Steven Soderbergh
Page 1
Steven Soderbergh: Interviews
Revised and Updated
Conversations with Filmmakers Series
Gerald Peary, General Editor
Steven Soderbergh
INTERVIEWS
Revised and Updated
Edited by Anthony Kaufman
www.upress.state.ms.us
The University Press of Mississippi is a member
of the Association of American University Presses.
Copyright © 2015 by University Press of Mississippi
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
First printing 2015
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Soderbergh, Steven, 1963–
Conversations with filmmakers series : interviews, revised and updated / edited by Anthony Kaufman.
pages cm. — (Conversations with filmmakers series)
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-62846-209-8 (hardback) — ISBN 978-1-62674-540-7 (ebook) 1. Soderbergh, Steven, 1963–—Interviews. 2. Motion picture producers and directors—United States—Interviews. I. Kaufman, Anthony. II. Title.
PN1998.3.S593A5 2015
791.4302'33092—dc23 2014047488
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available
Contents
Introduction
Chronology
Filmography
Hot Phenom: Hollywood Makes a Big Deal over Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies, and videotape
Terri Minsky / 1989
Interview with Steven Soderbergh: sex, lies, and videotape
Michel Ciment and Hubert Niogret / 1989
An Exploration of the Work Kafka
Michel Ciment and Hubert Niogret / 1992
Interview with Steven Soderbergh: King of the Hill
Michel Ciment and Hubert Niogret / 1993
Interview with Steven Soderbergh: The Underneath
Michel Ciment and Hubert Niogret / 1995
Soderbergh’s The Underneath Brings Nineties Style to Film Noir
Kevin Lally / 1995
Crazy for You: Steven Soderbergh Cuts Loose with Schizopolis
Patricia Thomson / 1996
Suddenly Soderbergh: The Onetime Wunderkind Beats the Backlash
Paula S. Bernstein / 1997
Out of Sight
Ed Kelleher / 1998
Sight Seeing: Steven Soderbergh Loosens Up
Dennis Lim / 1998
The Flashback Kid
Sheila Johnston / 1999
Emotion, Truth, and Celluloid
Michael Sragow / 2000
Steven Soderbergh: From sex, lies, and videotape to Erin Brockovich—A Maverick Director’s Route (with Detours) to Hollywood Clout
Anne Thompson / 2000
Having Your Way with Hollywood, or the Further Adventures of Steven Soderbergh
Dennis Lim / 2000
Man of the Year: Steven Soderbergh Traffics in Success
Anthony Kaufman / 2000
Steven Sodebergh Interview
Elvis Mitchell / 2002
Steven Soderbergh: “Everything Is the Director’s Fault”
Scott Indrisek / 2006
Eight Hours Are Not a Day
Matthew Ross / 2006
Interview with Steven Soderbergh: “Passion Has to Be Visible”
Michael Henry / 2007
Guerrilla Filmmaking on an Epic Scale
Amy Taubin / 2008
Split Personality
Demetrios Matheou / 2009
Stimulus Package
Scott Macaulay / 2009
All Work and No Play . . . Makes Steven Soderbergh Some Kind of Genius
Gavin Smith / 2011
Interview: Steven Soderbergh
Amy Taubin / 2012
Trojan Horses and Immaculate Math: An Interview with Steven Soderbergh
Ignatiy Vishnevetsky / 2013
Steven Soderbergh: Retirement, Liberace, Legacy
Mike Fleming Jr. / 2013
State of the Cinema Address
Steven Soderbergh / 2013
Additional Resources
Index
Introduction
Leave it to Steven Soderbergh to tweak the narrative.
When this volume of interviews was first published in 2002, shortly after a banner year in the filmmaker’s history in which he scored two Oscar nominations for Erin Brockovich and Traffic, the director’s trajectory could be described as a bumpy ride to the top, oscillating between hits and misses, low-budget oddities such as Schizopolis and studio hits like Out of Sight, and finally culminating in unprecedented success. As I initially wrote, this collection of interviews could easily be subtitled “The Rise and Fall and Rise of an American Director.”
But Soderbergh’s long and prolific career now defies any such easy categorization. From his breakout beginnings in 1989 with sex, lies, and videotape to his retirement from big-screen movie-making in 2013, the director’s output looks less like a sine wave and more like an elaborate sinuous experiment, with Hollywood vehicles such as the Ocean’s Eleven movies, Contagion and Magic Mike appearing just as risky and outside-the-box as low-budget exercises such as Bubble, The Girlfriend Experience, and And Everything Is Going Fine. As Soderbergh once said, “I’m big on circles, and loops within loops.”
For many years after his “flavor of the month” status with sex, lies, and videotape, he churned out a series of obscure films, which were virtually ignored by the mainstream media, from Kafka to the subtle coming-of-age film King of the Hill to The Underneath, an adaptation of Robert Siodmak’s 1949 film Criss Cross. Though Soderbergh appears confident with the aesthetic choices he made while shooting The Underneath in interviews in 1995, there are clues that indicate Soderbergh’s frustration with the direction of his work. “In fifteen years, people will look back at my first four films and they will realize that they were just a preface to a book that I am only now starting to write,” he tells Michel Ciment and Hubert Niogret of French film journal Positif. “In a way, what I want to do will look a lot like the short films I made when I was young.”
That’s exactly what Soderbergh accomplishes with his next project, the stripped-down Schizopolis, which kicked off a rebirth of Soderbergh’s filmmaking that lasted throughout much of his career. In a lengthy autobiographical article in the Los Angeles Times titled, “The Funk of Steven Soderbergh,”1 with the vivid subhead, “His First Film, sex, lies, and videotape, Put Him on Top of Hollywood’s Hill. He Predicted That It Was All Downhill from There. Why Was He Right?” Scott Collins finds the director at a crossroads. Having just finished the difficult, but regenerative task of shooting Schizopolis and not sure where to turn next, Soderbergh echoes the same sentiments that were only hinted at during the Positif interview, but with more chilling detail. “To sit on a movie set at age thirty-one and wonder whether or not you even want to do this, having no other real skills, is so terrifying and depressing,” he says. Although Soderbergh admits he felt better than ever after the creative outburst that was Schizopolis, Collins paints him in a far more ominous light: The article ends with Soderbergh imagining his own early death in a plane crash.
In the Schizopolis interviews that appear here, however, there is little of the gloom and doom that appeared in the L.A. Times. Soderbergh is less serious and more thrilled with Schizopolis’s ultra-low-budget, freewheeling style. “I needed a lark,” he tells Patricia Thomson in the Independent Film and Video Monthly in late 1996, after festival screenings at Toronto and the Hamptons where Soderbergh’s dual energizing efforts Schizopolis and Gray’s Anatomy—an adaptation of Spalding Gray’s monologue—were screened. “I think what will happen is I’ll end up applying a lot of
things that I got out of Schizopolis to something a little less schizophrenic,” he continues. Moving from super-structured to more improvised, Soderbergh’s subsequent films all seem to benefit from this pivotal turning point in his thinking.
In the interviews post-Schizopolis, a reinvigorated Soderbergh comes forward, echoing the humor and lack of pretension in his first sex, lies conversations. “The trick was finding that right balance between not fucking it up and staying loose,” he tells the Village Voice’s Dennis Lim about 1998’s Out of Sight, the George Clooney/Jennifer Lopez film that attracted Hollywood attention and garnered Soderbergh his first entrance into the mainstream. In the Out of Sight interviews here by Lim and Film Journal International’s Ed Kelleher, Soderbergh continues to reflect on the stimulating aspects of Schizopolis, but also discusses his new entry into Hollywood filmmaking, the star power of Clooney and Lopez and the importance of the genre film to his once-again burgeoning career.
With his next film The Limey, Soderbergh begins commenting on another influence on his work, British director Richard Lester (A Hard Day’s Night), with whom Soderbergh collaborated on the irreverent Faber and Faber book Getting Away with It. Combining interviews between Lester and Soderbergh, and diaries from a particularly difficult moment in Soderbergh’s career right after finishing The Underneath, the book figures as an important part of the director’s creative output. In an interview published in January 2000 following its publication, Michael Sragow speaks with Soderbergh extensively about his renewal, reflecting on the career pitfalls that plagued him and what efforts he took to combat his lack of enthusiasm for filmmaking after making The Underneath. With no specific film to plug, the interview serves as a candid snapshot of the director’s thoughts on the eve of 2000—the year that thrust Soderbergh into a spotlight he had not seen since sex, lies, and videotape.
With Traffic and Erin Brockovich, an even more confident director emerges—one who seems to have hit his stride making sophisticated Hollywood movies. Speaking to me at the end of 2000, the director discusses a newfound knack for making more mainstream fare. “If I turn out to be somebody who’s better suited to making the kinds of films I’ve been making lately [rather] than art-house movies, then whatever,” he says. “If you can’t hit the 3-point shot, you should stop shooting 3-point shots, and learn how to drive the lane. So I’m just trying to play to my strengths.”
But after making three movies that exceed $100 million at the domestic box-office (Traffic, Erin Brockovich, and Ocean’s Eleven), Soderbergh finds himself yet again at another juncture and in search of new challenges. (After Traffic, he also assumes the role of cinematographer on most of his films under the pseuonym Peter Andrews and also as editor, on many productions, under the alias Mary Ann Bernard.) In a lengthy 2002 radio interview with Elvis Mitchell for “The Treatment,” included here, Soderbergh speaks restlessly about taking time off to “change the work a bit” and “step up a little more.” “I think of the great filmmakers that I’ve admired over the years that took big risks,” he continues. “I mean really did things that a lot of people conceptually would look at and say, ‘You can’t do that; you’re not allowed to do that.’ That’s interesting to me.’”
During a period of intense experimentation, with the productions of Full Frontal, a down-and-dirty digitally shot sex comedy, Solaris; an adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s sci-fi classic; and the low-budget midwestern-set Bubble, many of the interviews included here also take on a similar playfulness. In a conversation with The Believer’s Scott Indrisek, Soderbergh talks about a range of eclectic topics from reality TV to pornography and politics, and with Filmmaker Magazine’s Matthew Ross, he discusses at length new interests such as working with nonprofessional actors and digital cameras.
In his next projects, Soderbergh continues to defy the cinematic norms of the day. On The Good German, a literal evocation of Hollywood-style film noirs, set in the crumbling environs of postwar Berlin, he aims to evoke old-school Hollywood and also subvert it. As he tells Positif’s Michael Henry, “There is a deliberate tension between glamour and poison. A constant struggle between beauty and decay, between outside and inside.” And with his two-part epic portrait of Latin American revolutionary Che Guevera, Soderbergh takes his filmmaking to extremes, both cinematically and also physically. “It was such a difficult production,” Soderbergh tells Film Comment’s Amy Taubin. “But to get pushed that hard creatively is a good thing. What interested me most was the process and the physical difficulty. In the case of Cuba, these people slept outside for two years. Just being out there made you appreciate the mental and physical stamina it took to do what they did.”
After the seriousness and bold aesthetic choices of Che, Soderbergh takes a turn back into comedy, with The Informant!, a no less formally daring movie, though the choices—from the upbeat Marvin Hamlisch score to Matt Damon’s hair-piece—serve to accentuate the film’s wry humor. For Soderbergh, his interest in film production, then, becomes increasingly about the craft of the movies’ making. As he tells Demetrios Matheou, “I’m really driven by process. I’m not a result-oriented filmmaker.”
In a 2009 interview with Filmmaker Magazine’s Scott Macaulay, Soderbergh talks extensively about another longterm shift in his aesthetic strategy. Though the article focuses on the low-budget digital project The Girlfriend Experience, he elaborates on a “decade-long process” of trying to involve reality in his films rather than “imposing” his “own will on the frame.” His plan, he says, is to make projects that are “almost like designed documentaries,” he explains. “For me, it’s just more exciting, more distinctive, and less predictable. I’m not controlling the environment; I’m keying off of the environment.”
Soderbergh’s formalist impulses remain apparent in his final round of features, an astoundingly accelerated schedule that spawns five feature films in three years. During this busy time, Soderbergh strives for a more economical and efficient cinema, movies that, in many ways, represent the pinnacle of his technical prowess. As he tells Gavin Smith in an interview about Contagion, “efficient” is “the perfect word” to describe his latest cinematic exercise. “I wanted the film to be as ruthless in its efficiency as the virus is,” he says.
At this final stage in his feature filmmaking career, Soderbergh also begins reflecting not just on the movies themselves, but also on the changing nature of audiences and the industry. Speaking to Amy Taubin about Magic Mike, his male stripper melodrama created with and starring actor Channing Tatum, Soderbergh admits, “I don’t want to waste my time trying to make things that are either not going to get made or, if they are made, not get seen. Wondering about why people go to the movies and what they want to see is something filmmakers continually need to do.”
While pondering whether his work “is still viable” in the current marketplace, Soderbergh completes his last two features, Side Effects and Behind the Candelabra. In a lengthy interview with Ignatiy Vishnevetsky pegged to the release of Side Effects, the director also opines on the relationship between his movies and audiences. Whether bigger movies, such as the Ocean’s films, or smaller ones, such as The Girlfriend Experience, he wants viewers to be active participants in his films. “I don’t expect them to sit there like a lox and just have everything done for them,” he says.
In the book’s final interview, speaking about his HBO film Behind the Candelabra, Soderbergh reflects more on the film industry that he was a part of for so long, and decided to abandon for other artistic pursuits. “I don’t want to drag on past my moment,” he tells Mike Fleming. “I don’t think any of us do. It’s hard because it’s the best job in the world. And yet you love the art form so much and respect it so much, you don’t want to feel like, to use the sports analogy, you don’t want to be taking up a position that should be utilized by a younger, better player. I don’t want to be that guy.”
Though Soderbergh’s reputation has solidified as one of America’s preeminent auteur filmmakers, his work defies auteurism
. It would be difficult for audiences or critics to see, say, Behind the Candelabra, and immediately notice the director’s handiwork.
And yet, it is possible to find through-lines and continuities when looking over this collection of interviews. One of the common threads, ironically, is that very struggle to define Soderbergh’s work. Many of the interviews touch on Soderbergh’s unpredictability and eclecticism. As early as 1993, Soderbergh is certain that he is not a classic auteur, but a much more conventional storyteller, uninterested in imposing a “style” on to the stories he directs. “A Huston or a Hawks were never fashionable, and they expressed themselves through a variety of genres,” he explains in an interview in Positif. “I’m not a visionary artist; sometimes I would like to be, but I don’t belong to that category of filmmakers like Kubrick, Altman, or Fellini. . . . I am not trying to impose my style.” Whether it’s the colorful, almost surreal King of the Hill or the handheld, edgy Traffic, or the cool, stylized spaces of Side Effects, Soderbergh remains persistent in refusing the auteur’s mantle.
Other threads also become apparent. Most pronounced is the Soderbergh protagonist: alienated, isolated, estranged, outsider, underdog. Whether it is the sullen voyeur of sex, lies, the disenfranchised gambler of The Underneath, the fish-out-of-water Limey in Los Angeles, a mother of two in the class action courts in Erin Brockovich, a Latin American revolutionary fighting a fateful battle in Che, or a father struggling to survive an epidemic in Contagion, Soderbergh returns to his loner-protagonist again and again. Comparing sex, lies, and videotape to the seemingly antithetical Kafka, Soderbergh describes both the characters as “alienated and disoriented.” And after making King of the Hill, again he indicates his interest in “main characters that are out of sync with their environment”—a phrase virtually repeated several years later when speaking with Anne Thompson about the character of Erin Brockovich.
While Soderbergh’s interest in these alienated characters runs through the text, his own direct “personal” connection to the characters grows more distant. In the sex, lies interviews, Soderbergh conveys information about his personal life and how it relates to the characters. But later, the direct link between him and his estranged protagonists increasingly becomes more obscure. Even when discussing Schizopolis—which features himself, his own ex-wife and daughter as actors—Soderbergh remains elusive about personal stakes, preferring to let the film speak for itself.