<bt>It isn't every day that Audrey Neeson sees a movie star being tackled on her street. "I got to see when they tackled Chris Cooper," Neeson said. "He's handsome. He's lucky I didn't go down there and tackle him myself. It made me feel young again."
Film crews were in Vienna on Tuesday and Wednesday shooting scenes from "Breach," the story of spy Robert Philip Hanssen. The movie may open this year.
Cooper (who has been in "Adaptation," "Sea Biscuit" and "American Beauty" among other movies) plays Hanssen, and the crews were re-enacting his arrest by a team of FBI agents on a street corner near Foxstone Park.
The crews set the scene by making some areas look like there was snow. They stretched white plastic across neighbor's grass and put fake snow on top of it. "There's a little winter right here," said neighbor Rod Norris.
The crews have been very accommodating of locals who went down to watch the filming, said Paul Nishimoto. "I'm surprised they let people come and view the scene," he said.
Neeson got the chance to have her picture taken sitting in Hanssen's chair, holding a machine gun. Later she saw a man walking down her street carting a bunch of the guns, and she realized they were just props. "That wrecked it for me. I thought I had the real McCoy," she said.
The film also served as an impromptu history lesson about Hanssen. Hanssen was an FBI agent arrested in 2001 for spying for the Soviet Union.
He was arrested in Vienna after dropping off information for his contacts. The way he would signal that there was a drop was to place a piece of white tape on a sign along East Street. He would then drop the information under a nearby bridge. "I walked over that bridge every day," said Mary-Clark Miller. "When there was money under it."
The other quick lesson that onlookers got was that when the crew says "rolling," they have to be quiet.
"Yesterday, there had been a bunch of kids here," Nishimoto said. "When they were talking, the crew was 'shushing' them."
In spite of the 'shushing' and the trucks lining the streets, the film crews have been good neighbors, Neeson said. "They've been wonderful," she said. "It's been fun."