Steven Soderbergh

by Anthony Kaufman

  Q: The title, King of the Hill, is very mysterious.

  A: I like the irony in it. There is a point in the book tied to this expression. When he is eating paper and has hallucinations, he is dreaming that he is playing this well-known game in the States: a kid who is standing on a hill has to fight off his playmates who are trying to make him fall so they can take his place as “King of the Hill.” In this dream, which becomes a nightmare, he is on a hill made of mud and a mudslide buries the two kids who were trying to dislodge him. This was part of the first version of the film; I had to leave it out. But I kept the title as a counterpoint because he is everything but “King of the Hill.” I thought it had a nice ring to it.

  Q: It’s not part of the American tradition for the director to be the editor as well. However, you seem to always work that way.

  A: I think that if film directors wanted to do it, they could. In fact, most of them are in the editing room. It’s true that from a practical standpoint the syndicates don’t like that, and it is out of the question that I get paid for my work as editor. The prices are set by the editors’ Guild and they don’t like it that I edit my own films. But, for me, it’s during the editing process that film becomes an art. You bring all the elements together and you build the film. It’s the part I like best. Sometimes I like directing, but I love editing. When I edit, I sometimes resent directors, but I like it anyway.

  Q: From this perspective, what was it like to make King of the Hill?

  A: King of the Hill was hard work. I started the adaptation while I was finishing Kafka. Then I staged it and shot more film than I had ever before, with a script that was unusually long. The film had a more open structure than the first two, and I constantly had to solve many different problems. The shooting was exhausting because I really had nobody to back me up, although I can’t say there were no pressures on me. Then, I had to sit down everyday for months at the editing table. I have two projects, one rather modest and the other more ambitious. This time, I think I’ll hire an editor to work while we are shooting; this will keep me from having to reshoot certain scenes, which is very expensive. I have just finished shooting a film noir about a half hour long, The Quiet Room, based on a novel which I knew nothing about, written under the pseudonym of Jonathan Craig, a name which I was not familiar with either! I had liked the story and I proposed it to a cable station, Showtime, that was producing a series of six short films, Fallen Angels, based on novelists like Chandler, Hammett or Cain, and directed by Jonathan Kaplan, Phil Joanou, Alfonso Cuaron, Tom Hanks and Tom Cruise. They had hired an editor and that disoriented me. In fact, if I shoot a dialogue sequence with three consecutive scenes, I know exactly at what point I am going to connect them. I was intrigued to find out whether they would know that too, and most of the time they did not. He was not a bad editor, but I understood then the extent to which I was already editing with the camera.

  Q: Can you tell us more about these two projects?

  A: The most important one from the point of view of budget deals with the beginnings of professional football in the twenties. The second is an original idea that I’m going to try to develop this summer. It’s going to be very strange and contemporary, that’s all I can tell you now. I have been thinking about if for a long time. I haven’t stopped taking notes without really knowing whether it’s going to amount to anything. I didn’t want the film to express the theme I had in mind overtly. It’s an even more personal project than sex, lies, and videotape, what disappoints me is that the ideas behind the film are the same ideas in the film. Fundamentally, the characters are the ones who articulate the ideas. I would like to achieve something more oblique. One day, while I was walking the streets of New York, all of a sudden I understood how to accomplish this. At the same time, I was frustrated because I was almost done editing King of the Hill and I had to shoot that episode for television and after that I had to come to Cannes and did not have a chance to tackle that script. I only want one thing right now, and it’s to get to work. Up until now, I have not made a great film, something that really corresponds to my own notions of the cinematographic art. I hope this project will allow me to explore a territory that is personal, something you can only do after years of practice and experience.

  Interview with Steven Soderbergh: The Underneath

  Michel Ciment and Hubert Niogret / 1995

  From Positif April 1996. Translation by Patricia Willoquet. Reprinted by permission.

  Q: When you wrote the script for The Underneath, which you signed with the pseudonym of Sam Lowry, you had no intentions of making the film yourself?

  A: When I was finishing editing King of the Hill, Universal called me to say that they were thinking about remaking Criss Cross, which I had never seen. When I watched it, I thought it would be an interesting script to write, that I could bring some ideas to it, but I told them that I didn’t really want to direct it. I wrote the scripts for two of my first three films and that’s something I like to do. On top of that, I needed work. I also liked the idea of writing for someone else and of seeing what they would do with it. Half way through the writing, I realized that there were certain elements in the script that were particular to me, and I wasn’t at all sure that a third party would know what I had in mind. So I called Universal to tell them that I was planning to direct it myself. It happened like that, by chance. It’s not one of those kinds of projects you think about for years. Everything happened very fast after that. I finished the script and we began shooting.

  Q: Why did you write under a pseudonym?

  A: I had a conflict with the Writers’ Guild, following a ruling they passed on the script. The Guild’s rule is that you send them the credits for the script once the film is done. If they notice that the director or the producer is trying to get credit for the script, there has to be a ruling automatically. The fact that I was the only scriptwriter did not seem to matter to them. Their decision was that my name and that of Daniel Fuchs should appear in the opening credits. I told them that I thought that was pretty stupid since Fuchs had been dead for thirty-five years and that would give the impression that we had collaborated on the script! My suggestion was that we indicate that I had written the script based on Don Tracy’s novel and on Daniel Fuchs’s script for the first version of the film. The Guild refused. According to the rules, I had twenty-four hours to ask for a hearing, but I had been traveling and came back after the deadline. I couldn’t object anymore so in order to voice my disagreement and my dissatisfaction, I signed using a pseudonym using the name of one of the characters in Brazil. That seemed an appropriate response to the bureaucracy!

  Q: What was your response to Criss Cross?

  A: I watched the film without really studying it. There were two things that I wanted to use: the idea of a man coming back home and wanting to reestablish a rapport with his ex-wife, and the hospital scene. I changed the family interactions quite a bit, and I invented a past for the two protagonists. In Criss Cross, you don’t see what the relationship between Burt Lancaster and Yvonne de Carlo has been like, and as a spectator I would have wanted to know.

  Q: Was it a challenge for you to tackle for the first time a film with a defined genre and constraints, and a remake on top of that?

  A: I like this kind of film. I also like the fact that sex, lies, and videotape was an original script, Kafka was based on someone else’s script, King of the Hill was inspired by a novel, and The Underneath is a remake. It makes sense to me to try anything once. When I started working on The Underneath, I thought the film would be much more of a thriller than it turned out to be. I did not know at first that there would be so much of me in the film. I thought I was going to be able to adapt the film in a traditional way, which is what they hired me to do. That’s really what I wanted to do, but I suppose it was stronger than I thought and I realize now that from the very beginning I have been making the same film four times, even if it does not seem that way to others. I also could say that, ironically, Michael’s c
haracter in The Underneath is more like me than any other character in my other films. He is incapable of living in the present. And I like to think that’s also the case for the first two thirds of the film; the film and the character have the same problem. In the United States, where the film did not work well, many people were confused by the last third, which is different from the rest.

  Q: What appealed to you about the film noir style?

  A: There is a central idea in this genre that I like a lot: a character lives as a function of a certain number of values in which he/she believes, and in relation to a moral code. When they start to want something very strongly, just for a moment they think they can cross that line that they themselves established in order to get what they want, and then go back to the way things were. Naturally, they find out that’s not possible. It’s a recurring theme in all the films of this genre that I like. On the other hand, the exterior aspects of the genre don’t really interest me. From the very beginning I told my collaborators: no wet pavement, no huge shadows, no hats, no smoke. That’s not what I was looking for. So we spent our time talking about colors and space. Many filmmakers today are trying to imitate the visual aspects of the noir genre, but that seems pointless to me. Of course, when I watched them, I had an appreciation for the shadows and all the rest, but at the emotional level what stayed with me was the moral dilemma at the heart of the story. You have to acknowledge the conventions associated with this kind of film if you decide to make one, but most importantly, you have to bring your own point of view. The only one in the States to have seen a major difference between The Underneath and the classics from half a century ago may have been Todd McCarthy in his review for Variety. He made the remark that in those films it’s always destiny or chance that is responsible for the tragic end, whereas in The Underneath it’s the character who, because of a series of decisions, brings about his own downfall. Michael is someone who spent his entire life refusing to take responsibility for his actions. In the end, he dug his own grave. This is a fundamental difference between this film and the original where Burt Lancaster can’t stop blaming bad luck. I kept this idea to the extent that I made a gambler out of the character, so his life is dependent on luck, but at the same time I show that he has the choice to be a gambler or not. And that he ends up a prisoner of his choice.

  Q: Your title, The Underneath, is unlike the traditional film noir titles that call attention to visual aspects: The Dark Corner, Asphalt Jungle, Panic in the Streets.

  A: I chose it, in fact, in order to give a clue as to the interpretation. We were trying to go under the surface. I don’t know if it was a good thing to encourage people to think along those lines. In any case, I did not want to deceive the audience by making them think this would be an action film, with chases around the big city. I really wanted to tone down the emotions. I decided to shoot in Austin, Texas, a city that does not really have a face. It’s just a place where you live. This seemed to me to reflect Michael’s point of view, his lack of interest in his physical environment; he doesn’t think about it, he doesn’t even pay attention to it. That’s why the house, the streets, even the clothes are not very interesting. He is so concerned with his own problems that he doesn’t notice anything around him. That did not keep me from wanting to give each place a particular physical presence, but once again, in a very controlled way. What interested me most above all this was the relationship among the characters, and particularly within this family that I find very strange.

  Q: While you were writing the script were you thinking about the colors already?

  A: Not at first. Half way through the writing, when I started organizing the structure and therefore the temporal levels, I started to imagine different chromatic possibilities to represent different periods of time. It was also at that point that I decided I did not want someone else shooting the film. I suppose that, like many writers, I did not want anyone disrupting what I had elaborated. Originally, there were four temporal levels; the first edit took account of all four but that was too confusing. It was a kind of flash-forward. At the beginning of the film, in the alley, the evening of the hold-up when they are discussing their plans and the color red is evoked, there are fragments of this fourth temporal level. Michael was saying things he would repeat at the end. But even my film crew didn’t understand anything.

  Q: Why did you choose to shoot the burglary, which is in the present, using colors one generally associates with flashbacks?

  A: We talked about it. It’s true that the past is generally more stylized, whereas we were doing the opposite. We used Ektachrome, which is a reversible stock and not very sensitive, and we overexposed and developed it as if it were a negative. Until my director of photography had told me, I did not know that reversible stock goes through two stages. In the first stage, the stock is developed like a negative, and in the second it’s transformed into a positive. We simply eliminated the second stage. Then, while we were editing, we learned from Kodak—nobody before us had used Ektachrome as a negative—that they had done some experiments on this stock with accelerated aging and that it was going to favor the greens. We asked: “When?” and they said: “Now!” We had to speed things up, pull the film, and from this interpositive we had to make a positive. I could see that between the time we shot and made a working copy—which was done right away—and the time we made the first release copy, which I saw four months later, the difference was astounding. It had been radically altered. What happens is that in the second stage of development into a positive, the development is interrupted. If you cut out this second stage, the film continues to develop and you can’t stop it. Spike Lee heard about what we were doing and he called me. I showed him a few scenes and he ended up shooting a large portion of Clockers with Ektachrome.

  To go back to your question, I wanted to stylize the present because I wanted to create a tension. This stock produced strange colors and a graininess that evoked a sense of anxiety and ill at ease. With Elliot Davis, my cinematographer, we wondered what color on the screen would produce the greatest discomfort, and we ended up deciding it was green. So we ran some tests with the Ektachrome and we decided to use it after we saw what was happening to the colors. And, to that, we added the hand-held camera for the scenes in the present, and we ended up with the tension I wanted. You had to create that tension visually because, at the beginning, there is no logical reason why the spectator should feel uncomfortable. We had to suggest a premonition and that’s what happened with the opening scene in the truck: the colors, the exchange of looks, the car which he can’t stop noticing, etc.

  Q: Given the difficulty in controlling the film stock, how did you work out the relationship with the decor, where the strangeness of certain colors, particularly on one of the walls of the family’s house, is connected to the overall chromatic ambiance?

  A: We ran a lot of tests and we obtained samples of all the colors we were planning on using, whether paint or filters, in order to see what would happen when we used Ektachrome. For the distant past, we eliminated the filters we usually use to shoot daylight in order to get a cold image. For the overall coloring, we made extensive preparations in order to see how each color would come across in each of the three visual registers corresponding to the three temporal zones. I wanted each location to have a particular texture. I hate those films in which the place where the protagonist lives looks like the place where he works (or his friends’ house), where everything is lit and painted in the same way. This doesn’t correspond to my experience of the real world, where light is constantly changing. I like the visual density of The Underneath, as far as the colors and the lighting. It’s a sign of laziness not to take advantage of elements like the light, or color, which do not cost anything.

  Q: How did you approach the scene with the armored vehicle? It’s a classic situation in gangster films.

  A: I watched The Killing, which I like a lot, and particularly the structure, even though I wasn’t taken with the voice over. I also scre
ened Asphalt Jungle, which I also like, and I was obsessed with the Sterling Hayden slang: “You’re trying to bone me?” an expression he repeats throughout the film. My decision to adopt this temporal structure had more to do with emotions than with narrative structure. Our existence is reflected in the film in the sense that our physical bodies go through life in a chronological, linear way from birth to death, while in the mind it’s different. Every time something happens to us, we think about a similar experience in the past and we imagine the consequences in the future. There is a constant back and forth. Our minds are totally non-linear. It seemed interesting to try to express that in film. I had been dreaming of making a film where there would be no end to the dialogue, where the last sentence in a scene would lead to the first sentence of the next scene. It would have been like one uninterrupted conversation that would cut across the three temporal levels, a verbal flow analogous to the interior monologue. I tried but I did not succeed. I also realized that if I succeeded in doing this I was foreclosing any possibilities for change in the editing room. I acknowledge that film is a more emotional than intellectual medium of expression, but in this case, I get as much satisfaction from seeing a mosaic being built as from being scared by a shark in another film. As I spectator, I derive as much pleasure. But, in the United States in particular, the public tends to feel that if you implicate them in an intellectual process the film becomes cold. It’s quite probable that, aside from sex, lies, and videotape where there is enough going on superficially to keep the spectator from entering into a process of reflection, the mental narrative in Kafka, King of the Hill, and The Underneath poses problems for the spectator.