Steven Soderbergh on ‘Black Bag,’ ‘Contagion’ Sequel and Donald Trump

Steven Soderbergh and David Koepp had a very offbeat idea for their next movie.

“David and I talked about what it would be like if George and Martha were spies,” Soderbergh says. “We wanted to make an espionage version of ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.’”

The result is “Black Bag,” a sleek, sexy and frequently surprising thriller that opens in theaters on Friday. It may be the breeziest movie Soderbergh has made since he stuffed George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez in the trunk of a car for “Out of Sight.” Only this time, it’s Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett providing the romantic sparks as George Woodhouse and Kathryn St. Jean, intelligence operatives whose marriage is threatened after he discovers that one of their colleagues is a traitor. The twist is Kathryn is a prime suspect.

To ferret out the mole, George hosts two dinner parties at their chic London townhouse for Kathryn and four other agents, doling out threats and recriminations between courses. The two sequences are masterclasses in pacing, staging and creating an atmosphere of suspense. They’re also the things that terrified Soderbergh the most about making the film when Koepp presented his script. He struggled to figure out how to make them visually dynamic. A chance to solve that puzzle proved too tantalizing to pass up.

“With every project he makes, Steven likes to set an unsolvable problem for himself,” Blanchett says. “He likes making things that scare him.”

In a wide-ranging conversation before “Black Bag’s” starry premiere in New York City, Soderbergh admitted that what scares him right now is audiences. They keep insisting they want to see something smart and unique but might not turn up to theaters when presented with the genuine article.

Cate Blanchett said you told everyone on the set, “This is not a film. This is a movie.” What did you mean by that?

It’s a feeling, you know? It speaks to how you want the movie to be received by a viewer. And so for me to say it’s a movie, as opposed to being a film, implies a certain level of fun and a tone that isn’t heavy. There’s a version of this movie where you go a very different way. Where you don’t glam it up and you make it grittier and harder and kind of less fun. And that just wasn’t what I had in mind. We felt this was a real Hollywood movie and you should get movie stars, and you should make them look great. That was the movie I wanted to make.

How did that influence the look of the film? Were there colors you avoided? There’s a lot of almost amber lighting.

There’s not a lot of red. I wanted a very warm sort of feel and a soft quality to the light because I wanted the actors to look fantastic. And amber, first and foremost, is flattering. For the first dinner table scene, I really wanted a contrast between the lush look of it and the kind of diabolical intention at the heart of the evening. You know, I thought that contrast could be really interesting — like it looks like a really inviting kind of tableau, but it’s got a very dark purpose behind it. And then the second dinner table scene at the end is much less flattering, much more interrogatory. You’ve got this overhead light that’s sort of beating down on people. It’s just got a very different feel, more clinical.

Those two dinner party sequences — the first, where Michael Fassbender’s character is trying to find the mole and the second where he exposes the traitor. Were those hard to shoot?

Those were the two scenes that scared me. It’s every director’s nightmare — a dinner table scene. Like nobody, nobody wants to direct those.

Why are they scary?

They can be super static. There’s continuity issues. It’s a testament to David’s skill as a writer that he can construct a story in which you have two scenes like that and have them be highlights of the movie. A script writing class would tell you, don’t do that once, especially not two times. But David knows movies, and he knows what you can get away with. He told me what he was working on and while we were making “Presence,” I asked him how it was going with “Black Bag” and he said, “Great. I just wrote a 12 page dinner table scene.” And I went, “Well, God help whoever has to direct that!’

At 93 minutes, “Black Bag” is so efficient. I feel like I’ve been watching so many really long movies lately.

The script wasn’t long — it was like 106 pages or something. So it was built to be very fast and sleek. But lately, I’ve been on a kick. “Presence” was like 85 minutes; “Kimi” came it at like 90 minutes. The goal is to identify, at the script stage, things that can go because it saves time and money. If you are rigorous in that process, it pays dividends. Now, you’re often surprised by what audiences respond to or pick up on or don’t pick up on. There are some things you need to go back and fix. I always set aside resources to do reshoots, because I anticipate — especially in a movie like “Black Bag,” where the way in which information is released is really crucial — that things will need to be clarified.

Did you do a lot of reshooting?

It was like two days. That’s not much at all. But Michael’s schedule got kind of wonky, because he was in ‘The Agency.’ At one point, I had one thing I needed to do with Michael. It was two hours of work, but I had to wait three months to get him to be able to do it. Everything else was finished, but we needed this one little thing.

Spy movies are such an established genre. What made this story compelling?

David found a way to keep it fresh. He found a way to differentiate it by going kind of narrow and deep on the character work, as opposed to let’s turn it into an action spectacle. It’s an emotional, psychological spectacle. The trick of coming up with a good story is to have it conclude in a way that is surprising but inevitable. That’s tricky. Sometimes you can surprise people, but it doesn’t feel right or it doesn’t feel organic. But if it’s too telegraphed, then they’re not surprised and they’re not pleased, right?

The key scene turned out to be when Catherine comes home and gets into bed and Michael rolls over and says, “I believe I’ve been set up.” And she goes, “I think I have been too.” That scene turned out to be the fulcrum for the entire plot and for their characters, because at that point you’re somewhat concerned that this marriage is in danger. That’s when they double down on the trust and the intimacy and they solve the mystery. It’s also unusual to see a movie about a marriage in which an affair is not the point. And I like this idea that the other people they work with are kind of annoyed at how well their marriage works.

They have a healthy relationship despite the fact that they both work in a toxic business, right?

Within the context of what’s possible, yeah they do. As it turns out, the people we spoke to who work in the intelligence community, there’s a lot of dating within the industry. There’s all these issues with the secrecy of the work that others don’t understand, so it’s not frowned upon in the way that it is in almost any other context or business. It’s understood that spies date other spies, because it’s really hard to be in a relationship with anyone else. So I would imagine the whole HR situation is pretty weird.

Michael Fassbender wears glasses. Is that a nod to Harry Palmer? Also, his name is George, was that a reference to George Smiley or George from “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf”?

Yes. The glasses were in the script, but David and I are big fans of those Michael Caine movies, and this felt very much in line with, especially the first two, in terms of its scale and what it was interested in. And George was a “Virginia Woolf” reference.

But there is the Smiley part of it too. I don’t know if David was thinking about that, but I really like John le Carré and the more realistic spy stuff. Especially because spycraft has changed a lot in the last decade or so, because of technology. We do not live in a world anymore where you can have multiple identities and travel around with three different passports that you store in your safe. Biometrics don’t allow for it. Now, it’s about cultivating sources. And that takes time, and it takes people who are very, very skilled at turning somebody over to their side.

One thing I liked about “Black Bag” is it’s set in this intelligence agency, which we assume would be run by competent people, but it is riven with interpersonal disputes and struggles.

People are people. However, you might imagine one of these institutions, they still operate just like high school. They can have all this pettiness and rivalries. A million years ago, when we were doing “K Street” for HBO, I basically realized that about D.C.

Given your experience making “K Street” and learning about how the Beltway operates, what do you make of the current state of politics under Trump?

God, the George W. Bush-era seems like the golden age now. Who would have thought we’d find ourselves wishing that things were that simple? You really wonder if it’s the death of metaphor. What are you going to make up that can top this? What we’re watching is crazy.

I don’t think I’d make anything about politics right now. I think you concentrate on stories and issues that are kind of perennial and always exist no matter what administration is in power. You don’t want to find yourself in a situation in which you run the risk of just dating the thing that you’re making — where its shelf life is months, as opposed to years. “Traffic” was topical, because that issue is never going to go away. You can make that movie every five years with different characters and different administrations, and it’s still a problem. But right now, it’s a weird time to make a movie about the president. If somebody forced me to make a movie about the United States President right now, I don’t know how I would approach that.

Do you mean you want to avoid making movies explicitly about Trump or the presidency in general?

I mean the office. I guess it would depend on whether it’s a drama, comedy or thriller. But we’re in a place right now where our ideas of what that office means are evolving. We have to ask ourselves if these traditional tropes of “good guy, bad guy” are real anymore. We have somebody in that office whose behavior mostly aligns with the behavior we would call villainous in a movie, right? And yet, he was elected by a lot of people. It makes you wonder if we got this wrong. Are people going to the movies and rooting for the villain, and we’ve just been pretending that that’s not true? The thing that is most unnerving: If you’re a parent of a child, what are you telling them about how to behave? How do you convince them there’s a right and wrong way to behave with what is happening in the White House now?

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A few years ago, you said you were exploring a philosophical sequel to “Contagion” with the film’s screenwriter Scott Z. Burns. Is that still happening?

We’ve talked about it. It would have to be about something new, but also something that’s plausible. Part of the reason people were able to find resonance in that movie when it opened, and then 10 years later when the pandemic happened, was it was rooted in reality. We’ve got to find a new gimmick, but it’s got to be something that people go, “Oh, that could happen.”

Would it be about another pandemic or a public health crisis?

Maybe. It would need to be something that’s going on right now that just needs a tiny little shove to turn into a huge thing. To me, “Contagion” was a horror movie. So the trick would be, can you find something as scary that’s real? There’s certainly a case to be made, especially in the West, for the long-term effects, environmentally, of what we eat, what we breathe. As is well known, we have plastic in our blood now. It’s in our brains. This is a new thing that’s got to have a pretty serious effect. There’s lots of possibilities.

You’re writing a book about the making of “Jaws.” When will that be released?

It’s evolving slowly. I’m hoping once my next movie, “The Christophers,” is done that, for the first time in a while, I’ll have a little bit of a break. I’ve done a lot of the spade work and so the more creative part of writing the book can begin. But I don’t have a sense of how long it’s going to take yet. Is it a couple months? Or is it going to take a year? I don’t know.

It’s about directing, and it uses that movie as a spine and jumping-off point. “Jaws” turns out to be a good movie to use as an excuse to talk about directing because of the circumstances under which it was made, and the fact that if that person hadn’t made it, it probably wouldn’t have been made at all. It certainly wouldn’t be a classic. It’s a great story of what Steven Spielberg accomplished by surviving what was a nightmare.

“Black Bag” reportedly cost $50 million. Studios don’t really make mid-budget films like this any longer. Was it hard to get it made and have it be released theatrically?

It’s referred to as the dead zone — mid-range budgeted movies for adults. Nobody’s playing in that space. And I have to give [the film’s distributor] Focus credit for not hesitating. These are the kinds of movies that I’ve made my career on. I would like for the movie to work, not just for my own benefit, but for the benefit of the next person who wants to make one of these. I don’t want to be used as an example against a filmmaker of why we stopped doing this type of movie. I think we’ve done everything right. The marketing materials are strong. The movie tested well. So the question becomes: Can we get people to get off their couch?

Wouldn’t it have been easier to make this movie for a streamer like Netflix or Amazon? That would have shielded the film from being judged a success or a failure based on the box office grosses.

The only companies that pursued it were all companies that put movies in theaters. None of the streamers wanted to make it, which was kind of surprising. You’re definitely swimming against the tide by making a movie like this and putting the resources behind it to have it open in wide release. In theory, it’s the kind of movie that people of a certain age always complain they don’t make anymore. Does that mean they’ll show up?

If “Black Bag” doesn’t work, will you rethink your approach to the business?

Yeah. It’s OK to make mistakes. It’s just not OK to make the same mistake over and over again. So if it doesn’t work, I’m not going to be in a hurry to go make another movie that is targeting the same people. I’ve got to recalibrate my future options to see if there’s an overlay between what I like and what people are going to see. That’s always the game you’re playing. You want people to see these things. The key is to keep the scale manageable so that it’s not catastrophic if it doesn’t turn out the way you hope. I just finished shooting “The Christophers” this week. I’m not sure what’s next. This will be a factor.

Do you ever think about making a franchise film, just so you can have the freedom to go make a bunch of other things that aren’t surefire commercial successes? Are you considered for those type of movies?

No, I’m not seriously considered for them. But I also don’t know that Hollywood works that way. I think people think it does. I make choices based on what excites me and scares me a little. I don’t have any rules about what I’ll make or not make, except that I won’t make a Western.

Why won’t you make a Western?

I’m scared of horses.