The Panther Newspaper: Behind the scenes of Steven Spielberg’s ‘Bridge of Spies’

Can you imagine Steven Spielberg as a college student? It turns out that even a three-time Academy Award-winning director was once a freshman at California State University, Long Beach, who missed his very first class on the first day of school because of horrendous parking. 

While he was in school, Spielberg said that he excelled in history — and probably not much else. After starting a family, he transitioned from directing films with an adventurous and science fiction narrative drive to more historically-based dramas, which he attributes to his role as a father who wishes to educate his children about world history.

“When I became a dad, for the first time life took a very sort of serious turn and I just became concerned about something I was never concerned about — which was the future of my children,” Spielberg said in a conference call with student journalists from around the country. “I’ve always said to my kids, ‘You can’t go forward unless you know where all of us collectively have been.’”

Spielberg’s latest project, “Bridge of Spies,” was released in theaters Oct. 16 and is inspired by true events from the life of an American insurance lawyer, James Donovan, during the Cold War. Donovan subjects his family to scrutiny, criticism and danger after agreeing to defend the most infamous person in the country at that time, Rudolf Abel, who was on trial for espionage.

“All of these stories about characters experiencing something profound and dangerous for the first time really hooks me as a filmmaker and makes me want to tell those stories,” Spielberg said. “I just find that Donovan, the real James Donovan (played very authentically by Tom Hanks) is a great example of what we need more of today ... People should be more patient with each other in trying to figure out, or trying to celebrate, what makes us different and not being so quick to judge someone who isn’t the same as us.”

Spielberg has now worked with Hanks on four films and said that he feels lucky that the actor wanted to work with him on so many projects.

“One of the happiest experiences I’ve ever had with Tom was on this last film, ‘Bridge of Spies,’ and it’s simply because Tom is an honest actor … When Tom knows a character, he becomes that person … and I’m just blessed to work with actors like that,” Spielberg said.

There are many things in “Bridge of Spies” that are relevant today, according to Spielberg.

“The movie is about spy craft; it’s about the art of conversation, the art of negotiation … we were spying on each other all through the ’50s and ’60s, and today we have a great deal of cyberhacking, which is a form of espionage,” Spielberg said.

Spielberg said that making movies about history limits his imagination in terms of the events that occur in the film, but it allows him to focus more on cinematic elements. Although he doesn’t manipulate the content of the scenes, Spielberg said he does utilize his creative license.

“In order to make it more tense and more suspenseful, I needed to take license with the order of sequences in order to condense a five-year story into something that only feels like it’s taking place over six or seven months,” Spielberg said. “These things all happened but nobody had tape recorders and we had to make up a lot of the dialogue because there wasn’t a record of what people said around the dinner table, for instance.”

Out of all of the locations used in “Bridge of Spies,” Spielberg said that the most challenging scene to shoot was on the Glienicke Bridge in Germany because he felt pressured to bring together every storyline that was established in the plot.

“We actually shot on the real bridge where the spy swap occurred all those many decades ago,” Spielberg said. “That was a difficult scene, not just because it was so cold and we were all freezing, but because there was a lot of weight on all of us to make that the best scene in the movie.”

But even in the midst of such a serious plot, Spielberg still implemented many instances of comic relief.

“Humor, to me, is a natural byproduct of just being alive and being able to respond, so I find that even in my most serious movies, to not have humor would be to deny the actual existence of the way all of us live our lives,” Spielberg said.

As of Oct. 25, “Bridge of Spies” (rated PG-13) has accumulated more than $32.6 million in revenue and is currently No. 3 at the box office.

Photo courtesy DreamWorks and Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation.