Bridge of Spies – Hanks And Spielberg’s masterpiece

He happened to be in the office at DreamWorks Studios the day Matt Charman, a British playwright and screenwriter, came to pitch a movie based on Donovan’s story.

Donovan, born in 1916, was a lawyer who graduated from Fordham University and Harvard Law School.

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. The Glienicke Bridge is where the prisoner swap took place.

“We couldn’t pass the opportunity up”, Jessica Lebling said. “He’s a very nice man”. “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 I want to be an actress”, she said. The subject of Bridge of Spies, James Donovan, was perhaps a more minor hero than those two Great Men, but what he managed to do in late 1950s East Berlin was still pretty film worthy. The director wishes to shoot a romantic comedy with Tom Hanks. “But all the big nuts and bolts of the superstructure of the story did occur”.

“My dad always said, ‘Don’t worry about this, there’s never going to be a war, nobody is that insane.’ But I never believed it. I actually felt that everybody was insane when I was a kid”, the director told EW.

The Nuremberg trials were led by Allied forces prosecuting Nazis for war crimes committed during World War II.

He continues: “I just had to realise something, that cars, clothes, girls, guys, whatever your flavour is, that s**** is all cool, but what’s really cool is being a good man, and walking with God and being a good person”. “Judges in Brooklyn were reviewing the situation and who they could choose, and they came up with my father”. “She’s a lot like me”.

Hanks was the right choice for Donovan because the lawyer “had to be a superb diplomat and negotiator, and he also had to be a fish out of water”, Spielberg says. To play the street-smart but profoundly ethical Donovan, Spielberg thought of Hanks, who quickly signed on.

Then it comes to him: “William Holden”, he says with a smile.

He died on January 19, 1970, at the age of 53. “Bridge of Spies” is, in a way, a surprise from Spielberg, who might have been expected to end his three-year absence from filmmaking with a big, commercial entertainment. His family will attend a book signing on October. 10 from 1 to 2:30 p.m., where they will discuss the book and Donovan, at the Bookstore Plus in Lake Placid.