Steven Soderbergh

by Anthony Kaufman

  Soderbergh wrote the screenplay for sex, lies, and videotape in eight days, and on half of those he was driving from Baton Rouge to Los Angeles. “It came out so fast,” he says. “I just wanted it dealt with. I didn’t know if anybody would read it. I didn’t know if my agent would say, ‘I can’t send this out.’ It just seemed too personal.”

  Soderbergh thinks of his four characters as himself cut into quarters, but it is the placid, withdrawn Graham who most apparently resembles his creator. “We never talked about it,” says actor James Spader. “But there would be days when I’d get out of wardrobe and come to the set, and we’d be wearing the same thing.”

  The movie’s development was, by Hollywood’s standards, obscenely brief—it was financed (by RCA/Columbia Pictures Home Video), shot, edited, and shown at the U.S. Film Festival within twelve and a half months after Soderbergh first dropped the script on his agent’s desk. The snags were minor. Several talent agencies refused to show it to their clients because they thought it was pornographic. He wanted to shoot the movie in black and white, but RCA/Columbia insisted on color. And the title—which Soderbergh chose after thinking to himself, “How would Graham describe this movie?”—met with some resistance. His investors feared that potential distributors would assume from the name that it was shot on videotape instead of film stock.

  “It got to the point,” says Soderbergh, “where they were saying, ‘You know, we can keep the first two words; sex, lies—that’s fine. But the third word—maybe we could change the third word.’ And I’m like, ‘What—sex, lies, and magnetic oxide?’ I said, ‘No. You either change the whole thing or you leave it.’ As long as we came up with something good. Nobody could, including myself.”

  The shooting, according to his actors, went so smoothly that the only issue they can recall is Soderbergh’s telling MacDowell and San Giacomo to tone down their southern accents. “We aren’t doing Tennessee Williams here,” he’d say. In response, they started calling him Steven Subtle-bergh.

  He made $37,000 for his efforts, 10 percent of which went to his agent, 5 percent to his lawyer, and 1 3/4 percent to the Writers Guild. He owed about $5000 in back taxes, which he paid, and he bought himself a 1960 AMC Rambler for $1300. He has $2100 left to get him through the next two months of living in Los Angeles, and his monthly rent, $400, is due. Paramount, Warner Bros., Columbia, and Universal have all offered to pay him to rewrite two of his scripts; Soderbergh, being conservative, guesses he could get about $100,000 to do that, but he doesn’t want to be beholden to anyone.

  The thing is, he could use the money. He wants to get braces. During a particularly unpleasant episode with his former girlfriend, she retaliated with a slew of withheld criticisms, including one aimed at his teeth. It was just another thing to feel self-conscious about. When Soderbergh finally makes his next movie deal, that will be the first thing he buys for himself.

  Soderbergh is in an editing room in North Hollywood, working on the final details of postproduction with his friend and sound editor Larry Blake. They met nine years ago, about the time that Soderbergh was making a rather disjointed film starring the Goodyear blimp and himself doing poor Marlon Brando imitations. For that reason, it’s pretty hard for Blake to connect Soderbergh with his new-found celebrity.

  “I’ll stand for anything,” Blake says, “except for seeing your picture in ‘The Great Life,’” —a column in the Hollywood Reporter.

  Soderbergh tells him about seeing Fawn Hall at a screening. “What if somebody takes a picture,” he says, “and I’m in the shot somewhere?”

  “If you’re in the background, then that’s okay,” Blake says. “But not if it’s you and your arm’s around Morgan Fairchild.”

  Soderbergh dismisses this as impossible. Still, it’s certain that his next project will have a higher profile. Although he’s been offered a lot of “relationship” movies, Soderbergh has a more ambitious idea for himself. He wants to make the film version of a 616-page novel by William Brinkley called The Last Ship, an apocalyptic epic about the men and women of a naval crew who survive World War III.

  Such a project will probably cost at least twenty times what sex, lies, and videotape did, but he knows that he can get a deal for it, if only because Sydney Pollack has agreed to become involved. At the same time, he’s embarrassed by the figures his agent is saying he’s going to demand for Soderbergh’s services: $250,000 to write the script, $100,000 for a rewrite, $500,000 to direct. “That’s absurd,” he says. “I don’t want to draw attention to myself.”

  He’s feeling guilty, too, about the distribution deal that’s been made for his movie. Miramax Films had promised to pay $100,000 over the highest bid, but then Island Pictures weighed in with an extremely generous $1 million for the distribution rights, plus $1 million to be spent on advertising. The only problem was that Island expected Soderbergh and his producers to split any promotional costs above that. So they went back to Miramax and offered to wave the extra $100,000 in exchange for Miramax’s picking up the tab for all the advertising. That fee, along with the $575,000 that Virgin Vision is paying for the foreign rights, meant that Soderbergh’s investors will have made all their money back, and then some, by the time the movie opens in early fall.

  “It’s a ruthless deal, it really is,” says Soderbergh. “The film has to make like $4 million just to break even.” At the point the deal was made, Miramax had Pelle the Conqueror in release, and even though it had been nominated for two Academy Awards and had been out for nearly two months, it had just barely grossed $1 million.

  Meanwhile, sex, lies, and videotape still isn’t finished to Soderbergh’s satisfaction. He’s in a cutting room, excising lines from the climactic moment when Ann and Graham admit their attraction for each other. Just a few hours ago, he got his first lukewarm response to the film. Barry London, the head of marketing at Paramount, apparently wasn’t impressed by it. There had been some discussion that Paramount was going to make a bid to distribute the movie, which would have been a coup, to get the promotional force of a major studio. (None of the other majors was interested because RCA/Columbia already owned the video rights, the real cash cow of the film business.) But then Soderbergh got a call telling him that London’s reaction to the movie was, “Yeah? So?”

  It’s exactly what he feared would happen—that the word-of-mouth has built expectations so high that people will be disappointed when they finally see it. Soderbergh has this joke; speaking in a nasal Long Island accent, he’ll say, “Dawn Steel’s being very cold to me,” or “Ray Stark’s being very cold to me.” It mostly works as a joke because these people aren’t being cold to him; in fact, Steel, the president of Columbia Pictures, called to tell him how much she enjoyed his movie and that she hopes he’ll do something for her. And now he gets this review of his work: “Yeah? So?” Soderbergh may not want to wallow in being the flavor of the month, but he doesn’t want to blow it, either; Simpson and Bruckheimer were invited to a screening of sex, lies, and videotape in late April.

  A voice comes over the intercom into the room. “Steve! Call for you on line one.” He picks up the receiver. “Hello? Yes? . . . Oh no, that was today? Oh, fuck. What time is it? . . . Ah, shit! Yeah, you better. I’ll leave right now. Tell her, tell her that we just concluded negotiations, that I’m on my way. . . . Yeah, it looks like the Miramax thing is . . . Yeah. Everything that we wanted. . . . Everything. Yeah. Yeah. Tell them I’m running ten minutes behind.”

  He jumps up and then looks down at himself. Most of the time he wears what he calls his “arty, pretentious filmmaker garb”—jeans, a black T-shirt and a long black cotton coat—but today the T-shirt has been replaced by a white one bearing the words SEX, LIES, AND VIDEOTAPE.

  He winces; he’s forgotten that he had a three o’clock meeting at Warner Bros., and now he’s going to show up for it not only late but with the name of his movie stenciled across his chest. “Oh, man,” he says, “they’re going to think I’m a complete dork.” When it come
s right down to it, he can’t help wanting these people to like him.

  Interview with Steven Soderbergh: sex, lies, and videotape

  Michel Ciment and Hubert Niogret / 1989

  From Positif, September 1989. Translated by Paula Willoquet. Reprinted by permission.

  Q: What are your origins and what was your childhood like?

  A: My family moved around a lot. I was born in Atlanta, Georgia, on January 14, 1963, and after living in a number of different places we finally settled down in Louisiana when I was thirteen years old. My father was an education professor and he would change jobs whenever he was offered a better position elsewhere. He would let me see any films I wanted. As a result, when I was ten or eleven, I discovered films like Five Easy Pieces, The Conversation, Scarecrow that had a tremendous impact on me. When I was thirteen, my father was teaching at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge and there was an animation course taught by film students to adolescents. Knowing that I was interested in cinema, my father signed me up for the course; but it soon became too draining because animation is laborious work. So I got a camera and started shooting live action and I discovered that this was an ideal form of expression for me, through words and images. I could use all the equipment from the course and needed only to provide the film stock, and I ended up making a number of shorts.

  Q: In what genre?

  A: During the first phase, as is to be expected, I mimicked the films I liked. So, when I was fifteen, I made an homage to Taxi Driver on Super-8, a film that fascinated me. It was so bad and everyone around me was so negative about it, that I had to rethink everything and conclude that it was not such a hot idea to make films based on other films. At that time, I had also seen Fellini’s 8 1/2 and I discovered that a film could be an expression of one’s personal point of view. So I decided that that was the direction in which I wanted to go. The films I made after that were more direct; they reflected my mental and emotional states. They were experimental and impressionistic, but at the same time they had a quasi-documentary feel in relation to myself, and only lightly manipulated reality.

  Q: How many shorts did you make?

  A: From the time I started making films until about two years ago I think I made six or seven shorts, about twenty minutes each.

  Q: Did you have other interests besides film when you were young?

  A: Besides books, not really, because I was totally absorbed by making films even at the expense of my studies. It was not until three or four years ago that I started getting interested in other forms of arts, like theater, dance, music, because I realized that I needed to enlarge my horizons. But reading was always necessary to me. When I was about fifteen and my films were becoming more experimental, I was very drawn to Faulkner because of the interior monologue and the way he allowed disparate emotions and ideas to flow from one another. At that time, when I was shooting, I had a pretty casual attitude toward tight narratives. I wanted to capture mental states. The last short I made in high school is still one of my best, in terms of technique and content. When I saw it again six months ago I was expecting a huge gap between what I was doing at seventeen and what I do now, at twenty-six, and I did not really notice a gap. The title was Skol!, which means “Cheers,” and also it was the name of a very popular brand of tobacco among high school students. It was a film about my impressions of school and my thoughts, a series of vignettes shot in black and white. I benefited from some lucky accidents: one exchange we shot in slow motion during a football game was in perfect synchrony with a piece of music from Glenn Miller’s “Moonlight Serenade.” My father had written four books on big band music so I was very familiar with Tommy Dorsey and Glenn Miller.

  Q: Since you spent much of your childhood in the South, do you feel any bonds to that part of the country?

  A: Probably. All kinds of strange things can happen in the South. It’s also culturally a very rich part of the United States. Even if its history is not always very positive, it is fascinating. Frankly, I saw more racism in the North than in the South, and Boston, for example, is the most racist city I know. Maybe because the rhythm of life is slower, I always felt that the South was more conducive to writing and thinking.

  Q: What did you do after you made Skol!?

  A: I was a senior in high school in 1980 and I was seventeen. After graduating, I liked the idea of going to Los Angeles and I had pictured a life for myself very much like the one I have had in the last four months! My luck was that my professor at Louisiana State University—where I had audited classes while I was in high school—had left that summer to work for NBC in Los Angeles. I got in touch with him when I arrived and he suggested that I work with him editing some short documentaries he was making for television. One was about a team of deaf football players from Colorado; the other was about a juggling competition. They were about seven or eight minutes long each and were shot on film and transferred to video to be edited. I continued working like that, including for sex, lies, and videotape, because it’s a lot faster, and people like Kubrick also started working like this. In 1980, people thought that was strange, unusual. It was a great experience for me; I had the opportunity to work in my area and to see my work appear on the screen.

  After six months, in 1981, they canceled the program. I did all kinds of odd jobs for the rest of the year so I could pay the rent—I counted points during televised games, for example—but it was very depressing. Los Angeles quickly started feeling like the worst place on earth, where people were judged based only on their material success. So, I went back to Baton Rouge feeling like a failure and with little hope for a future in filmmaking. I got a job that paid sixty-six dollars a week in a video arcade, where I gave out coins to people to put in the machines. The arcade was near the university campus, and my father—who had split up with my mother while I was still in high school—would come to see me in the evenings and would encourage me when I was embarrassed to be doing something a monkey could have done.

  All the while, I continued to read and write and started to work on a film, bit by bit, for the next sixteen months. It was called Rapid Eye Movement, a kind of impressionistic vision of my letdowns in Los Angeles. It was a cathartic experience for me; the expression of a mental process, and for that reason the film underwent many transformations from conception, to execution, to the final product. These changes took place progressively as the film developed—which in some cases can be a negative thing, but in this case it was not and Rapid Eye Movement is one of my most satisfying shorts. But, like the earlier shorts, it was made for my friends and me; I was not showing it to anybody else. In early 1983, I got a job with a video production firm where I worked in production and post-production. I shot and edited industrial films for about

  two years.

  During this period, I also spent time in Los Angeles where my friend had asked me to come help him edit some programs. Toward the end of 1984, he got a call from a collaborator of the rock group, Yes, who was looking for an inexpensive director to make a film about their tour. That’s how I found myself on the road for to days and brought back a documentary. Since I was not paid very much, I adopted a pretty irreverent attitude and this thirty-minute film was a lot like the first films of Richard Lester. Mostly, I wanted to have fun without worrying too much about how they would react, but finally they did rather like my work. They weren’t happy with my video editing so they sent me to London to redo it, then they suggested I work as an intermediary between the band and another director who had been commissioned to shoot one of their concerts. I turned them down because this annoyed me and went back to Louisiana. Two months later, they finally asked me to shoot their concert. I was twenty-one, had never filmed a live show, and in the fall of 1984 I found myself in Canada with eight Panaflex cameras shooting two evenings of concert. All went well and I finished editing the film, 9012Live, during the summer of 1985. I remember sitting in their offices lamenting that I could not shoot a script I had written. They told me to find an agent.
Which I did. I had her read my script, showed her Rapid Eye Movement and a piece of the concert film, and she liked them. She started representing me and got me several small jobs as a scriptwriter.

  Q: What was your script about?

  A: Again, it was very personal and set in Baton Rouge. In many ways, it was a first version of sex, lies, and videotape. It dealt with the relationship between men and women, with the absence of communication and with misunderstandings. But in spite of many rewritings, I could not make the script work. I think I was still caught in a very adolescent way of thinking and had never really had a profound relationship with a woman, which would have enabled me to cast a more mature look at the relationship between the sexes.

  Q: Had you written other scripts?

  A: Yes, but they weren’t any good. One was about relationships inside a high school and the other was a detective story treated as comedy. I knew they were not successful, but it was good practice.

  Q: Aside from the contemporary films you already mentioned, which filmmakers were you most attracted to?

  A: Certainly, people like Orson Welles and Howard Hawks. And also comedy directors like Preston Sturges and Lubitsch who made a big impression on me. Some of Wyler’s film too, and Sunset Boulevard, and The Third Man. Mostly, American films. But, of course, I was also influenced by works like Rules of the Game, The Bicycle Thief, or Diabolique. Strangely enough, I know very little of Bergman—I don’t think I saw more than three of his films, even though my paternal grandfather was born in Stockholm. But I saw the films in a chaotic way, because of the availability. I also experienced the changes that occurred in American cinema of the mid seventies as a devolution—with the arrival of blockbusters at the expense of the mature works of the new American cinema who had impressed me so much, Rafelson, Scorsese, or Coppola.