Oscar-winning filmmaker Steven Soderbergh has assembled quite the collection of megastars for his 35th feature, including a former James Bond, Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender.
It’s close to half a year since Bridgerton’s breakout star Regé-Jean Page joined the mouth-watering cast of Steven Soderbergh’s feature-film Black Bag.
Written by Jurassic Park and Spider-Man scribe David Koepp, this almost guaranteed cinematic gem was acquired by Focus Features back in January and began shooting in London five months later. By the end of June production had wrapped.
Story-wise it’s all relatively under lock and key, with the only crumbs publicly provided up to this point being that Black Bag concerns the intelligence world and therefore lies in the spy genre.
For those who’ve followed Soderbergh’s singular career so far, this can be considered a natural progression after directing the heist-themed Ocean’s trilogy with George Clooney and Brad Pitt front and centre; crime flicks The Good German, Logan Lucky, Out of Sight and No Sudden Move, and the action thrillers Kimi and Haywire.
Thanks to Netflix’s The Gray Man and last year’s Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves, British rising star Page is now more than comfortable in the presence of Hollywood greatness, which brings us to the Black Bag casting line-up.
One of the only bright sparks in this summer’s critically savaged video game adaptation Borderlands, double Oscar-winning icon Cate Blanchett leads the pack, while The Killer’s Michael Fassbender and No Time to Die’s Naomie Harris are in there too.
As is recent War Rig commander Tom Burke – he played Praetorian Jack in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga – Pierce Brosnan, and Back to Black actress Marisa Abela.
Previewing the film during a chat with IndieWire, Soderbergh described Black Bag as not just standard spy fare, but a “love story” with a marriage “at its core”.
“There are no chase sequences or anything like that. It’s an intimate relationship film about people who work in the intelligence service. But super-entertaining, and fun. There’s a 12-page dinner scene that scared me. But one of the things that kept me calm was the six people sitting at that table,” he admitted.
“When David Koepp and I were working on [his next film] 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,” continued Soderbergh, before explaining how the aforementioned dinner sequence was nightmarish for a director.
“Nobody even moves from their seat. And that kept me up. Because how do you do that? 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 it’s spectacular. And what happens at the end of it, you don’t see coming.”
