Steven Soderbergh’s Rules of Engagement

Four decades in, Steven Soderbergh is still figuring it out — no, really.

“Every movie is a moon shot,” he insists. “In that regard, if you’re trying to land a rocket on the moon, and you’re off by 1 degree, you miss the moon by a wide margin.”

Across his prolific career in independent filmmaking, the director of the Ocean’s trilogy, Contagion, Magic Mike, and dozens more has broken so many molds that he’s emerged as an almost defiantly dynamic filmmaker, bringing his signature idiosyncrasies as a director, editor, and cinematographer to bear on one genre after another.

“It’s why this is the best job in the world.”

This year alone, his unsettling Presence tells a ghost story from the specter’s perspective, and his espionage thriller Black Bag (now in theaters) grounds a globetrotting tale of personal and professional deceptions within a married couple’s precisely calibrated work-life balance. These latest films, both collaborations with the screenwriter David Koepp, bear Soderbergh’s signature in their restless formal experimentation: the former in how his camera — with its long and roving takes — conveyed the titular entity’s emotional investment in a family’s domestic drama, and the latter in how his clockwork pacing, staging, and editing rhythms reflect a level of control rivaling only that which his covert characters exert over their own lives.

But, as Soderbergh sees it, all he’s doing is learning a little more each time he’s behind the lens. “It’s why this is the best job in the world,” he tells Inverse. “You never know enough; every movie is different, every day is different, and you’re humbled by the mistakes that you make that are inevitable when you’re trying to work something out.”

Black Bag, in this respect, is all about deduction — and duplicity, as its nest of spies races to ascertain the identity of a mole in their midst. Indeed, all of Soderbergh’s cinema has been about the process of problem-solving, from the meticulous planning and preparation of the thieves who crowd heist comedies like Out of Sight, Logan Lucky, and No Sudden Move to the underdog crusades driving procedural portraits like Erin Brockovich and Contagion. The byzantine, puzzle-box construction of more experimental films like The Limey and Schizopolis only compounds the type of challenge Soderbergh delights in setting for both himself and his characters.

“You’re manipulating the audience,” Soderbergh explains. “I mean, you are — that’s your job — but you don’t want [them] to feel manipulated. It’s a seduction, and you want the seduction to be pleasant for the person that you’re trying to seduce — and hopefully subtle enough that you’re getting consent in a way that feels organic.”

In a wide-ranging conversation, Inverse spoke with Soderbergh about seducing the audience with Black Bag, why he prefers to operate his own cameras on set, and the state of theatrical releases.

Setting the Table for Black Bag

Set in the world of professional spycraft, Black Bag is an alluringly sleek and sharp-witted thriller in which two married intelligence operatives, George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) and Kathryn St. Jean (Cate Blanchett), find their professional and personal lives threatened by the theft of a dangerous device. It appears there’s a traitor in their agency, and so George investigates, soon narrowing down his list of suspects to five duplicitous colleagues, including two other couples and — oh, dear — Kathryn.

George’s conflict between emotional and analytical ways of puzzling through this predicament gives rise to an intoxicating, erotic frisson. Inviting all four colleagues over for a dinner party at his and Kathryn’s London flat, George takes care of the cooking — and spikes the chana masala with a lip-loosening narcotic, so much the better for him to coax some confessions from his cohorts.

In this early sequence and one that mirrors the film’s climax, Soderbergh — working from a dazzling script by Koepp, and with a stacked cast that fires his barbed dialogue like each bon mot is a bullet — generates more propulsive suspense from all of this verbal volleying than most filmmakers could from an actual gunfight.

“The two dinner-table sequences were the issue for me,” he explains. “How could I construct them visually in a way that keeps the audience in sync with the gear shifts that are happening, but not in a way that feels intrusive or overtly noticeable?”

Ultimately, he brought in the cast and mapped out every composition that he felt made sense for the film, printed them out, sat down with the script, and arranged them in the way that he felt would best build tension as the scenes played out. Each one took two days to film, Soderbergh consciously altering technical elements like lighting and camerawork between them to capture subtle shifts in what power dynamics were present at each dinner.

“I needed this film to be visually as unpredictable as the text.”

The first sequence, in which George quietly narrows down his potential suspects, was lit to be “more welcoming, enveloping, and flattering to the participants,” while the second was more harshly lit to resemble “a full-on interrogation,” in which “the gloves are off and it’s time to get down to it,” Soderbergh says. He was similarly strategic about selecting a moment to pull the middle section out of the dinner table and position the camera there, inside its perimeter.

“I needed this film to be visually as unpredictable as the text,” he says. “That was the aspect of the project that was keeping me up at night; every director’s nightmare is a dinner-table sequence, nobody likes shooting these, and this movie was literally built on these two lengthy scenes where people don’t even get up from the table.”

The Specific Look of Black Bag

Soderbergh has frequently served as his own cinematographer, editor, and camera operator on the films he’s directed, typically crediting these contributions to pseudonyms like Peter Andrews and Mary Ann Bernard. In doing so, Soderbergh aims to give himself puzzles to solve in every department. In Black Bag, his rapid-fire editing accounts for the film’s breathless momentum, and he subtly escalates tension through framing and lighting choices.

“You’ve got a wide array of tools, potentially, to create an effect on the audience, and the key is determining which of those tools to use,” Soderbergh says. “You shouldn’t be using all of them; that’s chaotic. I see some films in which there clearly aren’t any rules about what you can and can’t do, and I find that frustrating. What are the rules? What format am I shooting in, and why? What are the rules of movement? What are the cutting patterns? What is the key compositional component of how the movie is staged and scored? Your job is to combine and organize the use of these tools in a way that works on the audience, but not so consciously.”

Part of the pleasure of Black Bag is the perfect efficiency of its editing. Picking up precisely as the action kicks into gear and moving at a breakneck pace as its cast of characters navigates a maze of professional responsibilities, personal loyalties, and surprise betrayals, it’s a masterclass in suspense.

The same is true for Soderbergh’s distinctive cinematography, something he always carefully controls. In Black Bag, his soft amber lighting stands out, flattering the actors’ features without distracting from their mind games. “I start with what’s real, and then most of the time you’re putting your foot through a Rembrandt by trying to change that,” he says. “I do think there’s a psychological effect on an audience when they watch something that feels like the real world, as opposed to something that they know — whether they can articulate it or not — looks lit.”

Soderbergh has learned to “restrain the impulse to make everything look beautiful” in shooting spaces: “The cinematographer in you wants to make it look better, but the storyteller in you says it should be this ugly; that’s the way this space should look.”

Soderbergh, who cites such pioneering directors of photography from the 1960s as “David Watkin, Gordon Willis, Vittorio Storaro, or Giuseppe Rotunno” as his influences, cares deeply about color temperatures, which he uses to “show the world as it really exists” or “sometimes to create a certain effect.” “It’s such an inexpensive way to create an emotion for a viewer,” he says. “You know, it doesn’t cost anything to use colors. You just have to be smart about how you use them.”

An Actor’s Director

Outside of Fassbender and Blanchett, whose ice-cold chemistry electrifies the film’s core, the rest of Black Bag’s professional voyeurs are played by versatile actors — including Marisa Abela, Tom Burke, Regé-Jean Page, and Naomie Harris — who brought plenty to the table. “There’s a very real sensation, when you have a script like this and a cast like this, that it’s yours to lose,” says Soderbergh. “And while you can’t be paralyzed by that, it’s also your job to maximize the creative resources that are in front of you.”

“There’s a very real sensation, when you have a script like this and a cast like this, that it’s yours to lose.”

Throughout his career, Soderbergh says his approach has become to carefully calibrate the on-set environment so that, while filming, actors can simply focus on inhabiting their characters without noticing his presence. “The fact that I’m the cinematographer and the editor also means that there’s several conversations that are just happening inside my head,” he adds.

Soderbergh knows how seldom he speaks on set comes as a surprise to first-time collaborators. “I’m sure at some point, Naomie said to Michael or Cate, ‘He doesn’t really talk a lot, does he?’ And they were like, ‘No. He doesn’t.’ In a way, I do want to disappear, be a witness, and be a voyeur to what the actors are doing, and the only way to do that is to strategically remove yourself from being present in a way that’s distracting to them.”

“I just have such respect for actors,” he adds. “I think what they do is very difficult, it’s very vulnerable, and so I’m very conscious of creating an environment in which they feel safe to be fearless. It’s my job to make sure, frankly, the camera is in the right place to really capture what they’re doing, and the specificity of that is important. We’re talking inches between a shot that’s doing what it’s supposed to do and a shot that’s just mediocre. But that’s also part of the fun.”

He used to figure out what each actor needed through extensive rehearsals; now, he just takes everybody out to dinner and observes their behavior — a tactic, of course, that he and Black Bag’s lead character, George Woodhouse, have in common.

Soderbergh has always been deeply fascinated by human relationships, whether personal or professional, and his interest in the ever-shifting dynamics of sexuality and morality cements Soderbergh as a filmmaker worthy of study — not that he sees it that way.

“Orson Welles once said to a journalist, ‘I’m the bird. You’re the ornithologist,’” he explains. “I don’t really analyze what I’m doing beyond what I want to do next.”

A Working Man

Black Bag furthers a certain opening of the floodgates after a long Soderbergh dry spell on the big screen. After a sustained period of working outside the studio system and its traditional means of distribution, Presence and Black Bag have brought Soderbergh back to theaters, enjoying scaled-up marketing efforts and wider distribution.

Across the past seven years, he kept up his unrivaled productivity by self-distributing films domestically (Logan Lucky and Unsane, through his Fingerprint Releasing, in collaboration with Bleecker Street), making films for streamers (High Flying Bird and The Laundromat for Netflix; Let Them All Talk, No Sudden Move, and Kimi for HBO Max), and mounting non-film projects like Max miniseries Full Circle and sci-fi web series Command Z. (And no film speaks to the industry’s state of flux like Magic Mike’s Last Dance, made for HBO Max but instead released in theaters after encouraging test screenings.)

“The only thing that you can trust at the end of the day, strangely, is the market,” he says. “The market tells you how you’re doing, whether it’s through the performance of a movie in the literal sense, or your ability to attract talent and to get people to write checks to make the things that you want to make. The market tells you how you’re doing, so my sole metric for how I’m doing is my ability to get films made and get people to be in them.”

“The only thing that you can trust at the end of the day, strangely, is the market.”

To that end, Soderbergh reflects, the advice he has for aspiring filmmakers these days has as much to do with “character, how you behave, and how you treat people” as it does any other currency. “Everybody likes to tell stories that come from a film set, and they really like telling stories about the director, and you need to be aware of that,” he says.

“One of the things that I can control, in a world in which you can’t control a lot of things, is my process, my way of working,” he says. “It’s designed not only to be efficient in its pursuit of what the thing ought to be and wants to be, but also to hopefully result in an environment that people want to experience a second time or a third time, as artists.”

If Soderbergh is exacting about his approach to filmmaking, even when involved as a producer on projects from mind-expanding sci-fi odysseys to off-Broadway plays and indie romances, that’s because his command of craft creates space for other artists to do their best work — and empowers him to pursue his own passions.

“I’m still choosing projects based on what excites me,” he affirms. “The question of, ‘Who pays for this?’ has changed somewhat but, at a certain point, to complain about it is kind of a waste. You just have to figure out how to navigate it.”

Black Bag is now in theaters.