People are ultimately unknowable even your spouse.
The directors new filmBlack Bagis all about trust.
Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
This year is already shaping up to be a productivity all-timer.
He hopes to premiere it this fall.
Soderbergh is also remarkable for his creative restlessness.
My default mode is to venture to ask myself, how few shots can I do this in?
Its a process of distillation.
I was going to ask you about those.
so that you kind of end up thinking about them as the action sequences of the film.
Which they are: I really had to think of them like that.
Your first feature,sex, lies and videotapehad a number of very important scenes unfolding around tables.
Im still interested in people in rooms, talking.
Im still convinced this is where events begin.
I was speaking to the actor that was involved in developing it.
I said, Its not a problem for me.
I didnt get the job, but the thing never got made, so … Its all in the process.
How do you shoot it, you know?
Like you, he seems to enjoy working in every genre.
Whose idea wasBlack Bag?It was Davids idea.
I kept harping on it and prodding him for years to essentially write his own version of that play.
And I think what he ended up doing was adding that notion to something he was already working on.
We would keep in touch.
In one of our conversations, I said, Hows it going?
And David said, Its going great!
I wrote a 12-page dinner scene today.
And I said, Well, God help the person whos got to directthat.
And then, three months later, Iwasthat person and there were two dinner-table scenes!
One of the actors is you.
Its your only lead performance.
So I wonder: Isnt every Steven Soderbergh movieSchizopolis?
What you just said makes me think of two things.
I respect that in other people.
I would never in a million years do that.
I want her to have something that belongs to her, that she doesnt have to share with me.
I dont have a big belief in that kind of privacy where you have to share everything.
and Guzman says, Trust.Exactly, yeah!
But the bottom line is people lie.
This is all around us!
Its a human thing, unfortunately.
The development of language allowed that sort of deception to flourish.
Before humans could talk, I think it was a lot harder to pull off a lie.
Once we started talking, language was the fuel that let us really start making shit up.
Youve just made me envision a movie about cave people trying to lie to each other without language.
Was it a random mutation?
Was it diet related, because we started eating different things?
We still dont know exactly when this phase transition took place.
Its ridiculous how small that number is.
Thats how close we came to not being able to have this Zoom call.
Human civilization was a rounding error?Oh, completely.
Its wild to think that we came that close to not being us.
Or is this it?
Bad ideas scale faster than good ideas.
Also interesting: Theres a successful marriage in this milieu, George and Kathryn.
We were recalibrating and reshooting things while we were shooting.
And if theyre ahead of you, thats a disaster, right?
This is something that Davids very good at.
Only this time, we never see your face or hear your voice.
ButPresencewas next level in terms of my physical relationship to them.
It was real choreography.
Thats how were learning what it wants.
That was a really fun challenge that was new to me as a director.
And that would happen, especially on some of the longer takes.
Im specifically talking about the lag time in a pan when an actor moves from one place to another.
And be in the right spot before it happens?Yeah.
That was a common occurrence.
And I guess thats just acting, right?Exactly.
But it was a new sensation for me.
And then there was also the fear of falling on those stairs, which were very serious stairs!
But it was exhilarating in the sense that there was no Plan B. Thats still a big departure for you.
You gave up that option inPresence.And thats why the movie is as brief as it is.
In a different way, the same was true forBlack Bag.
Its a fairly short film dense, but short.
And neither of us felt like that was necessary or correct to do.
Davids script came in at106 pages.
Thats short for a feature-film script today.
Your feature films tend to be short.
IsntTrafficthe longest, unless you countChe, which is really two films?Exactly:Trafficisthe longest.
Were not going to make it.
I would rather my work be on a list of movies that are, like, 96 minutes.
I am increasingly attracted to things that are distilled.
Correction: A previous version of this article mistook the name of the film Soderbergh directed Sasha Grey in.
