“If I’m working on a film and thinking about what’s next, I’m going to be attracted to something that I feel is going to annihilate the thing that I just did,” says the director when describing his initial creative instincts. He went on to cite his latest project, Black Bag, as an example. The film is a “love story” starring Cate Blanchett, Michael Fassbender and Tom Burke, with the plot still kept hush-hush. “In the case of Black Bag, it was following Presence, which is a ghost story told entirely from the point of view of whatever is in this house and this family is engaging with the whole movie. There are 36 shots in 84 minutes, which is not very many. It’s all from the point of view of whatever this entity is.”
“Black Bag is the complete opposite of that very complex narrative, with scenes that require a lot of shots, like a granularity in breaking down certain scenes. That was what was appealing to me—we’re going in the other direction, different format, different feeling. We’ve got movie stars in it, it’s supposed to feel like intelligent Hollywood entertainment. My first step is to always do the opposite of the thing I just did.”