Steven Soderbergh Talks “Intimate” ‘Black Bag’ & Its “Nightmare” 12-Minute Dinner Scene

We’ve said it a million times, but it’s true—Steven Soderbergh is perhaps the most prolific American filmmaker of our lifetime. Just look at the last almost-decade. Since 2017, he’s directed nine feature films. That’s more than one film per year, on average. And he’s not slowing down anytime soon. Even though his most recent film, “Presence,” hasn’t even been distributed yet, Soderbergh is already hard at work on his next film, “Black Bag,” which stars Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender. And according to the filmmaker, the idea for “Black Bag” came to him as a throwaway idea that morphed into a great script.

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Speaking to THR, while at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, Steven Soderbergh talked quite a bit about a variety of subjects, including what audiences can expect with his next film, “Black Bag.” The filmmaker explained how a quick conversation between himself and screenwriter David Koepp turned into a finished script months later. 

“It’s about two people in the intelligence community. So it’s very intimate,” explained Soderbergh. “When David Koepp and I were working on ‘Presence,’ we were just thinking of general ideas. And I said it might be interesting to make ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ but George and Martha are in the intelligence community. What would that be like? And he said, ‘Oh, that’s interesting.’ And then months later, he’s like, ‘I have a draft of the script.’ And it was great. So it’s a very, very specific take on people who are in the intelligence business but also have complex personal, emotional lives. It’s the kind of thing that I like a lot.”

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The complexity of the film is echoed in specific moments of the script. The filmmaker explained by opening up about a 12-page scene in the script where people are sitting down for a dinner. They don’t move. There’s no huge gunfight. Nothing but people eating dinner. 

“It was terrifying because there’s a 12-page dinner sequence, in which nobody even moves from their seat. And that kept me up. Because how do you do that? It’s a director’s nightmare,” said Soderbergh. “How do I keep this thing interesting for 12 minutes, and nobody’s moving? The good news is the scene as a piece of writing is spectacular. And what happens at the end of it, you don’t see coming.”

He continued, “But the challenge of creating a visual scheme that evolves, as the scene is evolving, identifying where the gear shifts are, and making sure visually, where is the camera. The camera has been outside the table. Now, the camera is inside the table looking out, because of this thing that somebody said and the tenor of the room has shifted.”

While Soderbergh is okay with sharing quite a few details about “Black Bag,” we still don’t know when we might see it on the big screen. However, we do know that Soderbergh is going outside of HBO and Warner Bros. for this one—signing on the dotted line with Focus Features. Previously, four of his last 5 films were made for WB and/or its streaming service.