Ever since his debut feature “sex, lies, and videotape” established him as a major director in 1989, Steven Soderbergh has been preoccupied with the secrets people keep and the lies they tell — both to others and themselves. It’s been a recurring theme in everything from heist films (“The Underneath,” “Ocean’s 11,” “Logan Lucky“) to true stories utilizing a variety of tones and styles (“Che,” “The Informant,” “Behind the Candelabra”) and idiosyncratic comedies (“Schizopolis,” “Full Frontal”).
After 36 years of filmmaking and over 30 features, you might think Soderbergh has said everything he has to say on the subject. He’s now back with “Black Bag,” a spy thriller that might be his smartest and most beautifully directed meditation on secrets, lies, and betrayal to date — it’s certainly one of his most entertaining. Screenwriter David Koepp’s story of a British intelligence agent (Michael Fassbender) investigating five of his colleagues — including his wife (Cate Blanchett) — to figure out which one of them is a traitor is intricate, suspenseful, and deeply romantic in its portrayal of a married couple whose mutual affection is perceived by others as a vulnerability, when it’s really their superpower.
Koepp’s script is so tailored to Soderbergh’s obsessions, and so in line with the director’s skill at crafting intelligent and stylish entertainment for adults, that you might think Soderbergh was an uncredited co-writer, but Soderbergh says the screenplay came to him pretty much ready to go as is. “The only request I made was to change the script from the U.S. to the UK,” Soderbergh told IndieWire. “He’d lived in London for four or five years and was happy to make that switch, and it didn’t require much tinkering other than changing the slug lines of the script, since intelligence agencies in Western countries share a lot of attitudes and approaches to their work.”
The British setting can’t help but evoke memories of past spy films from “The Ipcress File” (a key influence on “Black Bag”) and “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” to the James Bond movies, and Soderbergh and Koepp exploit the genre beautifully to give their movie an impressive narrative economy. It clocks in at just over an hour and a half, yet has the density of a great novel thanks to the filmmakers’ ability to use the genre as a kind of shorthand. They assume you’ve seen enough other spy movies to understand the context, so they don’t waste time on things that can be established with a quick shot or gesture.
The movie sets up its premise quickly, as Soderbergh and Koepp trust that an audience weaned on espionage thrillers doesn’t need handholding when it comes to the basics — though Soderbergh admits that in the film‘s first cut, he and Koepp moved things forward a bit too quickly.
“You want people to be reaching for the movie without feeling that it’s beyond their grasp,” he said. “Based on feedback we were getting from screenings, David and I felt that, in a couple of instances, we were being too oblique releasing information. And that’s really the prime issue with a movie like this: what the audience knows and when.”
To help acclimate the audience, Koepp and Soderbergh added a scene in which four of the five agents Fassbender’s character will investigate get together for a drink before a dinner where he will unofficially begin his interrogations. That dinner is, in the film’s final form, a writing, directing, and acting tour de force, a beautifully shot and cut dialogue sequence that propels the story forward and sucks the viewer into both the espionage plot and the nature of the marriage at the movie’s core. Soderbergh knew going in that the scene was in danger of feeling either static or too showy, depending on how he shot it.
“My main concern was that nobody moved,” he said. “It’s bad enough to have a 12-page dinner scene, but the fact that no one moved or even stood was really piling on. It’s certainly not something the screenwriting gurus would encourage you to do, to anchor your movie with two long dinner scenes [there’s another one at the film’s climax] in which people are stuck in their chairs. But David’s good at that stuff, so my job was to just come up with a directorial approach that masked the fact that people weren’t moving around without being showy.”
The answer to Soderbergh’s problem was largely found in designing the shots with an eye toward editing, where rhythms would shift according to the shifting power dynamics in the scene. It’s a drastic change from Soderbergh’s previous film, “Presence,” a horror movie told from the point of view of a ghost in which each scene is an unbroken take; here, scenes like the dinner are chopped up into very precise, fine pieces to find dramatic emphasis.
“It just meant thinking about it, planning and previsualizing what the shots were and where the cuts come and when to shift the visual approach in a way that mimics the gear shifts that are happening in the text,” Soderbergh said. “I just brought everybody in on an off day and used a viewfinder app to document all the various compositions that I felt belonged in the movie. Then, I printed those out and sat down with the script to previsualize which angles would come at which point.” Soderbergh then wrote the shots down on a big whiteboard on set and crossed them off as he got them.
Knowing where the cuts were in advance allowed Soderbergh to keep from exhausting his actors, who were never expected to perform more than two pages at a time. The director broke the scene down into small sections and got every piece of coverage he needed — maximizing his time by shooting with multiple cameras — before moving on to the next piece. “It helps when you have actors this skilled, and you’re not worried about whether people know their lines,” Soderbergh said, alluding to one of the main pleasures of the dinner sequence: It’s a chance to see six incredible actors (Fassbender, Blanchett, Marisa Abela, Tom Burke, Naomie Harris, and Regé-Jean Page) at the top of their game.
The casting is another sly way in which Soderbergh gives his movie added resonance in its relationship to other spy films, as Harris appeared in several James Bond films, and Pierce Brosnan, a former Bond himself, stars as the spies’ boss.
“This movie is not avoiding the fact that it’s standing on the shoulders of a lot of other spy movies,” Soderbergh said. “I was hopeful that Pierce, in particular, would spark to the idea of playing the other side of the Bond character, the guy who would essentially be sending Bond out into the field. He did seem to like that idea, and I think he liked the idea of torturing his employees.”
“Black Bag” finds Soderbergh once again serving as his own cinematographer (under the pseudonym Peter Andrews) as he has on every project since “Traffic” in 2000. Soderbergh famously likes to move fast and avoid, as he puts it, “taking lights off the truck,” which makes the visual elegance of “Black Bag” all the more astonishing. It’s one of the more purely beautiful films Soderbergh has ever made, and if there wasn’t a bias among cinematographers against directors who do double duty as DPs, the photography would be a shoo-in for awards consideration. For Soderbergh, the key to creating beautiful images without relying on movie lights is a close collaboration with the production designer.
“In the case of the house [where the married couple lives], I had conversations with Philip Messina about how I wanted the set to be lit, and that affected how he laid the set out,” Soderbergh said. “ I said, look, I want you to build these soffits that I can have lights inside of that bounce into the ceiling to provide a sort of ambient fill that is of a different color than what I’m gonna use as my primary source. And then he came up with these sort of light wells in the apartment that during the day provided illumination.”
From that point,, Soderbergh and Messina brought the gaffer into the conversation to discuss the practical lights and what they would look like in terms of intensity, color, and temperature so that the set would be entirely lit by lights that were part of the set’s decor. “It’s all about prepping the look beforehand,” Soderbergh said, “so that when we get to actually shooting, if you walked on the set, you wouldn’t see any movie lights anywhere. It was all built in.”
Part of the visual pleasure of “Black Bag” comes not only from the soft, flattering lighting but from the lavish surroundings in which many of the characters live; Soderbergh freely acknowledges that the house where Fassbender and Blanchett reside is a “movie house” more expensive and glamorous than what real-life spies might be able to afford. Yet he also insists that the house is expressive of character.
“It shows that all of their disposable income and time away from work is spent on making their house the way that they want it. This is their safe space. They work in a business with a lot of uncertainty and instability and a certain amount of risk, and their home is really their cocoon.”
“Black Bag” is just one of several gifts for Steven Soderbergh fans to come out this year; January saw the release of “Presence,” and this month, two of his earlier features, “The Informant” and “The Good German,” will be released on 4K UHD. “The Good German,” in particular, deserves reappraisal, especially since Soderbergh says no one has ever said a kind word to him about it.
“‘The Good German‘ remains, to this day, the most maligned thing I’ve ever made,” he said. “Other things I’ve made that had mixed receptions when they came out have, over time, been looked at more kindly. That’s not the case with ‘The Good German.’ People hated it when it came out, and there’s been no one willing to carry the torch for that movie 20 years on. It’s baffling because I was so happy with it and remain happy with it.” When told that IndieWire recently ran an impassioned defense of the film, Soderbergh wryly responded, “Well, they say if you can reach one person…”
Not one to spend time looking back, however, Soderbergh is already hard at work on his new feature, a two-hander called “The Christophers” that reunites him with “No Sudden Move” and “Full Circle” screenwriter Ed Solomon. It’s his fourth film in a row in London, which he says has purely been a matter of coincidence. “It’s just one thing after another keeps happening here,” Soderbergh said. “I do like it here. But I’m going to be finishing this movie soon, so I guess I have a big decision in front of me — if they let me come back.”
“Black Bag” is now available for rent or purchase on all digital platforms. “The Good German” and “The Informant” will be released on 4K UHD on April 15.
