After years of serving as a writer-producer on the X-Men movie franchise, Simon Kinberg made his feature film directing debut with 2019’s X-Men: Dark Phoenix. For Kinberg, there ultimately wasn’t much difference between helming a big, special effects-driven superhero film and a more grounded spy thriller like his latest, The 355, because he finds both to be the kind of “kinetic, intimate, genre film” he wants to make as a director.
Featuring major action sequences set around the world, The 355 may seem on par with directing a big comic book movie but as Kinberg recently told IGN “there are few things to the scale of an X-Men or superhero movie. And this certainly isn't that scale, though, certainly, It's not an indie movie. It's still a big movie with action.”
The 355 stars the acclaimed ensemble of Jessica Chastain, Penélope Cruz, Lupita Nyong’o, Diane Kruger, and Bingbing Fan as operatives from various international intelligence agencies who team up to stop mercenaries who have acquired a hi-tech weapon. For Kinberg, it’s the chance to work with actors – and thus characters – that excites him whether it’s as a writer, producer, or director.
“What I found in directing is not that dissimilar from what I found in producing, which is part of why I wanted to direct, which is I love working with actors. And so, what that means is I love working with characters, which is not that different than why I started writing in the first place,” Kinberg said. “And when you're making huge movies, you work with extraordinary [talent]. There's Oscar-winning actors in the X-Men movies. There's Oscar-winning actors in The 355, but the mechanics, the machinery, the technology that's required of a superhero movie, of a $200-plus million-dollar film, is just different.”
“It's not as nimble. You can't run through the streets of Paris, like in this film, with a handheld camera, chasing somebody on a motorcycle,” Kinberg said. “It's going to be visual effects. It's going to be just more contained. It's not going to be quite as kinetic. And I like more kinetic filmmaking. And I also really like more intimate character-driven filmmaking. And even Mr. & Mrs. Smith [one of Kinberg’s first produced films as a screenwriter], I think I would call a kinetic character-driven film despite the fact that they had massive stars. So just like 355, I would call it a kinetic, intimate, genre film, despite having big stars.”
“I think really what I found from X-Men is the things I like, and maybe more importantly, the things I think I'm good at. Not that I can't get better at them. And not that I can't get better at other things. But at the age of 48 and having made a lot of different movies in a lot of different capacities, I am going to chase the things that I think I'm uniquely suited to do.”
Kinberg was introduced to The 355 by its lead, Jessica Chastain, whom he previously worked with on Dark Phoenix and The Martian, which Kinberg produced. Through the years, the two have become close friends and, as Kinberg explained, “it was on the set of that X-Men movie that she had the idea for this. And she brought it to me, and she said, ‘I really want to do a female ensemble spy movie.’ I love spy films. I think the James Bond movies and Star Wars movies are probably the reason I wanted to be a filmmaker when I was a kid, or even work in film.”
The prospect of making what he called “a proper ensemble spy movie” also excited him, especially since Kinberg doesn’t feel there’s been one since 1998’s Ronin, a film he loved. “I really liked the idea of being able to do a team-building movie in the spy genre. And anytime I feel like I can sort of cross-pollinate genres, which certainly Mr. & Mrs. Smith did, as like a romcom spy movie, anytime I can cross-pollinate like that, I get excited.”
Beyond its female ensemble, Kinberg believes another aspect of The 355 that sets it apart from other spy movies is that it depicts the personal lives of its badass protagonists in a way many films in the genre, with the exception of the Daniel Crag Bond films, don’t. Naming the Sean Connery Bond film and the Bourne and Mission: Impossible film franchises as “truly among my favorite films and favorite franchises,” Kinberg also said he wanted The 355 to not be in the same “spy without a personal life” vein as those other espionage films.
“You don't really see them as parents. You don't see them yearning in the sort of humanistic way that we all do. Very rarely do you see them, even as legitimate friends,” Kinberg said. “You see them as chummy with some of the people that may be on their crew, but you don't really see them as deep, kind of complex friendships.”
“I've spent a lot of time around spies, having done research with them, really, starting with Mr. & Mrs. Smith and having worked on other spy movies in other capacities. I'd done a lot of production rewrites in my time on spy movies. And they have obviously, like all of us, real lives and real flaws and real fears. They're human, and I just wanted to bring that kind of humanity to the genre that you don't see very often, especially in big-scale spy movies. You might see it in smaller spy movies, like The Lives of Others, or something like that. But you don't really see it on a scale like this.”
For more of our interview, learn what Simon Kinberg thinks of Marvel Studios' Kevin Feige as a producer and about the X-Men entering the MCU.
The 355 opens in theaters this Friday, January 7.
