Spy Game

Tony Scott compresses the present tense into a single day and reaches back through flashbacks to Vietnam in 1975, Berlin in 1976 and Beirut in 1985. The real pressure is not in the field but in a conference room, where executives question Muir as if gathering history while building a pretext for leaving Bishop to die. Muir understands that, and works by steering his own agency the wrong way. He spends 282,000 dollars of his retirement savings on it. The production had to change plans too. Israel was the principal foreign location for the Beirut and Vietnam material; a team had prepared there for 4 months and a building had been bought to blow up. The plan collapsed overnight, and location scout Christian McWilliams was given 76 hours to save the film. The answer was Casablanca, where the replacement apartment block sat beside a factory owned by the King of Morocco and the permit was hard to get. The Chinese prison holding Bishop was shot in a Victorian gaol in England. Brad Pitt turned down the lead in The Bourne Identity to take this part. A good fit if you want the work done by telephone, forged paperwork and bluff, with Redford barely leaving the building. Not for anyone irritated by cutting that interrupts every act of remembering.