When it comes to award potential, you can’t do much better than Steven Spielberg directing Tom Hanks in a film based on a script by Ethan and Joel Coen and inspired by true events. That pretty much sums up Bridge of Spies, the long-awaited film that unites all of these top-tier filmmakers and debuted its first trailer this week.
Set against the backdrop of the Cold War, Bridge of Spies casts Hanks as James Donovan, a Brooklyn attorney tasked with negotiating with the KGB for the release of a captured American spy-plane pilot in exchange for a Soviet spy detained in the U.S. Donovan chronicled his experience in the 1964 novel Strangers On A Bridge, and in later years served as an associate prosecutor at The Nuremburg Trials and was instrumental in drafting the legislation that established the Central Intelligence Agency.
Spielberg, Hanks, and the Coen brothers have won a combined nine Oscars, giving Bridge of Spies an impressive pedigree to go along with its award-friendly subject matter. Along with Hanks as Donovan, the film stars Mark Rylance as KGB agent Rudolf Abel, Scott Shepherd as CIA operative Hoffman, Amy Ryan as Mary Donovan, Sebastian Koch as East German lawyer Vogel, and Alan Alda as Donovan’s partner at his law firm, Thomas Watters.
The film will be the fourth collaboration between Spielberg and Hanks as director and star, respectively, and the first since 2004’s The Terminal. It’s also the first collaboration between Hanks and the Coen brothers, the latter of which have been nominated for five screenwriting Oscars and won two (for No Country For Old Men and Fargo).
Back in March, Dreamworks Pictures announced that Oscar-nominated composer Thomas Newman (The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Saving Mr. Banks) will score the film.
Bridge of Spies hits theaters October 16, 2015.
