Few movies are as tightly scripted and paced as Steven Soderbergh’s suspenseful new spy caper Black Bag. But leave it to Cate Blanchett to ad lib a line—while coolly providing a rationale for how a pair of spies can afford a showplace London townhouse on a government salary. As production designer Philip Messina remembers it, Blanchett—playing the Chloé-clad brunette intelligence agent Kathryn St. Jean—and her husband, master spy George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) have invited two couples who are colleagues at their British spy agency to their home for dinner (“Don’t eat the chana masala,” he warns her).
As George stirs the pots simmering in his minimalist kitchen, Kathryn greets guests at the entry to their enviable Georgian home. In filming, this is when Blanchett veered off script. “She literally threw a line when ushering the guests in,” Messina recalled in an interview. “One of them says, ‘Oh, what a beautiful home,’ and she responds, ‘Yes, it’s amazing what you can afford if you don’t have children.’" (Blanchett's spontaneous line made the final cut.)
With that arch rationale, Messina and set decorator Anna Lynch-Robinson were off and running, creating a fantasy backdrop that speaks volumes about this glamorous couple. In this Edward Albee-meets-007 psychological spy thriller, the townhouse is the stand-in for James Bond’s Aston Martin: a fantasy object that conveys everything you need to know about its smoothly sophisticated owners who happen to be spooks. Soderbergh and Messina imagined that the couple would live in an elegantly appointed townhouse. “Kathryn and George make decent money,” Soderbergh has said. “They don’t have children and are obsessed with their work, so they don’t take a lot of vacations. It makes sense that they would put all their money into this home.”
The director told Messina that he wanted to make a stylish, classic Hollywood movie. “I thought, let’s just have fun with this,” Messina says. Adds Lynch-Robinson: "We were trying to make them into this magical couple. They are the grownups in the film and I wanted people to believe it was their house. So I thought: She would have Penhaligon's. She would have Diptyque. And Tom Dixon glassware."
Here, the production designer and set decorator explain how they brought this house of spies to life.
Spoiler Alert: None of it Is Real
In Black Bag, the scenes set in the offices of British Intelligence were filmed on location in central London—from the lobby of the Financial Times building to executive offices at the top of a Norman Foster-designed building in the city's financial district. But the search for the perfect Georgian townhouse was more of a challenge. "When I first read the script and saw that the first scene in the house was 25 pages long and set in a dining room, that scared me," Messina admits. "I know that Steven doesn't like to repeat angles, so I knew we would have to build that room. Then I started opening up big views on every side of the dining room, and it quickly became: let's build the ground floor. And then there were intimate scenes in the bedroom, so why not build that too?"
He ended up constructing an entire brick-and-mortar two-story townhouse on a soundstage at London's Pinewood Studios. It took eight weeks for Messina and his crew to build the residence inside and out, together with the street it is on. For the production designer, who studied architecture at Cornell University before he "kind of fell into the film business," the process of designing a real house was fortunately in his wheelhouse (he once even designed a home for Soderbergh in New York City).
And Messina definitely got into it. "I wanted the house to feel like it was embedded in the neighborhood," says the longtime Soderbergh collaborator, who also designed the sets for Out of Sight, Erin Brockovich, Traffic and Ocean's 11. "These are spies hiding in plain sight. The front of the house is very classical, you could even say anonymous. But I did a lot of scouting and realized that a lot of London townhouses have very modern renovations in the back. So what's inside the house is a little more interesting."
The Actors Had Design Input—and Opinions
Picture Michael Caine circa 1970—turtlenecks, tailored suits—and you'll get an idea of Fassbender's look in the movie for his master spy character, George (he wears Dunhill in the film). But this modern spy is just as unflappable at home as he is directing his nation's cyber security operations. He can whip up a gourmet meal any night of the week. "It's his kitchen, and he's always cooking for her, so I wanted it to be a little bit masculine, with clean lines, very slick," Messina says.
The designer reached out to Fassbender to ask if he had any thoughts about the design of the room, and the actor did have a strong opinion. It turns out he is a fan of Gaggenau appliances. "My first thought was: Can we afford it?" the production designer says. "But we reached out and got a product placement. So the refrigerator, the wine fridge, even the microwave—it's all Gaggenau."
He designed the kitchen, with its walnut veneer cabinetry and walls painted inn Benjamin Moore White Dove, fully to scale. "I'm kind of obsessive about details," Messina says. But usually a movie budget doesn't allow for a room to be fully built. "You just make it fake and have a couple of drawers that open." But Lynch-Robinson found a kitchen installer in the UK who quoted a very reasonable price to create the real deal. "Everything worked, every cabinet was filled with cups and dinner service for eight, the gas stove and vent worked and when Cate asked for coffee we were able to pop it in the kitchen's microwave and warm it up," Messina says.
There Are Hidden Objects in the Background of the Dinner Scenes
Two of the central scenes in Black Bag are set in the townhouse's well appointed dining room. If that sounds like a delightful evening, think again. Not since Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? has a social gathering at home unfolded with such menace. The centerpiece of the room is a long oak dining table that Lynch-Robinson sourced from a Sheffield, England company called Made in the Cellar—only to see Soderbergh request that the center of its top be removed so he could shoot actors from that viewpoint.
As Cate Blanchett has observed, this allowed him to shoot people from a very particular, paranoid angle. "He never, ever shoots in the way that you think he will," Blanchett adds. "He chose to shoot my character through George's gaze right from the beginning. I was able to play into that and then try to subvert that as it went along."
The design of the dining space is unusual: at the end near the kitchen, Messina created a glass box and filled with an acacia tree. "I wanted a beautiful backdrop and I didn't want to obscure the kitchen too much," he says. "Steven loved it and really played with the reflections."
One of the movie's Easter eggs is the large mural behind the dining table, which Messina designed and had hand-painted by Rohan Harris. "It's very pastoral, because George's happy place is when he is in his boat on a lake," the designer says. "But I was kind of inspired by the title sequence of White Lotus, when they show those pastoral scenes and all of a sudden in the corner there is something that is really going wrong. Keep an eye out for some hunting dogs that are kind of taking down a fox."
The Bedroom Reflects Its Secretive Inhabitants
Black Bag is a relationship movie in the cloak-and-dagger disguise of a spy caper. The tension between Blanchett and Fassbender's marriage and their chosen professions is the film's true subject. In the movie, they are as devoted to each other as they are to their work. The plot begins when George is given the task of ferreting out a mole in his agency—and his own wife can't be ruled out.
The writer, David Koepp, has said that the idea came from his fascination with the personal lives of intelligence agents, who he interviewed while researching scripts for the Mission: Impossible franchise. "When you can lie about everything, how do you tell the truth about anything?" Koepp says. "For George and Kathryn, the confidential information they can't share goes into what they call their 'black bag.'"
For the film's designers, the primary bedroom in the townhouse had to make sense as a backdrop for a couple who can keep secrets, sure, but who also can't resist one another. The room feels like an authentic Georgian room, with its decorative plasterwork, paneled walls and herringbone parquet flooring. Lynch-Robinson piled velvet and ikat-patterned bedding onto an iron-framed bed and decorated the space with furniture, lighting and artwork from local stores including John Lewis, Heals, and Zara Home. The lighting alone in the spies' house is enviable and illuminating: here the bedside lamps are by Pooky, the vintage chandelier is from Pure White Lines, and the antique sconces are from James Worrall.
Meanwhile, Messina devised another wall covering: a chinoiserie-inspired, gold foil wallpaper with a branch motif that was custom-made by Avalana Design in the United Kingdom. "It was like their little nest," Messina says. "And then I picked a dark turquoise paint color to go with the gold foil. Anna and I were like, 'That's a sexy combination there.' I loved the bedroom. There's hints of pale pink in the bedding. I like to create trends and not fall back on ones that are already out there."
The Tree in the Glass Box Was a Struggle to Maintain
Considering the complexity of the production, the filming mostly went smoothly. But then there was the tree in the glass box. Messina came up with it, and pushed for it, since it would be visible in so many of the movie's scenes. "It needed a nice branch structure and the greens guys came up with an acacia, and I said, let's make sure since this is going to be a long shoot that this tree can survive," he says. "They told me no problem, they'll put grow lights on it and water it every night."
A week into filming, the tree started dropping its leaves. "We left it in the pot and built rocks around it, and then we started adding silks (silk leaves) to keep continuity," Messina adds. "As it kept dropping leaves, we kept adding silks. That was my biggest stress on the movie because it was literally in the backdrop of crucial scenes."
Ingrid Abramovitch, the Executive Editor at ELLE Decor, writes about design, architecture, renovation, and lifestyle, and is the author of several books on design including Restoring a House in the City.
