean, what's it about?' 'Well, what's the central question of it?'' He's just a
really, really fascinating person."
"What was exciting was when I shot the first scene with Tom and with Mark. Tom came out
after I finally said cut after five or six or seven takes and we shot the whole scene
from top to bottom from one angle and I covered it like crazy. And Tom pulled me aside and
he just went 'oh my god, Mark Rylance!' and Tom was so excited.
"How did we do?" "In there? Not too good. Apparently you're
not an American citizen." "That's true."
"And according to your boss, you're not a Soviet citizen either."
"Well, the boss isn't always right. But he's always the boss."
"Do you never worry?" "Would it help?"
"And the thing that Tom mentioned to me that was interesting was: 'Mark is playing it very,
very secretly, and I am being seduced to be still too, and I can't do that, I have to
stay James Donovan, I've got to be the bulldog. Watch me carefully and don't let me be seduced
into being as still as Mark. Because that's the character he's found, and I feel myself
being pulled to his technique and I need to be the polar opposite of him. And that was
a great note for an actor to give a director."
"An actor like Mark Rylance, he is a completely unknown entity in the best of all possible
ways, he gets to create something from the whole cloth without being burdened by every
other movie that he's ever made and had attention drawn to him. Now that's going to change,
because he's going to be making an awful lot of motion pictures beginning even after we
worked together on Bridge of Spies, but even so, I think that because he's older, he's
of an older generation, he's going to enjoy a chameleon-like existence for a very long
time."
"People are scared of this man. He's a threat to all of us. Do you know how people will
look at us? The family of a man trying to free a traitor?"
"Everyone deserves a defence. Every person matters."
"I'm able to draw on the fact that I'm a child of the Cold War, I grew up under, I've been
saying 'the shadow of the mushroom cloud'. I know what it's like to have the raid siren
ring in school and you'd duck and cover under your desks and you get 16mm projectors rolled
into the classroom and you'd see these half hour documentaries of 'what do you do when
you're walking down the street and you see a bright flash?' You know, 'go to the nearest
wall, and duck and cover!' 'And here's Bert the Turtle' - this little animated character
that we actually grew up with - Bert the Turtle, who taught us how to go into our shells when
the air raid sirens blast. And I was convinced we were going to go to war with the Soviet
Union. I was convinced as a 13 year old."
"We little men, we just do our jobs." "Like Lieutenant Powers, he's just a pilot."
"He was making photographs from seventy thousand feet when he was shot from the sky. People
in my country consider this an act of war."
"The scenes we were shooting, in Germany, in the parts of Berlin where we could still
shoot period buildings that hadn't been torn down and replaced by modern buildings, a lot
of the crew and a lot of the German crew would come over to me and they would say 'you know,
I was raised in the East and my uncle and aunt fled when the wall went up and we were
stuck on one side, and we didn't see them for a couple of years.' It was so interesting
to get involved in what an emotional time that was for Germans and to have all my German
crew telling me stories of where they were when the wall went up."
"You're an American. You could well be detained. Definitely stay away from the wall. Cross
it and you'll be shot."
"In some ways it's a reassuring sort of look at the possibilities that can come across
with intelligent people having intelligent discussions and I think that ends up being
one of the great powers of the cinema, you can get the same sort of sensibility of 'what
would I do in those circumstances?', whether or not it takes place in a galaxy far, far
away or it took place in 1961 or if it took place last week. That's what good movies do,
they raise that question of 'what would you do, in the same circumstances?'."
"Every movie I begin, it's just scary, it's scary because it's an adventure and I don't
know what's going to happen on the film and sometimes if it's a special effects picture
I'm more confident because I've already pre-vized half the picture and I know exactly what I
need to get, but when it's a movie like Bridge of Spies, or Amistad or Lincoln or even Saving
Private Ryan where there are no storyboards, except for the U2 shootdown, that was the only
time I did storyboards on Bridge of Spies. I don't have that to fall back on. It's scary and it's exciting
all at the same time. Because I get to make the movie in real time."