Oscar winner Soderbergh and David Koepp had a very offbeat idea for their next movie.

“David and I talked about what it would be like if George and Martha were spies,” Soderbergh says. “We wanted to make espionage version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.”

Black Bag, a sleek, sexy and surprising thriller that opens in theaters on Friday, may be one of the breeziest movie Soderbergh has made.

This time, it’s Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett providing the romantic sparks as George Woodhouse and Kathryn St. Jean, intelligence operatives whose marriage is threatened after he discovers that a colleague is a traitor, and Kathryn might be prime suspect.

“With every project he makes, Steven likes to set an unsolvable problem for himself,” Blanchett says. “He likes making things that scare him.”

What scares him right now is audiences: They keep insisting they want to see something smart and unique but might not turn up to theaters.

Cate Blanchett recalled you saying, “This is not a film, this is a movie.”

It speaks to how you want the movie to be received by a viewer. For me, to say it’s a movie, as opposed to being a film, implies a certain level of fun and tone that isn’t heavy. There’s a version of this movie where you go a very different way. Where you don’t glam it up and you make it grittier and harder and of less fun. We felt this was a real Hollywood movie with movie stars that look great.

There’s not a lot of red. I wanted a very warm sort of feel and a soft quality to the light because I wanted the actors to look fantastic. Aamber, first and foremost, is flattering. For the first dinner table scene, I wanted a contrast between the lush look of it and the diabolical intention at the heart of the evening. And then the second dinner table scene at the end is less flattering, more interrogatory. Overhead light is beating down on people. It’s just got a very different feel, more clinical.

Those were the two scenes that scared me. It’s every director’s nightmare, a dinner table scene. Nobody wants to direct those.

Why scary?

They can be super static, and there’s continuity issue. It’s a testament to David’s skill as writer that he can construct a story in which you have two scenes as highlights of the movie. A script writing class would tell you, don’t do that once, especially not two times. But David knows movies, and he knows what you can get away with. While we were making “Presence,” I asked him how it was going with “Black Bag” and he said, “Great. I just wrote a 12-page dinner table scene.” And I went, “Well, God help whoever has to direct that!’

The script wasn’t long — it was like 106 pages. It was built to be very fast and sleek. But lately, I’ve been on a kick. “Presence” was like 85 minutes; “Kimi” 90 minutes. The goal is to identify, at the script stage, things that can go because it saves time and money. If you are rigorous, it pays dividends. But you’re often surprised by what audiences respond to or pick up on or don’t pick up on. There are some things you need to go back and fix. I always set aside resources to do reshoots, especially in a movie like “Black Bag.”

David found a way to keep it fresh, a way to differentiate it by going kind of narrow and deep on the character work, as opposed to an action spectacle. It’s an emotional, psychological spectacle. The trick of a good story is to have it conclude in a way that is surprising but inevitable. Sometimes you can surprise people, but it doesn’t feel right or it doesn’t feel organic. But if it’s too telegraphed, they’re not surprised and they’re not pleased.

The key scene turned out to be when Catherine comes home and gets into bed and Michael says, “I believe I’ve been set up.” And she goes, “I think I have been too.” That scene is the fulcrum for the entire plot and for their characters, because at that point you’re concerned that this marriage is in danger. That’s when they double down on the trust and the intimacy, and they solve the mystery. It’s also unusual to see a movie about a marriage in which an affair is not the point.

Healthy relationship despite toxic business

Within the context of what’s possible, they do. The people we spoke to in the intelligence community, there’s a lot of dating within the industry. There’re all these issues with the secrecy of the work that others don’t understand, so it’s not frowned upon in the way that it is in almost any other business. Spies date other spies, because it’s really hard to be in a relationship with anyone else. The whole HR situation is pretty weird.

Fassbender wears glasses, a nod to Harry Palmer? Also, his name is George, a reference to George Smiley or George from “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf”?

The glasses were in the script, but David and I are big fans of those Michael Caine movies, and this felt very much in line with, especially the first two, in terms of its scale and what it was interested in. George was a “Virginia Woolf” reference.

People are people. However, you might imagine one of these institutions, they still operate just like high school. They can have all this pettiness and rivalries. When we were doing “K Street” for HBO, I realized that about D.C.

Current state of politics under Trump?

The George W. Bush-era seems like the golden age now. Who would have thought we’d find ourselves wishing things were that simple? You really wonder if it’s the death of metaphor. What are you going to make up that can top this? What we’re watching is crazy.

I mean the office. I guess it would depend on whether it’s a drama, comedy or thriller. But we’re in a place right now where our ideas of what that office means are evolving. We have to ask ourselves if these traditional tropes of “good guy, bad guy” are real anymore. We have somebody in that office whose behavior aligns with the behavior we would call villainous in a movie. And yet, he was elected by a lot of people. It makes you wonder if we got this wrong. Are people going to the movies and rooting for the villain, and we’ve just been pretending that that’s not true? If you’re a parent of a child, what are you telling them about how to behave? How do you convince them there’s right and wrong way to behave with what is happening in the White House now?

It would have to be about something new, but also something that’s plausible. Part of the reason people were able to find resonance in that movie when it opened, and then 10 years later when the pandemic happened, was it was rooted in reality. We’ve got to find a new gimmick, but it’s got to be something that people go, “Oh, that could happen.”

Would it be about another pandemic or a public health crisis?

It would need to be something that’s going on right now that just needs a tiny little shove to turn into a huge thing. “Contagion” was a horror movie. The trick would be, can you find something as scary that’s real? There’s certainly a case to be made, especially in the West, for the long-term effects, environmentally, of what we eat, what we breathe. We have plastic in our blood now. It’s in our brains. This is a new thing that’s got to have a pretty serious effect.

Writing a book about the making of “Jaws”

It’s evolving slowly. I’m hoping once my next movie, “The Christophers,” is done that I’ll have a bit of a break. I’ve done a lot of the spade work and so the more creative part of writing the book can begin. But I don’t have a sense of how long it’s going to take yet. Is it a couple months or a year?

It’s about directing, and it uses that movie as a spine and jumping-off point. “Jaws” turns out to be a good movie to use as an excuse to talk about directing because of the circumstances under which it was made, and the fact that if that person hadn’t made it, it probably wouldn’t have been made at all. It certainly wouldn’t be a classic. It’s a great story of what Spielberg accomplished by surviving what was a nightmare.

“Black Bag” cost $50 million, and studios don’t make mid-budget films like this any longer

It’s referred to as the dead zone — mid-range budgeted movies for adults. Nobody’s playing in that space. And I have to give Focus credit for not hesitating. These are the kinds of movies that I’ve made. I would like for the movie to work, not just for my own benefit, but for the benefit of the next person who wants to make one of these. I don’t want to be used as an example against a filmmaker of why we stopped doing this type of movie. I think we’ve done everything right. The marketing materials are strong. The movie tested well. So the question becomes: Can we get people to get off their couch?

Making this movie for a streamer like Netflix or Amazon?

The only companies that pursued it were companies that put movies in theaters. None of the streamers wanted to make it, which was surprising. You’re definitely swimming against the tide by making a movie like this and putting the resources behind it to have it open in wide release. In theory, it’s the kind of movie that people of a certain age always complain they don’t make anymore. Does that mean they’ll show up?

If “Black Bag” doesn’t work?

It’s OK to make mistakes. It’s just not OK to make the same mistake over and over again. If it doesn’t work, I’m not going to be in a hurry to make another movie that is targeting the same people. I’ve got to recalibrate my future options to see if there’s overlay between what I like and what people are going to see. That’s always the game you’re playing. You want people to see these things. The key is to keep the scale manageable so that it’s not catastrophic if it doesn’t turn out. I just finished shooting The Christophers this week, and I’m not sure what’s next.

Making a franchise film?

I’m not seriously considered for them. But I also don’t know that Hollywood works that way. I think people think it does. I make choices based on what excites me and scares me. I don’t have any rules about what I’ll make or not make, except that I won’t make a Western as I’m scared of horses.