Steven Spielberg clarifies on his prediction about superhero movies

For the fourth time in their legendary careers, Academy Award victor Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg collaborate once again in the political thriller Bridge of Spies.

On the red carpet, Hanks bypassed most of the press, rushing past reporters in an overcoat, fedora and bushy moustache like a character out of a spy caper.

“Bridge of Spies” opens in theatres October 15. 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. 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. On February 10, 1962, the bridge was the site of the historical swap of two spies when the Americans exchanged Soviet Agent Rudolph Abel (a terrific star turn from Mark Rylance) for the American pilot Francis Gary Powers, who was on a reconnaissance-spying mission when the Russians shot him down.

Despite this, the film’s most captivating performance comes from Rylance who steals every second he is on screen as Abel.

Which isn’t to accuse the film of being shallow. 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.

“Bridge of Spies is about the art of the conversation”, he says.

However, there was another lesson that spoke to Spielberg, one that emerged in his research. Amy Ryan doesn’t get much to do as Donovan’s concerned wife, but she does, as ever, lend a certain dignity to the proceedings. In that way, Bridge of Spies gestures, effectively, toward the synthetic nature of the Cold War, a gross magnification of slights and aggressions, a global standoff that could be reduced, and at least once was, to the gamesmanship of two men sitting in a room. 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. “In the Cold War, when words could be interpreted as lethal weapons, there was a great deal of danger in what was said and even more danger in the things that went unsaid”. I think Bridge of Spies mostly exists as something smaller, a muted celebration of a few pretty simple values: courage, commitment, compassion.