Steven Soderbergh

by Anthony Kaufman

A: I told Cliff Martinez that I wanted an instrument that was close to the zither because it seemed to go well with the atmosphere of the place. I had a Carol Reed experience. I was in a restaurant listening to a gypsy group playing the cimbalom and I knew this is what I was looking for. Cliff used a numerical recording of a cimbalom, brought it back to the U.S. and he was able to replay the sound of the cimbalom in his electric drum—he is a drummer—while looking at the film on video. So many films nowadays overlook the extent to which music can be used in counterpoint, and even in irony. I think Cliff Martinez understands this very well.

  Q: Was the sculptor based on Max Brod?

  A: He was a synthesis of Kafka’s friends. There is a reference to Brod in the sense that he liked Kafka’s work while the latter asked him to destroy it. I think Max Brod was right. When Kafka would ask him to burn his writings, it was a way for him to make this request at the same time knowing that he wouldn’t do it. Brod told him many times that he wouldn’t do it, so I think there was a tacit understanding between them.

  Q: It’s strange that three recent Anglo-Saxon films—Barton Fink, Naked Lunch, and Kafka—all deal with a similar theme: the corruption of the world by the imagination of a writer.

  A: What they have in common is that they evoke the world of the writer. But the difference, I think, is that Kafka does not deal with literary creation. It stops where the other two films begin. The implication, in Kafka, is that these events will become a fiction, will inspire him, while Naked Lunch and Barton Fink talk about the moment of inspiration, of creation. But it’s true that it’s a strange coincidence, and just as strange that Woody Allen’s Shadow and Fog and Kafka are coming out at the same time. I don’t think this is the beginning of a trend and that producers are going to launch into imitations! I don’t know in what direction American cinema is going, but I feel that people in the business are worried and are not sure of anything. Movie tickets are so expensive that the public knows what to expect when they go see a studio film; but I don’t think they are ready to take chances with a film like Kafka. By nature I am more pessimistic than optimistic, which is not a typically American attitude.

  Interview with Steven Soderbergh: King of the Hill

  Michel Ciment and Hubert Niogret / 1993

  From Positif, October 1993. Translated by Paula Willoquet. Reprinted by permission.

  Q: You have surprised us once again with your third film King of the Hill.

  A: When I read the book in 1986, I was very attracted to the character of the boy, in some ways, I felt close to him. The fact that the story takes place in the thirties was of secondary interest to me, even though my father grew up during this period. He knows the popular culture well, has kept many records from the time and I owe to him my love for the cinema. This decade was very accessible to me and I felt very comfortable in relation to it. On the other hand, the social correspondences—economic crisis, unemployment—were not as evident as they are today when I first discovered Hotchner’s text. So, there’s a happy coincidence. Also, when I took on the project in 1989, I was not married yet and had no children. And, of course, that also influenced my approach to the subject. I knew the material was very different from my first two films, and this was part of its appeal.

  Q: When did the book come out?

  A: In 1972. Hotchner had been contacted many times by producers, but he had never wanted to sell the rights because it was very personal for him. Robert Redford, whose company was involved in the project in its initial stage, came to see Hotchner and succeeded in convincing him that he would not be disappointed. Once he accepted, he became very cooperative, very friendly, and he never reproached us for our choices to include or leave out this or that passage. In fact, the book is not very long, it does not have an epic structure, and I think you’ll agree that as far as the tone and the emotions are concerned the film is very close to the book. Since the story uses the first person narration, everyone thought I was going to use a narrator. I knew, however, from the very beginning, that I would not. Unless you adopt a particular strategy for the narration—like in Sunset Boulevard or in Terrence Malick’s two films, Badlands and Days of Heaven which make brilliant use of a narrator who is neither very conscious nor very eloquent—I don’t really see the need for one. So, I had to achieve the same results by different means. On the one hand, I incorporated certain lines in the first person from the book into the dialogue so as to give a sense of the main character’s personality. On the other hand, I simply invented things, like the imaginary story about Charles Lindbergh he tells in class at the beginning. This little speech enabled us to enter his world. Finally, I was lucky to find a young actor who was able to invoke interior thought. A narrator would tend to encourage you to read the events in a specific way, and I did not want any part of that. I wanted the audience to be freer in their interpretation.

  Q: You made a film based on an original script (sex, lies, and videotape), another based on someone else’s script (Kafka), and now a third based on a novel. Do you encounter different kinds of problems with each?

  A: There are problems particular to each project, but I don’t feel any closer to sex, lies, and videotape than to King of the Hill, for example. It’s true that at first I was a bit terrified at the thought of tackling someone else’s work in order to adapt it for the screen. I adopted a method that William Goldman suggested, which is to read the text with a color pen and to underline what must absolutely be kept; then to read it again twice more with different color pens. Then, the passages that have been underlined in three colors should make it into the film. I ended up with a short version of the book in the form of a script that was unfilmable! This set me free to invent, to establish connections that did not exist in Hotchner’s text. But this first stage, in spite of not being very productive, was useful to me because I was afraid to distance myself from the book, to imagine. When Hotchner read the script, he had to admit that it was at the same time different from and similar to what he had written. Emotionally, it was faithful to the original. So, it was a difficult process, but not as difficult as starting from scratch with a blank page, as with sex, lies, and videotape. As for Kafka, the problem was to film a script by someone who is very smart and very stubborn, like a family member with whom you have no control. We plan to work together again, but I told Lem Dobbs that in the meantime he should make a film so he might gain more, or less, appreciation for what I do, because right now he is in the enviable position of never having made a film and of knowing it all. These three films then posed different problems. I suppose, also, with sex, lies, and videotape my collaborators were less inclined to send me notes, to offer comments; they felt I was very close to the material. So, they hesitated telling me what to do. With the other two films, I got many more suggestions.

  Q: Since Hotchner’s book is an autobiographical fragment, did you ask him to tell you something about the characters’ background, about what does not appear in the book?

  A: In this sense too, he was very cooperative. I showed him the script two weeks before we started shooting, and he gave me information about incidents that are not in the text. Also, when he visited the set, he would talk to the actors about their characters and his anecdotes, his digressions, the background details were very useful. For example, at the beginning, when they visit the new apartment, the younger brother calls out to his older brother: “Can you hear me?” Hotchner told us it was great for them because, up until then, they had lived in a one-room apartment; so, to call out to each other from one room to another was unheard of. His comments also addressed the film that I was making rather than the film that I should have made, according to him. I appreciated his support at a time when, in America, it’s fashionable for authors to pretend that we have ruined their work. The brother does not appear in the book; he had already left before the beginning. I felt it was necessary for him to appear in the film because the separation of the brothers carries a great emotional weight for Aaron. His physical presence at the open
ing of the film seemed crucial since his younger brother constantly referred to him, and also at the end when he returns. I also collapsed two characters into one in the case of Mr. Mungo, played by Spalding Gray, who lives across the hall. I had to invent dialogue for him. I really like the sequences that take place in this room, and I would have liked to shoot an entire film with this Fassbinder-like atmosphere, where a child is confronted with a strange situation which he does not really understand, with these two characters who seem to hate each other but who have a physical relationship based on money.

  Q: What most fundamentally made you want to shoot this film?

  A: I shared the child’s feelings. My parents are divorced and did not get along, even if everything took place behind closed doors. In this child’s emotional confusion about the behavior of the adults, I found what I had felt as a child. Even I could not understand the reason for their actions. I saw two beings that clearly did not get along but continued to live together, stay together. I would ask myself: If they are together, they must love each other, but it doesn’t look like they love each other. This idea, coupled with the idea that this child seemed to be the only adult in the story, appealed to me. I also like the aesthetic dimension of the period, the decor, the music. What most attracted me was the fact that this kid lived in his thoughts, which was the case for me too.

  Q: In your reconstruction of the period, you chose not to show the sordid side of reality caused by the economic conditions during the Depression.

  A: First of all, Hotchner’s book, no matter how much imagination you apply to it, is not Grapes of Wrath. Then, there was a lot of optimism at that time. People had not become cynical, they had not been betrayed by their government yet, nor caught up in a shady conflict that had ended badly. As Hotchner used to say to me, he never thought he would not be able to make it. The community had a faith in the future, in spite of all the adversity, which no longer exists today. You cannot forget that the action is set at a time when Roosevelt comes to power, many jobs are created, and there is hope for a new beginning. Which does not mean that my point of view is devoid of pessimism. For me, the story was leading up to this sequence where he found himself abandoned by everyone and alone in this room, eating pages from the newspaper advertising food, which ends up giving him hallucinations. This had to be a trying scene. What is strange about his predicament is that he never weighs the danger he is in, because kids don’t have a sense of their own mortality. And I wanted to shoot the story from his perspective, the perspective of a twelve-year-old boy who does not know what the Depression means, and who thinks that’s just the way things are, particularly since his family was never well-off, even with the Depression. I don’t know if I succeeded in getting the idea across that what saves him at the end, strangely enough, is this kind of hallucination he has, stretched out on the floor in a semi-catatonic state, practically ready to die when he sees the candles. The anger he feels rising up in him against his father is what gets him out of his stupor. Once he is able to express this anger, his situation improves, his father and brother return.

  Q: Like the James Spader character in sex, lies, and videotape, and like Kafka, he is not in sync with the world.

  A: Absolutely. If there is a link among the three films, it lies with the main characters that are out of sync with their environment. I am attracted to these mental states. I was struck by the little game that the critics and film folks at the [Cannes Film] Festival played to find out whether I was really an “auteur.” This makes me laugh because I think you can only know this once a filmmaker has made twenty films. A Huston or a Hawks were never fashionable, and they expressed themselves through a variety of genres. 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, let alone share their talent. These artists have changed the cinematic vocabulary; their films are unlike any others. I am more like those who respond to a certain kind of subject matter, and who look for the best style to express it. I am not trying to impose my style. It’s like the difference between studio films and independent films, as if the independents were always great while the studio owners were always the bad guys. I think that some critics, instead of trying to appear confident, should admit that they can be bewildered by a filmmaker’s choice. Of course, it’s always easier to avoid this by simply stating that you weren’t expecting this or that from the filmmaker and that you are not interested. Human beings are complicated machines. There are days I feel closer to Kafka, others I feel closer to the kid: I change from one day to the next.

  Q: How did you envision the hotel, which is different from the one in Barton Fink?

  A: It’s certainly present in the book. In Barton Fink, the Coen brothers really turned the hotel into a character. Their hotel was almost the hero. My hotel had to assert itself by degrees, culminating in a scene which was secondary to the plot, and which I completely cut out. Aaron was locked up in his room toward the end of the film, then he came down to the dancing room in the basement and asked for a job at the “customer service” desk, an expression he had heard from a prostitute. It was an extremely baroque scene, with everybody sweating, dominated by blue, a color that is never present in the film. Visually, it was very striking, but I had to cut it out: first, because the film was too long; then, you could ask why he was able to leave his room to ask this but not to steal food, since he was dying of hunger. I couldn’t put the scene elsewhere either because it was linked to his physical and mental state.

  Q: How long was the first cut?

  A: Two hours and fifteen minutes. It was very long and I cut thirty-five minutes. I don’t like films that are long only because the director was too attached to what he filmed. The length of Lawrence of Arabia is justified, but King of the Hill is not an epic. I like to leave the theater wanting to see the film again. I had a lot of difficulties making cuts, including cutting this sequence, but I think it was in the interest of the film. It’s interesting to see how often the audience is ahead of you and able to make connections, and often they don’t understand at all what you are trying to do because your intentions are too intimately connected to who you are as a director. I don’t ask that the audience like what I do, but I insist that they understand it.

  Q: You chose warm colors—browns, yellows, amber tones.

  A: We followed Edward Hopper, where the reds are burgundy, the yellows are mustard. The neighborhood in St. Louis where we shot had those tonalities; the bricks were a strong uniform red. I never saw so much brick in my life. We deliberately limited the range of colors, and we took great care with the texture of the walls and ceilings, with their smooth surfaces reflecting light. It was very different from the “realist” tones of sex, lies, and videotape or from the black and white of Kafka, let alone from the strange and cold colors in the latter’s final sequence. It’s interesting to see how you can influence the audience indirectly through sound and color. It makes me sick to see films where the set and sound designers have not really made a contribution, which of course, in the final analysis, is the director’s fault. Of course, sets cost a lot and the artistic director has more financial constraints than the cinematographer. You don’t need a lot of lights to light your set well, as shown by Philippe Rousselot. The director has to be very clear and specific about what he wants from his set designer if he wants his work to come across in the image. That’s why I tend to be well prepared, and to plan and construct the scenes in advance. I don’t shoot thousands of feet of film only to work it all out in the editing. I have to be able to say that I don’t need a ceiling for these scenes, or that I’ll need half a ceiling in another scene. Little details like this make it possible for you to come to the set the day before and to ask that a surface be repainted. Changes like this can only happen if you’ve already taken account of them in your budget. For King of the Hill, we had a budget of eight million dollars for eight weeks of shooting. The hotel was built in a warehouse. Overall, we tried to be
faithful to the style of the period, avoiding colors that were too familiar to contemporary audiences. We were not looking for a photographic style like that of Walker Evans. The fact that we were dealing with recollections gave us more freedom. Times were hard, but by the same token the memories were tainted with nostalgia. My father, for example, is still drawn to this period.

  Q: Did you have films of this period in mind?

  A: Not really. We were looking for an emotional quality that was linked to childhood. We referenced The Four Hundred Blows, The Bicycle Thief, My Life as a Dog, or even Hope and Glory that also evokes a dramatic period in a strange way.

  Q: How do you explain the tendency nowadays to make films about childhood memories, from Radio Days to Reunion, Empire of the Sun and Kubrick’s forthcoming Wartime Lies [ed. note: the film was never made.]?

  A: It may have something to do with the breakdown of the family, the increasing number of divorces, children born of different marriages. The result is my generation, fractured, without direction. I was led to study the huge psychological impact that an unstable, unpredictable, uncertain education can have. I don’t know if other filmmakers had the same reaction, but this certainly played a role for me. I think my father’s generation valued sacrifices more highly. Nowadays, many adults in America, at a certain point in their lives, decide to think about themselves first, to have a new wife, etc. I am not passing judgment, but I am sure this has affected these people’s children. For a long time the effects were hidden, but they are coming to the surface now. We have a generation of kids who don’t care about other human beings, who don’t feel any connection with others because in their own lives these connections were severed very early on.

  Q: How did you work with Jesse Bradford who plays Aaron?

  A: He was amazing, independently of his professional experience. There is a saying in Hollywood that you should never work with water, planes, animals, and kids. After sex, lies, and videotape, there was no greater challenge for me than to make Kafka. After Kafka, it was another challenge to get a great performance from a child actor. He is in every scene and carries the entire film. With our tiny budget we looked in three cities, in the manner of Gone with the Wind. The first kid I auditioned was Jesse Bradford. I told the casting director: “That’s him.” Twenty minutes after I had chosen who would play the part of Lester, she told me: “Stop! I am not going to let you decide after only one audition!” Particularly since we still had three weeks to decide! I told her it was not my fault that she had done a great job. But she was panicking anyway. And it went on like that: Jeroen Krabbe, Lisa Eichhorn, Spalding Gray, Elizabeth McGovern, Karen Allen were all my first choices. They were free so I was able to hire them. What struck me about Jesse Bradford is that there was like a veil over his face when he was reading the script or talking to me. He was curious and professional, but he was not letting me see how he felt about what was happening to his character in the film, nor how he was affected by the experience of making this film. It was as if he was wearing a mask for the audition, and that’s exactly what his character would have done. My only problem was his good looks that might have made it more difficult for people to identify with his plight, unless he could compensate for that with some unusually good acting. Which he succeeded in doing.