Only two Steven Spielberg features have not been scored by John Williams: **The Color Purple **(Quincy Jones) and Twilight Zone: The Movie (Jerry Goldsmith). Three, if you include Duel, although technically that's a TV movie. Now there's a third (or fourth, depending on your stance on the whole Duel thing) in the shape of upcoming espionage drama Bridge Of Spies. Due to "a minor health issue, now corrected," John Williams is no longer scoring the film.
Perhaps to sweeten that epoch-interrupting news, the director has offered the world a glimpse at the film in the shape of this first-look still. Spielberg has instead filled the gap with Thomas Newman. He's a composer with an impressive CV in his own right, spanning everything from Pixar animations to Sam Mendes' dramatic fare, and is currently scoring a spy movie of a different stripe in Mendes's Spectre.
As for the still, the first of the pictured trio is Tom Hanks' James Donovan (Hanks), a lawyer who was pushed headfirst into the Cold War during the 1960s when he had to negotiate for the release of downed U2 spy plane pilot Gary Powers after the airman was shot down over Russia. Alongside him is Mark Rylance's Rudolf Abel, a suspected KGB spy who was defended by Donovan in a US courtroom in 1957.
Bridge Of Spies boasts a screenplay begun by Matt Charman and overhauled by the Coen Brothers. The title as it now stands refers to the popular Cold War nickname for what's now the Glienicke Bridge connecting Wannsee and Potsdam: East and West Germany at the time the film is set. Its official name then was the Bridge Of Unity, but it garnered its alternate moniker due to its notoriety as a prisoner exchange point for Western and Soviet powers.
Hanks and Rylance's fellow cast members include Amy Ryan as Donovan's wife Mary and Alan Alda as Thomas Watters, a partner at his law firm. Filming took place in Berlin and New York, and Bridge Of Spies is out in the UK on October 9.