Tom Hanks locates student’s ID card, sends tweet to find her

A dramatic thriller set against the backdrop of a series of historic events, “Bridge of Spies” tells the story of James Donovan (Hanks), a Brooklyn lawyer who finds himself thrust into the centre of the Cold War when the Central Intelligence Agency sends him on the near-impossible task to negotiate the release of a captured American U-2 pilot.

Steven Spielberg, the director of “Bridge of Spies” (opening Friday), remembers growing up in and with the Cold War. Audiences applauded the film during its World Premiere at the New York Festival on Sunday. Donovan hopes to win Powers freedom through a prisoner exchange of convicted Soviet Union spy Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance), whom Donovan defended years earlier.

“I think that was the background that he had”, 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. “I even smoked crack”, said the 25-year-old rapper, who used to go by Chet Haze.

Spielberg says he decided to make Bridge of Spies his next film after 2012’s Lincoln because it felt connected to the same “theme about a single person doing the right thing, or attempting to do the right thing, despite all the obstacles he faces”.

“I didn’t know what was going to happen”, she said.

I suppose that might be a lesson we can take from Bridge of Spies, something about war, or conflict, not actually being its own inevitable entity, but rather a mosaic of human lives-each Donovan, each Stasi officer a tessera in a grander portrait, one we really ought to stop making and remaking.

“I was also trying to make the point that there was room for every kind of movie today”, he continues. But even the mighty Hanx can’t keep this movie’s chilliness fully at bay.

“I remember what it felt like to fear something so much you hate what causes the fear. But all the big nuts and bolts of the superstructure of the story did occur”. And yet that movie, which was essentially about the passing of an amendment, was so mesmerizing and compelling that it grossed nearly $300 million worldwide and won two Oscars (it was nominated for 10 others). “To me, when I’m shooting scenes that contain a lot of dialogue, camera movement is part of the storytelling”. “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.