It was late February last year and Spielberg was about to shoot The Kidnapping Of Edgardo Mortara, the story of the Catholic Inquisition in 19th century Italy, which he had wanted to make for six years. As the start date in Italy drew closer, the best director Oscar-winner of Saving Private Ryan and Schindler’s List was fretting. One critical element had not fallen into place.
“I had my crew in Italy and was starting to build sets and had scouted all the locations and I was unable to find this boy upon whose shoulders this entire story rests,” Spielberg says speaking to Screen International in December. “Mark Rylance was cast as the Pope [Pius IX] and Oscar Isaac was cast as the father, and I’d spent almost 10 months looking for this six-year-old kid. It’s much easier to find a 10-year-old child than a six-year-old child to carry an entire movie. I was looking at over 3,000 young applicants for the role.”
Then he received a message from Stacey Snider, chairman of 20th Century Fox, who used to run DreamWorks for Spielberg. She said: “I have a script you need to read.”
“Anything she gives me I read because I trust her taste,” Spielberg says. “She gave it to me through Amy Pascal, the producer who had purchased the script [to The Post] with Fox. I didn’t read it right away because I was trying to get my other movie off the ground and thought, ‘Well, I’ll read 20 pages, maybe, and read the rest tomorrow.’”
That resolution dissolved almost immediately as he opened the script by first-timer and American Film Institute Conservatory graduate Liz Hannah. As Spielberg turned the pages, he became engrossed in the thriller-like account of The Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham and her decision in 1971 to publish excerpts from the Pentagon Papers, leaked by military analyst Daniel Ellsberg, that outlined the US administration’s lack of confidence in the course of the Vietnam War.
“I wound up reading the whole thing,” continues Spielberg. “There was an undeniable relevance to what happened in 1971 with the Nixon administration trying to stop the free press from printing a story which was not flattering to him or his administration, and all the obvious parallels with today.
“I gave myself one more week to find this boy and said if I don’t find [him] I want to direct this immediately and I want Meryl Streep to play Katharine Graham and Tom Hanks to play Ben Bradlee — there are no people better for these parts in the world today.
“I made one last attempt to find this young child. I actually went through — it took me a week to do it — 3,000 readings, 3,000 auditions. Sometimes I only watched 30 seconds of one, maybe a minute of another, but I went through all 3,000. At the end of the week I called up Amy Pascal and said, ‘I’m ready to go to work. Let’s do it.’”
They summoned the key people from Italy and strategised about how to switch projects. “I transferred [heads of department] on to The Post so they didn’t lose any time,” he says, adding wistfully: “We just lost about 27 brilliant Italian locations for what I was about to do, and I had to make some hard calls to tell Mark Rylance and Oscar Isaac it wasn’t going to happen this year, although I still intend to make that movie with Mark and with Oscar.
