Spielberg Takes On Terror

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"We all talk in genres," Kennedy says, "and this is clearly a thriller from a movie-making standpoint." On the other hand, it had to be a character-driven and intellectually acute thriller to satisfy her and Spielberg's ambitions for it. So "we knew and took the approach early on that we are not making a documentary." At some point the phrase "historical fiction" entered their conversations. They understood that they would have to compress and conflate some of their material. And, yes, do some inventing as well. "The fiction," says Spielberg, "comes in the interpersonal relationships of the five members of the ex-Mossad team" on which the film focuses. "I was very careful," he says, "to start the movie by saying 'Inspired by real events,' because until the secret files are opened up nobody will really know actually who did what."

But Kushner could make a good, entertaining guess. Spielberg had long wanted to work with the Pulitzer prizewinning author of Angels in America, and once he had solved Kushner's concerns about formatting a screenplay ("I said, 'Well, there's a program called Scriptor--put it on your laptop and you don't have to worry about that again'"), Kushner said he would try a few scenes. They became a 300-page first draft, written largely on spec, after which he and Spielberg happily collaborated for a little more than a year to complete the script. "You speak the words, and I'll provide the pictures," Spielberg remembers saying. "It was a lot of e-mails and arguments on the phone," Kushner says, "and an exciting amount of give and take. I think we really affected one another politically and emotionally." Another challenge was to create a sense of identification with Avner and his team. Avner, in particular, is a man not very in touch with his inner life. "I always felt like the character was trying to convince himself of an ideal without necessarily coming to terms with what the ideal was," says Bana. The whole team, says Kennedy, is five men on a mission who don't want to think of themselves as anything like the men they are pursuing.

Kushner located a dry, allusive, sometimes bleakly comic language for them, and Spielberg often found himself just listening to Kushner's words, momentarily forgetting his picture-making part of their deal. In a situation rare in modern filmmaking, the screenwriter was on the set 90% of the time. "When something was more action driven, Steven would take the lead," says Kennedy, "and when something was more dialogue driven, Tony would take the lead." Says Spielberg: "It was as close as I've ever come to directing a play."