Why Commercials Director Sophia Banks Got CIA Training

Sophia Banks likes making things. That’s been the one constant throughout a career which has touched on commercials, fashion, action films, comic books, and science fiction. Sure, these careers might sound disparate – this is the same person who styled Priyanka Chopra, and also set a murderous Jason Clarke loose in a CIA facility in the feature film Black Site – but they’re unified by Banks’ hands-on, practically guided approach.

It’s been that way for Banks for a while. Growing up in Australia’s Northern Beaches, without many people around her who were interested in film, Banks hoovered up VHS tapes, made her own films, got into photography, acted, and constructed a creative process basically on her own. 

“I’m much more a visual person than words,” Banks explains over the phone from LA. The images come to her first – particularly those images that are the prism through which to tell great stories.

That’s how it went with Black Site. Banks had been interested in action and sci-fi since her adolescence, when she first grew obsessed with James Cameron’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day. “I didn’t even know why I was so obsessed with it,” she says. “It was just good filmmaking.” So when the script for Black Site landed on her desk, she responded to its fast pace, and it’s vaguely science-fiction edge.

Though the film is set in the real world – a top secret CIA containment facility, in which a deadly assassin (Jason Clarke) has been unsuccessfully held prisoner – Banks saw it as coming in the tradition of a film like Alien, John Carpenter’s The Thing, or the works of James Cameron. But with its stripped-down leanness, and pervasive sense of isolation, the film has a heightened quality to it that is entirely Banks’ own.

The other unique thing about Banks’ approach? Her total immersion in the world of Black Site. “I was in pre-production, and I was talking to different people about shooting action,” Banks explains. “ I was like, ‘Wow, we’re going to be filming in Australia; we’re not even going to have real guns, and I’ve never fired a gun.’ 

“So I thought, ‘I’m not going to know what it looks like, what it feels like.’ So I went and got training in America, with the guy who trained Keanu for John Wick.”

Banks was initially terrified of the experience – “because guns can be terrifying,” she explains. But the desire to construct a world out of carefully placed details became overwhelming. The gun training done, Banks then decamped to a facility called WOST in Orlando, where she undertook a three-day tactical training course. 

​​“Because we’re dealing with the CIA – US military – I was like, ‘That’s not something I really understand.’ And that’s important for me as a filmmaker – to understand. I learned self-defence, I learned how to get out of car-jacking. I learned my way around all different kinds of weaponry.”

She laughs. “You have to get a background check to go there. And a lot of people there are military, or ex-military. And so it was a really good chance to mix with these people.”

Banks learned a new language through the experience; a new way of being. “There’s so much to the behaviour of the CIA I didn’t know,” she says. “You don’t clear a room with your finger on the trigger, which they do in police shows, so you don’t accidentally shoot someone.”

Those results are up on the screen – Black Site is fully realised, filled with a kind of detail and precision that only comes from learning how to make something, and then doing it. Which is the key to Banks, and precisely what she’s ready to apply again to commercials. “I’m so excited to get back into commercials,” she says. “That world-building I’ve learned is really important even crossing to commercials. I feel like it’s a real fun road to go down.”