Trivia / Bridge of Spies

• Actor-Shared Background: Mark Rylance has a wife who is a musician, just like his character Rudolph.
• California Doubling: Largely averted. Though some of the East Berlin scenes were shot in Poland, most of the film was shot on location in New York City and Berlin. The climactic scene on the titular bridge was even filmed on the actual bridge where the real exchange took place.
• Dawson Casting: Tom Hanks was fifty-nine playing Jim Donovan in his forties.
• Production Posse: Fourth collaboration between Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks—after Saving Private Ryan, Catch Me If You Can and The Terminal. They had also both acted as producers of the Band of Brothers miniseries. In a subversion, this was the first Spielberg film since The Color Purple (1985) not to have John Williams do the score—due to health issues.
• Real-Life Relative: The real-life son of Francis Gary Powers has a cameo as a CIA agent involved in training the pilots.
• Screwed by the Network: Disney barely promoted the film in the weeks up to its premiere, and it faced heavy competition with Goosebumps (2015) and The Martian. It ended up losing to both films and grossed only $15.4 million on its opening weekend domestically, while Goosebumps and The Martian grossed $23.5 million and $21.5 million, respectively. The film under-performed compared to a previous DreamWorks/Fox co-production also directed by Steven Spielberg, Lincoln, and was a major vindication of DreamWorks' decision to transfer future distribution of their films to Universal the following year.
• Star-Making Role: Mark Rylance was already an award winning star in the theatre world, but this introduced him to film audiences, with his acclaimed performance earning him an Oscar and multiple roles in critical and commercial hits following.
• Throw It In!: The extras playing the photographers were originally told to put their used bulbs in their pockets. One of the extras was a historian and said that the photographers would have just thrown the used bulbs on the floor. Steven Spielberg was then inspired to shoot the low-angle shot of the principals walking through all the bulbs.
• What Could Have Been: Gregory Peck tried to get a movie made about this story in 1965, with himself as Donovan and Alec Guinness as Abel. Unfortunately, escalating Cold War tension as well as the Cuban Missile Crisis meant the story was considered to be politically volatile by the studios, and the movie was dropped.
• Write What You Know: According to Steven Spielberg, the scene where Donovan's son becomes a Crazy Survivalist is drawn directly from his own memories of growing up in the Cold War.

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