From director Steven Soderbergh comes the gripping spy drama, Black Bag, where legendary intelligence agents and married couple George(Michael Fassbender) and Kathryn(Cate Blanchett) Woodhouse balance their dangerous career with their marriage. When Kathryn is suspected of treachery, George must make a choice between his loyalty to his marriage or his country.
Director Soderbergh and screenwriter David Koepp have teamed up before, most recently with the 2024 thriller Presence. This time this unconventional spy drama takes people behind the lives of elite officers who work in the shadows. The idea for Black Bag came to Koepp as he was conducting interviews on intelligence officers for the blockbuster Mission: Impossible franchise. “All the spycraft stuff was very cool, but I learned more than I ever expected about the people,” he says. “One woman told me that her job made it impossible for her to sustain a relationship. A line in the movie was inspired by my conversations with her. ‘When you can lie about everything, how do you tell the truth about anything?’”
The idea of navigating this relationship called to director Soderbergh, and so the collaboration began. “It is an interesting context in which to explore the idea of betrayal,” he says. “The source of most conflict in the world is somebody feeling they have been betrayed or that a trust has been broken. In this situation, both main characters hold a kind of get-out-of-jail-free card because not only are they not obligated to share everything, in some cases they are forbidden to.”
Spy thrillers have always been appealing to writer Koepp, and with Black Bag, he’s made sure that the stakes are as high as it could get. “People are lying,” he says. “The stakes are astronomical. There’s nothing more fun to write than that. We have all the action, suspense and tension that audiences want from a spy story, plus characters that are compelling and layered. At times, Black Bag becomes more like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? than Mission: Impossible. That’s a big part of what audiences will respond to. It brought me back to some of the great 1970s films like Klute and All the President’s Men, which were steeped in paranoia and deceit. The feeling of being lied to was very strong in that era and it’s pretty strong in this story as well.”
Black Bag also stars Marisa Abela, Tom Burke, Naomie Harris, Regé-Jean Page, and Pierce Brosnan. The film arrives in Philippine theaters on April 2. Follow Universal Pictures PH (FB), UniversalPicturesPH (IG), and UniversalPicsPH (TikTok) for the latest updates.
Credit: “Universal Pictures”
