[Editor’s Note: The following interview contains spoilers for “Black Bag.”]
Chances are if you just saw director Steven Soderbergh‘s latest “Black Bag” you have some questions. The film revolves around the marriage of George (Michael Fassbender) and Catherine (Cate Blanchett), a rock-solid relationship that can withstand the secrets and lies of spy life, until the seemingly impossible situation of George having to investigate his beloved wife for potentially selling out their cyber security agency’s top secret Severus operation.
The “Jurassic Park,” “Mission Impossible, and “Spider-Man” screenwriter David Koepp is no stranger to keeping audiences at the edge of their seat. With “Black Bag” he’s constructed the perfect spy story, where the true art, as he explained to IndieWire, is mastering how and when information is doled out to the audience. In the interview below, Koepp talked about the inspiration for story, his research, the challenge of writing a dinner table scene, the film’s big twist, the joys of writing a spec script during the hell of the WGA strike, and the real world consequences when countries like the U.S. create malware.
IndieWire: What were the origins for this film?
David Koepp: This is like the longest I’ve ever had an idea before actually writing. I got the idea in 1996 or ’97. I was on “Mission: Impossible,” the first one, and we had a lot of technical advisors, you know, CIA people, and I remember talking to someone. I was being nosy because that’s what writers do, and I was asking about her personal life. She said, “It’s really hard to maintain a relationship because I can’t trust anybody, and they shouldn’t trust me.” And that really resonated with me, and I thought about it for — I figured I’d give it three decades, and then wrote about it because there’s a lot of spy movies in the world, and that’s not an aspect of that life that I ever really considered. And it’s kind of summed up: Marisa Abela has a line that’s sort of the crux of it, which is, “When you can lie about everything, how do you tell the truth about anything?”
So I ran with that, and then I wanted to make it a married couple because, to me, that’s the ultimate intimate relationship. But it’s not that they were being unfaithful to one another; if anything they’re too faithful. The construct of their job prevents them from being open with each other, and I thought that must be really difficult.
Not only did you start with a committed relationship, but it seems like the idea was to construct a couple with the perfect complimentary professional and personal attributes. Was the idea, if you were going to take this premise to its furthest limits, to make them as difficult a team to break up as possible?
Yeah, I think that’s what makes us like them. I think that each of them are so fully committed to the other one, that they would do anything for [each other], even to the point of something that’s illegal or betrays their country. And I like those people. I like people who are fully committed to one another, and the world trying to come between them, and good luck to you.
But also, if there’s a married couple, you have to find tension, right? Because a married relationship is sort of by definition meant to be a settled relationship, and yet, it’s a drama, so we have to find tension. And usually, the tension people go to is cheating, but I wanted to do something different, and so I found the tension somewhere else.
When in the process did you and Steven start collaborating on this? This project’s obviously been long-gestating. Did you have a draft of this script before he got involved?
Well, we’d done, at that point, two films together. We’ve known each other for 35 years, but our first one was “Kimi,” that Zoë Kravitz was in, and “Presence,” which came out earlier this year. But this was my strike spec. When the writers’ strike came a year and a half ago, I thought, “Well, I can’t put it off any longer, I’ve been thinking about this for 30 years.” So it was great — I mean the strike was horrible — but in terms of writing something, I had four or five months of uninterrupted thought. I had no other projects, obviously, going on. And there was no one aware of this, or waiting for it, and nobody was asking me about it. So, it was really just me in my office trying to wrestle this — I knew I wanted it to be very complex, so trying to wrestle this very complex six-character piece to the ground. And I did probably three or four drafts before sending it to Steven, who was the only director I sent it to. I briefly considered directing it myself, but it wasn’t quite for me, and he was the only other person I thought of. So I sent it to him, and he was enthused, and off we went. Once Mr. Soderbergh is enthused, things can happen very quickly [laughs]. He’s not known for dithering.
Instead of “let’s talk about it forever,” he had script notes the next morning?
Of course he has notes, they all do, but that was helpful. I love working on spec. Sometimes, it works out, and your movie comes together, and other times, nobody wants it. But you do get to do a lot of chewing with your creative mouth open in private. You get to work out a lot of problems by yourself before you seek an opinion. And those experiences just have generally gone well for me.
Did you always know how you wanted that central premise to resolve itself? The question of whether the marriage would withstand, was that something that you had decided from the start of how that would land?
Yeah, I wanted the marriage to withstand. You know, I’m married. I love my marriage. So I wanted that message rather than a painful, horrible breakup, or one of them shoots the other one. I guess that would be a pretty painful breakup. I liked this idea that, in the first act, seeds of suspicion are planted; throughout the second act they’re sort of tussling back and forth trying to figure out what the other one is up to, and then at the end of the second act they compare notes and realize, “OK, let’s deal with this together.” And that allows us a very fun third act. That was my structural approach. So yes, I did know going in that by the third act, I want them to know, “OK, we’re in a real pickle, let’s get out of it together.”
Taking that into consideration, and wanting to play it straight — without misleading or cheating in how you misdirect the audience — is the key to keeping us guessing what you don’t show us. And where the audience is in terms of the information as it relates to our heroes.
Yeah, you’re really parsing things out carefully to let people know what you want them to know, when you want them to know it. And then, of course, it’s always helpful when you have a structure of what is essentially a detective movie. George is the detective. And if you have a structure where in the climactic sequence he can reinterpret events for you, and tell you what really happened, that’s great. There’s a character whose job it is to actually tell you, the audience, by way of telling the other characters, what happened and why.
But yes, what information we have, and when we get it, is oh so hard. It’s such a matter of fine tuning as drafts go on, and cuts of the film go on. Because you gotta know what’s going on, but you also want, in this movie, a sort of slightly pleasant fog of confusion — not confusion, but wondering. So to nourish that, and give it enough, but not too much, that’s the art of this. And it takes refinement. You don’t get it on the first pass. It takes a lot of passes through.
For a good portion of this movie we’re with George. We’re seeing and gathering information through his point of view. But because his character, which is only strengthened by Fassbender playing him, is such this cool, “doesn’t tip his hand” guy, we don’t know what he’s thinking or piecing together.
Yes! And that’s what I love about how he plays it. He’s so impassive. And he gives you so little, and he’s behind those enormous glasses, and he’s just implacable, but you know he’s taking it all in. And so, what I love about that kind of acting is when he finally raises an eyebrow, you think, “Holy shit, he’s really upset, something terrible has happened.” I think when you’re that minimal, you do yourself a lot of favors and leave yourself a lot of room to work, as opposed to someone who’s terribly emotive all the time and lets you see what they’re thinking. But because his whole job is to not let you see what he’s thinking, that was the right choice for how to play it.
It strikes me that a key scene in all of this is when we break from gathering information with George, when Freddie (Tom Burke) and Catherine are in the driveway, and we’re getting information in a new way.
Right, in her point of view. And that’s the bridge, because we’ve seen her out in the world doing things, but we weren’t let in on them. Like when she’s in Switzerland, we’re observing her from George’s point of view. So, the scene that you pointed out, outside the house, is exactly the pivot in the movie. It’s when Freddie comes to see her, and they talk and compare notes — although Freddie is attempting to manipulate her, we later realize — and the scene that follows immediately after is George and Catherine in bed comparing notes, and changing it to our point of view, instead of mine or yours. But that scene with Catherine outside was meant to be the pivot — now we’re seeing something she knows that George does not, and then they immediately share it.
There’s this quote from Steven: “All the scenes, no matter who’s in them, are ultimately about George and Catherine’s marriage.” Through all your drafts, with all the complications in plot, complex layers, and intertwined ensemble, were you seeing each scene as advancing this examination of this marriage?
Well, that’s an interesting point that only someone else can make about your material.
Right, but is it the way you thought about it while writing?
No [laughs]. It’s not, but it’s a perfectly valid interpretation. And it also gives him a framework to direct them. Now that I think about it, when we do see scenes with other characters, they are referring to their marriage, certainly in that opening, in the bar before they go to the dinner party when everybody meets up for a drink, they’re talking about George and Catherine, and in the therapist’s office, it’s George and Catherine. They really cast a large shadow over it. So I think that’s just a director interpreting, which is great. That’s what they’re supposed to do.
In terms of the other four suspects, did you think of that group as being a foil for George and Catherine? For example, I think of Freddie. Professionally, he’s been unable to advance because his personal life is a mess. Were these four characters conceived as counterpoints to reveal what’s so special about what George and Catherine have?
The movie’s got a spy plot, but to me the personal lives, particularly the romantic lives, of each of those six characters, and, with the exception of George and Catherine, each of the other four are pretty fucked up. And I wanted to see that. And the easiest way to do that is to have them sleeping with each other, and we’ll figure out why.
Freddie, in my mind, started out as Iago. He’s the loyal lieutenant who was passed by and became bitter and spiteful, but he evolved into something else. He was awfully fun to write. Someone who knows someone who’s terribly dissolute, and knows it, and is witty and verbal enough to talk about it, is just a ball to write. And the other one who was particularly fun was Clarissa, who’s Marisa Abela, because she’s the audience surrogate. She’s aghast at the way these people behave. I don’t think she’s long for the intelligence world, because she does not seem to be enjoying it.
Maybe because I’ve seen too many spy movies, but my instinct with Severus was it’d be a MacGuffin. So it was a surprise when that became a very real thing and a big part of the action in act three. What was the inspiration?
Stuxnet was sort of designed to do the same thing, and it caused the centrifuges to spin in the Iranian reactors. Those kinds of cyber ops are constant. They’re ongoing all the time. Countries do make bad plans, or develop things that are more powerful. Stuxnet got out and started disabling computer networks all over the world. It was just a massive problem. What doesn’t seem to occur to us when we make those, or when any country generates that sort of malware, is that if it exists, it can be used against you. So is it so wise to create that? That is very much based on real-world dirty tricks that we’re up to.
And this cyber security agency they all work for, that’s real too? That’s actually the acronym for the agency. You didn’t need to make that up?
Yeah, NCSC (National Cyber Security Centre), which is part of the larger British intelligence community, but it’s particularly the cyber ops branch. Every large military power has one. For us, it’s the NSA. Yeah, this stuff’s really out there. Now, whether they all behave this way — actually, in my research, I found, no, they’re probably a little more boring, and the offices aren’t quite as photogenic. But, you know, we’re making a movie.
In your research, were you able to get access to these people?
Sure. There’s plenty of people who will talk to you. Active duty, not so much. If you’ve retired, or changed jobs, and you didn’t have an NDA, those are people who really want to chat. And NDAs also expire, and then those people will chat. And there’s a lot that’s been written about it. But the intelligence community … most people like to talk about where they work, and it’s not really hard to get them talking. So we did not encounter any particular difficulty. I’d come up on areas in research where someone would stop me and say, “Classified.” But then I could sort of get the aroma of what was classified, and just phrase questions in a different way, and I could usually get what I was interested in.
Dinner table scenes are not always the favorite of filmmakers. You lack movement, and the ability to get things flowing. This film is anchored by two big ones. It seems like you took what is sometimes a problem and turned it into screenwriting virtue.
Well, one of the big reasons I wanted to write the script was to see if I could write a 14-page dinner party to start the movie, sustain it, and get away with it.
You like to give yourself those kind of challenges?
Yeah, you go in with a structural idea, or so aesthetic idea: The whole thing takes place in the house, or Steven’s idea for “Presence,” the whole thing’s from the ghost’s point-of-view, and my idea with this was there’s going to be six main characters. I want to introduce them all at dinner — we ended up introducing them a little sooner, but, right up front, there’s a long dinner sequence that sets the table, no pun intended, for the whole movie. And that was just great fun to write. It happens that they’re drinking a lot, and George has slipped them some drugs, so they’re gonna talk and behave more openly than they might. Then, shortly after I started outlining it, I realized, “Oh, I got to bookend that. That’s also how we’ll end the movie.” That was one of my biggest reasons for wanting to do this, to break the rule that “no, three or four pages is plenty at a table. Nah, we’re gonna do 14″ [laughs]. That made me giddy.
I’ve been taught, exclusively through movies and television, that polygraph machines, or lie detectors, are unreliable. At the highest level of a government spy agency, do people like George exist who are just absolute legends and experts at this?
Yeah. They’re still used quite frequently. NSA polys at random, I think never more than a three months go by without having to take a polygraph. They are somewhat reliable. And some people are better at reading them than others. Did I exaggerate and make him the greatest gunslinger in the West? Well, sure. But, the techniques, like actually tightening your anal sphincter muscle, does affect your heart response. I encourage everyone to try it out, if they get polygraphed. Those things I was able to read about and research.
“Black Bag” is in theaters now from Focus Features.
