Deadline’s Read the Screenplay series spotlighting the buzziest awards-season movies continues with Black Bag, the spy drama that reunites director Steven Soderberg with screenwriter David Koepp for a third time after 2022’s tech thriller Kimi and 2024’s ghost story Presence.
The plot centers on George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) and his wife Kathryn St. Jean (two-time Oscar winner Cate Blanchett), both high-level operatives at the UK’s National Cyber Security Center and both passionately in love with each other. When it’s discovered there a mole inside the NCSC that seeks to unleash a destructive cyber worm attack, George is given the job of stopping them and is handed a list of five suspects. One of them is his beloved Kathryn.
Black Bag hit theaters via Focus Features in March and has grossed $43.9 million at the global box office. Its A-list cast includes Regé-Jean Page, Marisa Abela, Naomie Harris, Tom Burke and Pierce Brosnan.
Koepp, whose wide range of stellar credits include the likes of Jurassic Park, Carlito’s Way, War of the Worlds, The Paper and Spider-Man (Tobey Maguire edition) and of course Steven Spielberg’s upcoming UFO movie Disclosure Day, said he conceived of the idea for Black Bag while doing research on and interviewing spies for on another of his iconic scripts: that for the first Mission: Impossible movie directed by Brian De Palma and starring Tom Cruise.
“All the spycraft stuff was very cool, but I learned more than I ever expected about the people,” Koepp 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?’”
“Think about it,” he adds. “If you want to have an affair, it couldn’t be easier. You just say, ‘I’ll be gone for three days and you can’t ask me where I’m going because you don’t have clearance.’ You can’t trust people and people can’t trust you. For George and Kathryn, the confidential information they can’t share goes into what they call their ‘black bag.’”
Soderberg sparked to the idea, seeing “the same kind of opportunity that the Ocean’s films presented”: a star-driven drama with commercial appeal (Koepp has cited character-driven conspiracy thrillers like Klute and All the President’s Men as touchpoints). Amid developing the script together, the setting was changed from the U.S. to the UK and the NCSC, where intelligence is drawn from technology rather that human sources.
“It just felt like a fresher location for this story, if only because there seem to be so many series and movies set in the American intelligence world,” Soderberg says. “London is a city I find verycinematic. David agreed to that.”
Read the screenplay below:
