FILM 1590: BRIDGE OF SPIES
TRIVIA: According to Tom Hanks
in a press release for the movie, when his lawyer character of James B. Donovan makes
arguments to the Supreme Court about Rudolf Ivanovich Abel, the
actual words used in the dialogue for this movie were the same as the arguments
presented to the US Supreme Court.
Rudolf Ivanovich Abel's
seemingly incongruous accent, as voiced and acted by actor Mark Rylance, was actually
accurate. Abel was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne to Russian parents and spent
some of his school age years in Scotland. He returned to Moscow in his late
teens but never lost his accent when speaking English.
As seen in the film, Soviet agent Rudolf Ivanovich Abel received
coded messages from his KGB handlers that were hidden inside a hollow U.S.
nickel. The FBI first became aware of Abel's activities in 1953, when a Soviet
agent mistakenly used one of the hollow nickels to buy a newspaper. The
Brooklyn newsboy who had received the nickel thought it felt too light. He
dropped the nickel on the sidewalk, and it popped open, revealing a piece of
microfilm with a coded message inside. But FBI cryptologists were unable to
crack the code until 1957, when a KGB defector, Reino Häyhänen, gave them the
key to deciphering the code, and also gave up Rudolph Abel. The "Hollow
Nickel Case" was also dramatized in The FBI Story (1959),
starring James Stewart.
According to Steven
Spielberg in a press release for the movie, Gregory Peck came after
the story in 1965. Alec Guinness
agreed to play Rudolf
Ivanovich Abel, Peck would play James B. Donovan, and Stirling Silliphant would
write the script. MGM declined to make the movie at the time. It was 1965, Cold
War tensions were high, and MGM was reluctant to get into the politics of the
story.
For the scene outside the courtroom, the photographers were initially
instructed to put their used flashbulbs, which are extremely hot to the touch,
in their pockets. One of the background actors on set happened to be the
historian of the New York Press Photographers Association. He told executive
producer and 1st assistant director Adam Somner
that, at the time, photographers would have ejected the bulbs onto the floor.
After several takes, noticing the bulbs strewn across the floor, director Steven Spielberg decided
to shoot the low-angle view of the principals walking through them.
The Russian phrase "stoikiy muzhik" literally translates to
"persistent peasant" - "stoikiy" being a term meaning
persistent, rigid, or uncompromising, and "muzhik" being a slang term
for a Russian peasant. Abel's translation of the phrase as "standing
man" is therefore appropriate on a metaphorical level.
In an interview with the International Spy Museum, the son of Francis Gary Powers, Francis Gary Powers Jr.,
indicated that his father was not told to commit suicide if shot down, unlike
the depiction in the movie. Instead, it was given as an option in case physical
torture had been involved, allowing the pilots to use a poison pin if the
pilots chose to commit suicide. He also indicated that the Soviets found the
pin on a third strip search but Powers warned them not to touch it; the Soviets
tried the pin on a dog and the dog died a few moments later.
Steven Spielberg cast Mark Rylance in the movie
after watching his Tony Award-winning performance in Twelfth Night which was
Rylance's third Tony Award.
Fourth theatrical feature film collaboration of actor Tom Hanks and director Steven Spielberg with the
two performing those duties. They pair previously worked together on [in
chronological order]: Saving
Private Ryan (1998), Catch Me If
You Can (2002), and The Terminal
(2004).
At the beginning of the film, Rudolf
Ivanovich Abel is painting a self-portrait, the scene is based on Norman Rockwell's
"Triple Self-portrait". Steven
Spielberg and George Lucas
are both big collectors of Rockwell's work.
The subway car that Donovan is riding on his way home is the only
remaining N.Y.C. Transit R11 subway car that was part of an order of 10 built
in 1949. It was called the "million dollar train" as each of the 10
cars cost over $100,000. The interior seen in the film is from a 1964/65
rebuild of the car , not the one it had when the story took place in 1961.
When London-based playwright and television writer Matt Charman stumbled upon
a footnote in a biography on John F.
Kennedy that referenced an American lawyer whom the President had
sent to Cuba to negotiate the release of 1113 prisoners, his curiosity was
piqued. Some quick research yielded a name he did not recognize, that of James
Donovan, a successful insurance claims lawyer from Brooklyn. But it was the
story of what took place several years earlier which he found most interesting.
Donovan had defended a Soviet agent accused of espionage during the Cold War,
and while he specialized in insurance law and had not practiced criminal law
for some time, was then asked to negotiate one of the most high-profile
prisoner exchanges in history. Charman had little knowledge of the
inner-workings of the film industry. Nevertheless, he flew to Hollywood in
hopes of convincing a studio to green-light a film based on Donovan's
remarkable true story. While Donovan's role was not well known in the annals of
Cold War history, Charman pitched DreamWorks Pictures a gripping tale of an
idealistic man navigating the world of national security and subterfuge. The
executives at DreamWorks were immediately intrigued. "When I heard the
story, it knocked my socks off," says producer Kristie Macosko Krieger,
who was a co-producer on Steven
Spielberg's Lincoln
(2012) and is based at DreamWorks. Krieger said: "Not many people know the
story of James Donovan and what he accomplished during this period of U.S.
history, but it sounded like something that was right up Steven's alley."
Rudolf Ivanovich Abel,
whose real name was Vilyam Fisher, passed away in 1971, and was rarely
photographed or interviewed while alive. According to actor Mark Rylance who portrays
Abel in the film: "We don't really know all that much about him, other
than the fact that he received and passed on messages at various drop sites
throughout New York using a hollow coin. He was, what you call, a sleeper spy.
Abel had been in the United States for several years before he began these
clandestine activities, and he wasn't the chief organizer of the spy-ring, he
just carried out the mission. But when he was caught, the U.S. government made
him out to be a little more important than he actually was."
Actress Amy Ryan
and actor Domenick Lombardozzi both
appeared in HBO's The Wire
(2002).
