Previous to Bridge of Spies, which is about the real-life civilian lawyer who negotiated a politically charged prisoner exchange during the Cold War, there was, of course, Schindler’s List, Spielberg’s career-changing, harrowing Holocaust drama about Oskar Schindler, who saved 1,200 Jews from certain death in concentration camps by fraudulently employing them in his factories. But in an era where movies are cut and paced at increasingly faster speeds to appease the shrinking attention spans of audiences, movies such as “Lincoln” and “Bridge of Spies” – commanding films about complicated chapters in history that take their time – stand out.
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In this image released by DreamWorks II Distribution Co., Tom Hanks…
While promoting his new film, ‘Bridge of Spies, ‘ at a recent press event, Spielberg said, “To clarify, I didn’t predict the implosion of the film industry at all, I simply predicted that a number of blockbusters in one summer – those big sort of tentpole superhero movies – there was going to come a time where two or three or four of them in a row didn’t work”. “Steven didn’t know that James B. Donovan was the one who had orchestrated the spy swap”.
“There’s a scene in Lincoln in which he has his cabinet around the table and has to justify why he needs the 13th Amendment signed and why he needs them to back him on getting these votes”.
“I play Peggy Donovan”, Lebling said.
Thursday’s standing ovation is the movie’s second of the week. “That was the one time that he cast me and I cast him”.
“I get to act like a different person”, she said.
Then it comes to him: “William Holden”, he says with a smile. Coming from a background of Shakespearean theater acting in the United Kingdom, Rylance transfers his skills to the big screen by making his character an enigma the audience is unable to crack. “And you’re not supposed to”, Spielberg says. I had never been in the spy genre before, even though this is a story about gentleman spies, not cloak-and-dagger spies with silencers and assassins. So I wanted to cast somebody who would not call attention to himself. Here Hanks is as sturdily reliable-decent, restrained-as he was in 2013’s Captain Phillips, another based-on-a-true-story film about cooler heads prevailing. “These are not just films like Bridge Of Spies, it’s independent movies as well”.
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In this film, “friendly” isn’t exactly the right word for the man he plays.
