Phillip Noyce's 2010 spy thriller “Salt” is a twisted action movie, with all the necessary thrills, fights and plot twists that should come naturally to the genre. It's only after watching a movie like “Salt” that you realize how poorly other spy movies have performed. It's so good. Angelina Jolie will play Evelyn Salt, an experienced CIA agent who has spent a lot of time in the field. At the beginning of the film, the CIA takes in a Russian defector and Evelyn is asked to interrogate him. He reveals that there is a secret Russian mole operating within the CIA, claiming his name is… Evelyn Salt. Oh no!
Salt evades capture by his CIA colleagues and goes into hiding, hoping to clear his name. Does she have any sympathy for the Russians, or has she been wrongly accused? There are many additional twists throughout the game and I will leave them for you to discover. “Salt” is equal parts Alfred Hitchcock, James Bond, John le Carré and “Mission: Impossible,” and it is excellent. There's even a scene where Salt has to dress up as a man to get to a costume party, and it works brilliantly. Jolie is incredibly suave and can certainly handle fights and stunts. Aren't there more hits like this?
However, during several stages of pre-production, the film was a little too close to “Mission: Impossible.” The film's original script, written by Kurt Wimmer, detailed the adventures of a male protagonist named Edwin Salt, and in a 2007 Variety article Tom Cruise was already circling the role.
However, according to Noyce, who interviewed Dark Horizons in 2009, the script was rewritten (by Brian Helgelund) when Cruise refused to commit. Cruise was perhaps rightly concerned that Edwin Salt was a little too close to Ethan Hunt, a role he had already played three times.
Evelyn Salt was originally named Edwin A. Salt
Noyce described his near-misfortunes with Cruise and even recalled reading Wimmer's script at a table, including with an actor who was merely doing Noyce a favor but who also might have been funny in the role:
“(W)e approached Tom Cruise. In Kurt Wimmer's script, the role – later played by Angelina Jolie – was then called Edwin A. Salt. We talked about the film with Tom, and we read at the table with various actors, including Samuel L. Jackson, who kindly played one of the roles so that we could hear the script read.
No, Jackson was never officially involved.
However, it appears that the table read was enough to get producers Amy Pascal and Ned Tullman excited about the film and pursuing Cruise more aggressively. However, this was around 2008 and Cruise was already extremely busy working on films such as “Thunder in the Tropics” and “Valkyrie”. He was probably also approached by other producers about another spy film, “The Knight and the Day,” which was released the same year as “Salt.” Moreover, Cruise did not like Edwin Salt's resemblance to his “Mission: Impossible” character. As Noyce recalls:
“After reading this chart, (Pascal and Tullman) decided they definitely wanted to make this movie. That's when – you know, they just couldn't convince Tom to commit. He had many projects in the pipeline. Around the time Tom was unprepared to commit to the script as it was, his main concerns were that the character was too close to Ethan Hunt, being a rogue spy with unusual abilities. So we spent many months trying to change that and reverse the story to distinguish the character of Edwin Salt from Ethan Hunt. But you know, he was right.
Noyce figured Edwin Salt was almost like Ethan Hunt's cousin, so he understood why Cruise would want to move on.
How did Edwin Salt become Evelyn Salt?
At the same time that these table readings were taking place, Amy Pascal contacted Angelina Jolie simply because she liked to discuss the possibility of a spy thriller with women, since there weren't enough of them in the world. Pascal put the pieces together and discovered that Edwin Salt could easily become a female character with just a few tweaks. Noyce, Wimmer and producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura went to Jolie's villa in the south of France (!) to talk about “Salt”. The workshops began, Edwin Salt's gender was reversed, and they were given a star. As Noyce remembered it:
“For a few, three or four days we discussed our collective visions of what the film could be and how, if a male character were to be transformed into a female character, how that could be achieved. In this process, this process involved creating a script based on these discussions and then having it revised again by Brian Helgeland, who essentially contributed the character or dialogue to the film, but Angelina committed to working from the script that emerged from these discussions.
Noyce noted that the script had been continually refined and revised over the years, which is very common with major Hollywood projects. He noted that the basic premise – that a CIA agent remains in limbo after being accused of being a Russian mole – has always remained the same, although the script turned out to be much more concise, substantive and realistic than at the beginning. Noyce noted that early drafts were broad and exaggerated.
“Salt” is of course not very realistic, but at least it sticks to the principles of a basic spy thriller. It's also an extremely good spy thriller. Some outlets have tried to re-rate and amplify the film, and they all need to be heard. “Salt” is currently available on Netflix and Apple TV+.
