That doesn't mean that it doesn't go a little bit Hollywood in terms of technology, but I think that it was a pivotal moment in the movie just like it is a pivotal moment in espionage." "The mechanics of how it goes down are actually pretty good. "It captures the emotional content, and also visually it plays well," Mahle says. One scene Mahle says is particularly realistic is the walk-in-when a Russian defector comes into the CIA offices to reveal that Salt is a spy. And I tried to always point out this would not happen, it would happen X way or Y way, so he had a sense of how wide the margins were." "So I was trying to help delineate areas in which they could get very real, and other areas in which they could go Hollywood. "It's a very thin line to walk, because you don't want to tell somebody that the whole script will just never happen," she says. What would I really be faced with? How fast would this unfold? She was very concerned about the pace of the development, how she would respond, what her considerations and concerns would be, but all in the context of if she was a real CIA officer."Īccording to Mahle, the early versions of the script she saw were pretty unrealistic. And it was very important to her to be real. "She wanted to get her mind emotionally around this role. "She was very professional and focused," Mahle says of the actress. "Because certainly Hollywood wants to be much more interesting and spectacular than maybe what the real spy world is." She also served as a source for Jolie. "As correct as Hollywood wants them to be," Mahle says. Mahle weighed in on the script, tweaking the story line, technical aspects and visuals so they were correct. To further enhance the film's realism, Noyce hired former CIA operative Melissa Mahle, who was with the agency for 14 years and served in the Middle East, to act as a technical advisor on Salt. "I think the biggest note I took from them was how isolated and lonely they felt not being able to talk about their life and their work with anybody in their family. "We spent a lot of time with different people who'd worked in Russia House and the CIA," Jolie says. "What I wanted to do was to ground the characters in reality, allow the audience to really believe in them, and then set them in a popcorn context, so that you could have fun but take it seriously at the same time," Noyce says. So, let's make all the technical aspects really realistic and let's do our research, which numbered thousands of pages." He even insisted that the actors spend time with real CIA agents, some in deep cover, some retired. "At the same time, make the audience really believe in the texture of the movie. "It's absolutely pure escapism," he says. But just how close did they get to reality?ĭirector Phillip Noyce acknowledges that much of Salt is a popcorn action flick. Salt's filmmakers say they went to great pains to get the lives of spies, the technical details of espionage and even the fight sequences right. But thanks to the recent bust of a Russian sleeper spy ring in the United States, the film seems as though it was ripped straight from the headlines-and serves as an important reminder that terrorists aren't the only threat to U.S. Just a few months ago, the plot of Salt, out July 23, might have seemed like something out of the Cold War: Evelyn Salt (Angelina Jolie), a decorated CIA agent, is accused of being a Russian spy and must go on the run to prove her innocence.
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