Black Bag star Michael Fassbender has shared that he was “panicking” after his preparation for one particular scene was scuppered by a late change.
The spy thriller, which is directed by Steven Soderbergh, sees Fassbender play a British intelligence officer whose wife (Cate Blanchett) is suspected of betraying the nation, leaving him torn between his loyalty to his country and his family.
One scene sees Fassbender’s character administer a polygraph test to three colleagues, with the action cutting between each interview. Despite the scene being written with cross-cutting in mind, Soderbergh elected to film each interrogation in full, a decision that left Fassbender “panicking.”
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“That was definitely the most challenging scene for me because in the script, it jumps between the characters as it's written dialogue-wise,” the actor told Entertainment Weekly. “So that's the way I learned it.
“But then on the day Steven was like, 'You're just going to do all of Clarissa's (Marisa Abela) dialogue in one, and you're going to do all of Stokes (Regé-Jean Page) and all of Freddie’s (Tom Burke).'
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“I hadn't learned it that way, and I'm asking quite similar questions to each of the characters. But there's subtle differences there. I was panicking. I had the pages all over the place in front of me.”
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Soderbergh, whose recent projects include Presence and Kimi, noted that the setup made the most practical sense, explaining: “It makes perfect sense if you're on a normal movie to memorise the script as written.
“It just turned out that in order to do this most efficiently, everybody had to be shot from these four different angles. I would set up two of them at a time and just rotate them in and out. As I explained that to Michael, he went, 'Oh shit.' He had to scramble his brain and get that sorted out.”
Black Bag is in cinemas now.
Reporter, Digital Spy George is a freelance writer who specialises in Movies and TV. After graduating with a degree in Film Studies and Journalism from De Montfort University, in which he analysed the early works of Richard Linklater for his dissertation, he wrote for several websites for GRV Media. His film tastes vary from blockbusters like Mission: Impossible and John Wick to international directors such as Paolo Sorrentino and Hirokazu Kore-eda, and has attended both the London and Berlin film festivals.
