“Nothing is a slam dunk anymore”: Steven Soderbergh on Black Bag

Given his predilection for ranging across genres and styles, it can be hard to pinpoint the qualities that define ‘a Steven Soderbergh film’, but Black Bag does feel like an archetypal example of his work. Written by David Koepp, it’s a sly study of relationships among spies, as British intelligence officer George (Michael Fassbender) hunts the traitor among his colleagues from a list of five suspects that includes his wife Kathryn (Cate Blanchett). “I don’t like liars” is George’s frequent refrain, but everyone is a liar in this film, which asks how any relationship can be built on trust in a world in which the term ‘black bag’ – ie, top secret – can be used to evade any line of questioning. A macguffin that could be cataclysmic in the wrong hands adds a sense of urgency to the narrative, but Soderbergh’s real interest lies in the interpersonal dynamics at work, and the way we deceive those closest to us. It’s very much an espionage thriller from the director of sex, lies, and videotape (1989), directed with a playfulness and focus that keeps us intrigued throughout its crisply edited 94 minutes.

In the decade since he returned to work following his short-lived ‘retirement’ in 2013, Soderbergh has directed ten features and four TV series to varying degrees of success, but apart from the continuation of the Magic Mike franchise [2012-], Black Bag feels like his boldest bid for a mainstream hit. At the time of writing, Soderbergh and Koepp’s January release Presence has taken $8.5 million at the global box office; a paltry sum, you might think, but it’s a healthy return against the $2 million production budget. Black Bag is more of a gamble because it’s the kind of film – a mid-budget, star-led entertainment aimed at adults – that has become an endangered species. “The general feeling in the business is that these are commercially risky things to do. I mean, it seems crazy to me,” Soderbergh told me when considering its prospects.

One hopes the film does prove there is still a sizeable audience for original, sophisticated and entertaining studio releases on this scale, but he’s not the kind of man to sit around fretting about things that are outside of his control. As is his wont, Soderbergh quickly busied himself with his next film, and he was mid-production on the comedy The Christophers in London when I caught up with him to discuss Black Bag.

Philip Concannon: When we talked about Presence you said you gave a few pages to David Koepp and let him run with that. What was your collaboration like on this film?

Steven Soderbergh: This one was gestating in David’s mind for quite some time. He had worked on Mission: Impossible [1996] and he came away from that with a notion of another spy story, but one more at eye level. I had mentioned to him years ago that he would be a good candidate to write a variation of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? [1966], with George and Martha as people who worked in the intelligence community, and that factored into his thinking, along with a lot of other ideas, so he told me about it when he was close to finishing it. I had a movie I was trying to get off the ground when I was finishing Presence, and David’s script came in right as I was coming to the realisation that nobody was going to pay for this other project, so I jumped on it immediately. After Presence we hadn’t anticipated working together again so rapidly, but it’s very much to my taste in terms of its character and story construction, so it was an immediate “hell yeah!” That’s my motto when somebody sends me something to consider, if it’s not a “hell yeah” it’s a no, because these things take a lot of time and effort, and the directing gods can tell when your intentions aren’t one hundred per cent legitimate. What I mean is, if it’s not a full-bodied “hell yeah!” the directing gods will conspire to make your life very, very difficult during the making of that thing. They will find whatever soft tissue is there because you are not one hundred per cent all-in and punish you. I’ve had this happen and it’s a hard lesson to learn, but an important lesson.

Black Bag certainly does touch on ideas that have recurred throughout your career. Your exploration of truth and duplicity in relationships stretches all the way back to sex, lies, and videotape and it feels like that theme particularly excites you.

It does, because I think that’s most of our lives, and all conflicts develop at some point from a betrayal and a break in the trust between parties or entities. I’m also interested in systems and how they put pressure on individuals that operate within those systems, and here was a system with this sort of built-in booby trap, which is ‘black bag’ as a kind of liminal state in which you exist with impunity and without consequence or accountability. That’s a bit of a design flaw in any system that’s built on trust, and I liked that about it. The interesting thing for us was screening the film for audiences to get feedback. It was clear that while younger audiences had a good time watching it, older audiences were more locked into it because they’ve had more experience with being married and in relationships for ten, 15, 20 years, and the stakes of the film seem larger to people who’ve been in long-term relationships like that. That wasn’t a surprise, but it affected how we’re approaching the sale of the film.

That’s relevant because conceptually, this is the kind of film that studios are not supposed to be making. This film exists in what is referred to as ‘the dead zone’, which is the mid-level budget movie with movie stars for grown-ups. Universal/Focus Features is taking a real runner on the fact that we have a smart commercial movie that should draw grown-ups to the theatre, but it’s an open question. My concern is less about me personally than, if this doesn’t work, it’s going to be another indicator for all the studios to stop making these kinds of films. I would hate for the person behind me who’s trying to make something in that same terrain to be told no because somebody points at Black Bag and says, “Well, that didn’t work.” We’re doing everything we can. The studio’s been incredibly supportive from the start and seems pleased, but this is not a slam dunk. Nothing is a slam dunk any more.

For modern audiences, the spy thriller means James Bond, Mission: Impossible or the Jason Bourne films, but those are big action spectacles and they don’t have much to do with spycraft. Do you see this film as a reaction to those?

I don’t think it’s a reaction to that, it’s more to my taste. Generally speaking, spectacle doesn’t play to my skill set. I’m happiest when I’m on a film set dealing with performance and how to make sure the characters are being presented in a way that enhances the narrative. Managing large-scale productions, just from my little exposure to it, is not something that I enjoy because more real estate is taken up on things that aren’t, to me, as exciting as two people in a room. I built my career on two people in a room, so I tend to gravitate toward stories that are centred around the idea of people in rooms talking. Every gigantic historic event that we’ve experienced started with a couple of people in a room talking, so I always find that that’s the most dramatic situation that you can come up with.

But, look, the biggest challenge for me when I read the script was clearly going to be these two lengthy dinner-table sequences. If you canvass one hundred directors and ask them, “What is your least favourite kind of scene to shoot?” I guarantee ninety per cent would say dinner-table scenes. They’re just the worst, and this was complicated by the fact that people didn’t even move. Every project has something that scares you, and those two scenes scared me. I was very worried about how to approach them, to keep them evolving visually without distracting the audience.

Those scenes are essentially your action set pieces, and I was very impressed with the polygraph sequence when Michael Fassbender interrogates the others. There’s tension and humour there, but it’s all in the edits and the way you cut from one character to another. How do you approach a scene like that?

The good news was David wrote it exactly as it appears, so what that involved was me bringing each actor in and shooting their sections from each angle. That was not as scary as the dinner sequence, because the set-up of where Michael is and where they are and how to shoot them was pretty clear. I have four good angles I can use on whoever’s in the chair, I have an angle on Michael and then I tried to make a meal out of the inserts wherever I could, taking every opportunity to cut to something: the blood-pressure device, the graph, the hands on the biometric sensor. I was absolutely trying to figure out how to tart it up as much as I could, but actually we were done with shooting that one by lunchtime. This is a testament to David’s screenwriting chops. You’d think in a movie in which the two set pieces are ten-to twelve-page dinner-table scenes, the last thing you’d want leading up to the final dinner-table scene is another eight or ten pages of dialogue, but because of the way David’s constructed the story, it’s exactly what you want at that point. There’s certain information you want, George has been teed up as being a top-shelf interrogator and, as you said, it’s also very funny, which comes at a good point in the film, just to release a bit of tension.

Looking at the overall shape of your career, you’re someone who’s been right at the centre of Hollywood making big studio films and you’ve also worked on the fringes of the industry. You’ve spent your career walking between these different modes of filmmaking and there aren’t many contemporary directors who have managed to sustain a prolific 35-year career making original features in America. It feels like you have found a model that works, and I wonder why more filmmakers can’t make it work like you have.

Well, look, everybody’s different, and it’s why I have no interest in hanging out on somebody else’s set. That to me is like hanging out in somebody’s bedroom, it’s very personal and we all do it differently. The critical period in my ‘career’ – it’s hard to say that word seriously because it sounds so pretentious – was during the making of The Underneath [1995]. It was the realisation that I needed to tear down myself as a filmmaker and start over. I needed to annihilate everything that had come before and be reborn and reconnect with the impulses that made me love movies and want to make movies in the first place. The Richard Lester book [Getting Away with It, a series of conversations between Lester and Soderbergh, published in 1999] was a key part of that. I reached out to him because his movies inspired me so much and his way of working felt more like my way than the way I was working on The Underneath. I was in danger of becoming a formalist and the thing was just inert. I was having this conversation with myself and going through that sort of tear-down got me to a place where I felt liberated and happy and energised, and it’s kind of continued. It’s like a bomb that’s still reverberating. I can still smell the cordite of that explosion and I have just tried to hang on to what I’d lost, which was the enthusiasm of the amateur.

Black Bag is getting a wide cinema release, and it was great to see Presence on the big screen, but that hasn’t always been possible with your films, as from High Flying Bird [2019] onwards a number of them bypassed cinemas. What conversations are you having that define how something is going to be released?

In the case of High Flying Bird, that was the best offer we got. With Kimi [2022] and No Sudden Move [2021], Warners said, “We’re building this platform and we need movies for the platform,” before they decided they didn’t want to do that. Frankly, those are movies that I’m not sure I would get the money to make if I was out pitching them as pure theatrical plays. No Sudden Move, probably not. It’s mid-range budget, not cheap, and I don’t think anybody would look at that and say there’s a big theatrical life for it, but I’m really glad I got to make that movie. I like that movie a lot and I enjoyed making it. But, look, my job is to adapt to what is happening, and when I talk about a piece of cinema, that has nothing to do with where you see it, it has to do with the filmmaker and the point of view and the specificity of the vision. I see commercials that have it and some very successful movies that don’t, so the argument about ‘it’s not cinema if you don’t see in the theatre’, I’ve never subscribed to. Of course, it’s more fun to see it in a screen with everybody; I want the biggest screen possible, but if the choice is whether or not I get to make it, that’s not a choice to me, that’s a false dichotomy.

You’ve said you are not particularly concerned about the threat of AI. How do you view it as a tool? Is it something that you have explored and something you can see yourself using?

As an iterative tool it’s really interesting, but I don’t feel threatened by it and I also think you have to remember, people don’t see something in a vacuum. If somebody says, “Yeah, you’re not scared of it now, but five years from now it’s gonna be so photo-real, it’s really gonna look like a movie, you won’t be able to tell,” I’m like, “You will be able to tell because we’ll know, and that knowledge affects the audience’s interest and engagement.” I do think we’re kind of allergic to the idea of AI taking over an artform, and I just wish everybody who is threatened by it would play with it. You’d realise it’s interesting, but the list of things that it will never be able to do is not small.

When you announced your retirement in 2013, one of the things you said was that you didn’t want to be making movies past the age of 50. You’re in your 60s now, so how do you feel about making movies as you get older?

I don’t know, I’ve still got some things in front of me that I want to do and that I’m very excited about, but I’m certainly never again going to publicly announce my retirement. That was stupid. If you said, “I’ve spoken to a psychic and can see into the future, and you are going to stop while you’re still physically capable of making a movie,” I wouldn’t be surprised and that would not alarm me, so as long as I’m excited I’ll be there. But knowing what my abilities are and knowing my personality, I can see a time when I’m out of ideas or I feel I’ve tried everything that I wanted to try. A couple of the things that I’ve got in front of me, if I can get them made, are really gonna push me, they’re terrifying to contemplate, but I’m also excited. If I’m able to do those things and get out the other end of them, I’m of a certain age and I’m very happy being home, so we’ll see.

Right now, there are things I really want to get done so I want to try as best I can to stay present, but, you know, I don’t control this. One of the things I want to do next, I’m literally just taking it out now, and maybe I’ll get the money for it or maybe I won’t. I could very easily find myself in a place where I want to continue working but none of the things I want to do are financeable. That’s a real possibility that I have to carry in the back of my mind, and no filmmaker wants to feel irrelevant. It’s a concern because culture is changing all the time, and you have to find this balance of being aware of culture and being a part of it and responding to it without losing your core creative identity. There are things that I like and there’s a form of storytelling and a kind of grammar that I like, and if there comes a time when people are like, “We’re past that, that’s not interesting any more,” that’ll be gut-check time, because I’m wired a certain way.