Steven Spielberg’s latest film, the spy-thriller “Bridge of Spies” starring Tom Hanks and Mark Rylance, is now out in theaters. This week, The Daily talked with the Academy Award-winning director about his career, his methods and his latest work.
The Stanford Daily (TSD): Let’s reflect on your career up to this point in 2015. What do you think has changed about the types of stories and characters that draw you in?
Steven Spielberg (SS): Well, as you probably already know, in the early part of my career I was always drawn in by characters. Everything I ever did was character-based. In my first major movie “Duel,” [a 1971 thriller about a petrified man in a small red car being chased by the unseen driver of a murderous truck], there would be no story if there wasn’t a human being we cared about driving the little red car. However, throughout my early career in the 70s and 80s, the big notions—dinosaurs, aliens landing in Wyoming, sharks haunting the waters of Amity Island—often overshadowed the characters that made those stories believable. A lot of credit was going just for the concept, not the flesh and blood behind the concept. And none of those films would have succeeded without that crucial human element.
As I’ve gotten older, the concepts have gradually gotten smaller because the characters have grown bigger. I’m much more focused on interesting folks like the characters of Rudolf Abel and James Donovan, played by Mark Rylance and Tom Hanks. Their stories are the ones that interest me today.
TSD: What first attracted you to Donovan’s and Abel’s stories? What first brought you to the project “Bridge of Spies”?
SS: Well, the film started with Matt Sherman, a wonderful English playwright who drew my attention to the story of the bridge-swap. Growing up, I always knew about Francis Gary Powers and how he was shot down over Russia. But I never heard of James Donovan [the lawyer who negotiated Powers’s release in 1961] or Rudolph Abel [the captured Soviet spy swapped to secure the safe release of Powers]. It took an English writer to wake this American up about a purely American story.
TSD: What relevance do you see the story having today?
SS: I hope never impose what I find relevant on others, if they don’t find relevance in such matters. But speaking personally, I feel that what I convey — a man [Donovan] who possesses immense talent to negotiate and not intimate, who can cajole but not threaten, who can compromise and not rattle sabres — is something that our world needs a lot more of. And we’re just not getting it. 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 also on Capitol Hill. He’s a person audiences could learn from: how to be patient with others, and how to figure out or celebrate what makes us different, instead of quickly judging someone who’s not the same as us.
TSD: This is now your fourth time working with Tom Hanks, too. You’ve worked previously with him on “Saving Private Ryan,” “Catch Me If You Can,” and “The Terminal.” What makes Hanks a uniquely talented individual to work with? Why do you enjoy working with him so much?
SS: Tom is such an honest actor. When I made my first movie with Tom, “Saving Private Ryan,” we were both a little bit nervous, but we worked together almost as if we shared a brain. And it’s been that way on the next three films following “Saving Private Ryan.” He exudes honesty, which means that he doesn’t have to act, per se. If he understands the character, he comes to embody the character’s persona without having to work very hard. Now that doesn’t mean he’s not a hard worker anyway. It just means that when Tom knows a character, he becomes that character in the same way Daniel Day-Lewis became Abraham Lincoln, but with different methods. I’m just blessed to work with actors like that, actors who can completely drop who we think they are and become totally different people.
I’m equally as lucky that Tom wants to work with me so many times. He’s clearly one of the greatest actors of this or any generation. He’s trustworthy. Audiences trust him and audiences want to hear how he tells a story.
TSD: You say that you have to fictionalize some scenes for dramatic purposes—which is understandable in the business of moviemaking. However, how do you define the balance between creative license and accurate portrayal when you make historical fictions like “Bridge of Spies?”
SS: At the beginning of our movie, we don’t say “The true story of the bridge of spies.” We say “inspired by true events.” And I make a distinction between a story like “Schindler’s List” and “Lincoln”—which are virtually true from cover to cover—and a film like “Bridge of Spies,” where every single event is true but in order to make the overall drama tenser and more suspenseful, I needed to take license with the order of sequences in order to condense a five year story into something that only feels like it’s taking place over six or seven months.
TSD: In what ways do you see “Bridge of Spies” contributing to our modern understanding of the Cold War and its legacy?
SS: Well, the Cold War is something that we’re being reminded of today: in Vladimir Putin and in the strained relations we’ve maintained with Russia for the last decade or so. The war of words we’re experiencing today, which is nowhere near as intense as the Cold War in the 50s and 60s, nevertheless establishes a current context from which we can go back in time and see what might have led to Putin, who grew up during the Cold War and was influenced by all of the leaders in Communist Russia.
Only recently, in the last two years of so, have the events of today explicitly brought back memories of the Cold War. But there’s a lot about “Bridge of Spies” that still remains relevant today. It’s about spycraft. It’s about the art of conversation, the art of negotiation. But it’s also about spying itself, and today there’s tons of parallels. In the 50s, we flew U2s over the Soviet Union, and today we’re flying drones everywhere and utilizing a great deal of cyberhacking, which is a form of espionage.
TSD: What was college like for the young Spielberg?
SS: Well, I remember I was late for my first class on my very first day at CSU Long Beach because I had to park so far away from the nearest parking-space. Hopefully parking has gotten better since I was a student. Now, I have a daughter — the last of seven — who’s just started college. And when we dropped her off, it was like only last week that I first went to college.
But here’s the thing: when you go to an out-of-state college, or any college away from where you were raised, it’s a very disconcerting experience. You’re literally a fish out of water, a stranger in a strange land. And college is all about forming bonds with people who are as lonely and freaked out about being away from home as you are. So for me, the first two or three months of college were about trying to regain my balance socially. And only after that was I able to gain my balance academically.
Contact Carlos Valladeres at cvall96 ‘at’ stanford.edu.