Steven Soderbergh on Black Bag, his return to big-budget cinema moviemaking

Steven Soderbergh is such a gifted filmmaker, he’s made an ordinary Pret a Manger in London look sexy and cinematic. In Black Bag, the 62-year-old director’s latest thriller, Cate Blanchett stars as Kathryn, an intelligence expert who purchases a Pret coffee (shaken, not stirred, definitely burnt) for the purposes of a dead drop. An intelligence expert indeed: who would suspect a superspy of hanging out at the city’s worst caffeine spot? “I’m just happy Pret let us use their real name,” says Soderbergh, who reveals he’s never drunk a coffee in his lifetime. “If I’m going in there, I want one of their baguettes.”

Across his 36 films, Soderbergh has veered between commercial crowdpleasers (Magic Mike, Out of Sight, the Ocean’s 11 trilogy) and experimental oddities (Bubble, Schizopolis). Black Bag is one of the former: it’s a star-studded spy caper written by David Koepp (Jurassic Park, Mission: Impossible) that’s smart, sleek, and, above all, fun. The twist is that Black Bag is also a nuanced drama about spies, their dating lives, and the secrets they’re obligated to keep from romantic partners. How do two professional liars who disappear for days at a time completely trust each other?

“If you work within the intelligence industry, you’re encouraged to date within the business,” Soderbergh explains to me in a London hotel, not a Pret, a few days before the film hits cinemas. “There’s no other place where you go to work and that’s true. I don’t know how the human resources department works when you’re telling people, ‘You should date Bob. He’s right there!’”

At the National Cyber Security Centre, George (Michael Fassbender) is tasked with discovering a mole within the company. He’s handed five suspects: Freddie (Tom Burke), Clarissa (Marisa Abela), Zoe (Naomie Harris), James (Regé-Jean Page), and his own wife, Kathryn. At a dinner party early in the film, George feeds a truth serum to his guests – but not Kathryn, because it can’t be her, surely? – which results in tension, hilarity, and a steak knife being used for non-eating purposes.

“The dinner table scenes are the action sequences,” says Soderbergh. “It wasn’t a surprise to me when I saw the first trailer for the movie, and the one exploding car is in it. That’s fair. It’s in the movie. And there’s just one. The good news was, the trailer itself was clearly setting the story up as being about a married couple, which is what the movie is about.”

As per usual, Soderbergh was his own cinematographer and editor under the respective pseudonyms of Peter Andrews and Mary Ann Bernard. The resulting film is smooth, satisfying, and pure Soderbergh. “The question is always: where is the camera, and what is the next shot? When it reveals itself to you, that’s incredibly exciting. When you’re stuck, it’s really frustrating. I never felt stuck here.”

According to the movie diary on his Soderblog, Soderbergh started principal photography for Black Bag on May 7 2024 and watched a cut on June 23 2024. “Editing, for me, is the most fun.” Why? “There’s nothing like it in any other art form. It’s a mosaic where each scene needs to move the movie forward, and if you got rid of it, the movie either wouldn’t make sense or it’d be diminished. I like that process of determining which scenes and shots will fight for themselves to stay in the movie.”

 I want to see the range of what’s considered a commercial movie wider than what it is

Even for Soderbergh, a director who was nominated for two directing Oscars in 2000 (with Erin Brockovich, he lost to himself for Traffic), he’s in a productive period. Black Bag is the director’s second film to come out in 2025 – Presence, his haunted-house horror from a ghost’s POV, came out in January – and he’s just wrapped The Christophers, another film in London. Still, there’s a certain amount of pressure on Black Bag, a mid-level budget movie for adults being released theatrically in an era when cinemas are reportedly in trouble.

After all, the last time Soderbergh worked with Blanchett was in 2006 on The Good German, a black-and-white noir shot on 1940s-style lenses that cost $32 million and had little chance of recouping its budget. Bizarrely, it’s Black Bag that’s being touted as a gamble. “You couldn’t do [The Good German] today, and we probably shouldn’t have done it back then,” says Soderbergh. “Focus and Universal are taking a chance that they can convince people to leave their home, and that [Black Bag] is worth it. I’d like to see other filmmakers get opportunities to make movies like this.”

Is there optimism from Anora, an indie film, winning Best Picture at the Oscars? “It’s very encouraging. It means somebody else who isn’t Sean Baker might get an opportunity. I want to see the range of what’s considered a commercial movie wider than what it is. Part of it is scale. You make a movie for cheap, and you don’t have to make as much money for it to be profitable. But marketing a movie, and creating awareness – just having people know it’s there – is really expensive. We’re better at bringing down the budgets of movies themselves than we are at figuring out how to not spend so much money on marketing.”

By chance, Black Bag is receiving free advertising by being a London-based spy movie arriving in cinemas three weeks after the news that Amazon paid more than $1 billion to creatively control the James Bond franchise. Soderbergh has previously turned down the chance to direct a 007 flick due to creative differences with the producers. Would he be open to it now?

“I think there are a lot of filmmakers who would like to make a Bond movie, and so I think they should really consider the idea of creating a real auteur-driven series of films, in which you really allow directors to come in and interpret what James Bond means. That’s a way to keep it consistently interesting. But I don’t run Amazon.” As he didn’t really answer the question, I ask it again, more directly. “It would have to be a great script. That means either they come up with a great script, or I task myself with trying to come up with an idea for one. I don’t know if either of those are going to happen.”

In the meantime, Soderbergh is working on two books, one about Jaws, the other a sequel to Sex, Lies, and Videotape (he wrote a script, then decided it’s more of a novel). He’s re-edited a number of of his older films (“in two cases, I’ve made the films shorter”) for a box-set likely to be out in autumn. Plus, there’s The Christophers, an already-shot comedy starring Michaela Coel and Ian McKellen that he describes as “an artist and an assistant in a weird relationship that may or may not be criminal”.

As Soderbergh is forever adapting to the landscape – he shot Unsane and High Flying Birds on an iPhone, and released Mosaic as an interactive app – I ask if he’s masterminded a way to release future projects on TikTok. “No,” he says, firmly. “We put a lot of work into Mosaic, and nobody wanted it. If they did, they would have watched it. That was a hard lesson to learn.”

In 2023, Soderbergh uploaded Command Z, a comedy series starring Michael Cera, to his website as eight linear episodes. “We were thinking of [releasing] Command Z on TikTok. I shot all these fake postings, and we threw them away.” The process meant studying the app. “The visual inventiveness of TikTok grammar to make visual jokes is really interesting. But it’s a snack.”

“I enjoy the specific challenges of long-form storytelling,” he continues. “Even though most eyeballs in the world are watching things that aren’t very long on their devices, whether it’s YouTube or TikTok, I believe the emotional interaction between the maker of something, and the people watching it, is deepened when the thing lasts more than four minutes.”

Black Bag is out in UK cinemas on March 14.