Steven Soderbergh

by Anthony Kaufman

  KL: What kind of input did Peter Gallagher have into shaping his character?

  SS: A lot. A lot in the sense of me knowing Peter, me having written it with Peter in mind, and shading it to what I think he does well. In that sense, he was influencing it before he even knew it existed. I didn’t call him until it was finished. And then once we started rehearsing, things came out of that. He and I just tend to have similar approaches and find similar things funny and similar things serious. It’s a very easy, and at this point almost nonverbal, relationship. What’s great about him is that he has no concern about whether something makes him look good or bad. At the end of the day, looking at the whole movie, I found it such a secure performance—it’s so unmannered and un-actory. You need to be a very secure actor to do that. It’s not a showy role—it’s a complicated role, but not externally. He really resisted the urge to tart it up and make him more lively, because the whole point is that he was a lot more lively when he was gambling and drinking. That’s the sad fact, that his life isn’t as exciting, and that’s probably what pulls him into this thing, the desire to feel that again.

  KL: He’s such a charming guy that it adds to the ambiguity of the character.

  SS: Yeah, absolutely. That whole point that his brother makes that “you’ve really coasted on your looks and your charm”—I wanted to use Peter’s looks to point out the fact that for somebody who looks like that, life can be a lot less demanding than for other people.

  KL: I’ve always wondered why he isn’t a bigger star, but there’s a real integrity to his career that’s a lot more valuable than stardom.

  SS: I think so, too. He’s always working, and he’s always doing good work, more often than not in interesting films. At the end of the day, if Peter doesn’t end up reaching the peaks of celebrity and fame that other actors reach, that may not be a bad thing. That may mean that he’ll be around a lot longer and have a better career. He certainly seems content. He’s read so many articles that have said, “This is the one that’s going to make Peter a star,” but he seems pretty pleased with the way things are going. He just likes to work.

  KL: Tell me how you found Alison Elliott.

  SS: Through the normal audition circuit. [Casting director] Ronnie Yeskel and I saw a lot of people, and Alison reminded me very much of a young Lauren Bacall, specifically in the sense that she was really hard to read sometimes. There was a smoky quality about her. We screen-tested her with Peter, and the two of them seemed to really hit it off. I was trying to make a point about Rachel’s being somewhat opaque, and whether Michael’s enamored of just the idea of this, or Rachel specifically. I wanted to make all that sort of fuzzy by making her hard to read. Alison was really good at that. You sense that there’s something going on, that she’s smart. At the same time, you wonder: God, why does she constantly pin her hopes to these men, especially these kinds of men? What’s going on with her? And I wanted you to not know what was going on with her. Also, as you talked about, Alison looks like somebody who could be in your neighborhood—she’s attractive, but she’s not one of those movie femme fatale types. All of that, combined with the fact that I wanted somebody who was, as far as the public was concerned, an unknown, so that you wouldn’t be thinking: Oh, I’ve seen her play this part, I bet she’s going to go this way.

  KL: This is your fourth film, and you’ve never made a traditionally commercial picture. Is it a struggle to keep making the kinds of films you want to make?

  SS: Not yet! It may be soon, but thus far it hasn’t been a struggle at all. Believe me, I’ve got it great. I think it would be a tougher situation if I’d made films that were, from the ground up, designed to be more commercial and were more expensive and all that. I don’t think any of the films I’ve made have carried with them the kinds of commercial expectations that a lot of other filmmakers have to deal with. So people look at King of the Hill—it didn’t cost a lot of money, and I don’t think they were saying, “My God, what a huge failure for him,” because it just wasn’t that kind of movie. I don’t think anybody looked at it and thought it was going to be a blockbuster. We all hoped it wouldn’t lose money, but I don’t think we had any illusions about how it was going to perform. But it’s a strange time—I certainly wonder whether or not the movies I’m interested in making are movies that people are interested in seeing, over and above the exigencies of the timing of the movie’s release and what else is out there and things that you can’t control. The kinds of movies I grew up on in the late sixties and early seventies that I responded to, I don’t know that people really want to go see those anymore.

  KL: There seems to be a real schism right now. Studio commercial films have never been more crass, yet the independent film movement seems pretty strong.

  SS: It is in some cases. I just think it’s all pretty blurry. It’s just obvious to me that the A films of twenty and twenty-five years ago are now art films, and the B films are now the A films, from the studio’s standpoint. So that leaves me sort of with one foot in and one foot out. But I can’t really complain.

  KL: I’m sure you’ve been asked this before, but after sex, lies, and videotape, did you have to go through some kind of decompression or recovery period from all the expectations surrounding you?

  SS: No, not really. It was disorienting, because it was so unexpected. But because it was unexpected, it made it easier to deal with. I knew that I hadn’t asked for it, I hadn’t campaigned for it. It’s funny to read people bashing you for having won an award, say at Cannes, that you certainly did not ask for and did not expect. It wasn’t my fault. I certainly knew that it was going to come back to me, in the sense that all this praise would be turned around at some point. But that’s fine. If that’s all I have to deal with, then that’s pretty easy. I don’t live in Los Angeles, I’m not privy to the sort of discussions and parlor games about who’s on top and who’s not and who’s a failure and who’s a success. I don’t hear it, so I don’t really think about it that much. I just want to work. I think other people thought about it a lot more than I did.

  Crazy for You: Steven Soderbergh Cuts Loose with Schizopolis

  Patricia Thomson / 1996

  From Indendent Film and Video Monthly, April 1997. Reprinted by permission.

  Schizopolis opens with a long shot of a manic crazy-man clad only in a tee-shirt fleeing across a green lawn with two men in white in hot pursuit. It’s a situation the film’s director, Steven Soderbergh, likens to being an independent filmmaker: “You want to be free, but everyone’s trying to tackle you and bring you down.”

  With Schizopolis, Soderbergh refused to be wrestled into conformity. His fifth feature is an idiosyncratic, energetic, and blissfully uncommercial comedy that represents a complete departure from the director’s expected career track—a screeching U-turn, in fact, that takes him back to the world of no-budget filmmaking. Shot over a ten-month period in Soderbergh’s hometown of Baton Rouge, Schizopolis came together with the help of friends who took deferred salaries and sometimes doubled as crew and cast. For his part, Soderbergh not only wrote and directed the film, but also served as cinematographer and played two of the leads.

  For indie directors who envy the kind of studio deals and comfortable budgets Soderbergh had previously managed to land, Schizopolis is a surprising career twist. But it’s no fluke; the writer/director is already at work on a sequel.

  As the whole world knows, Soderbergh made his remarkable debut in 1989 with sex, lies, and videotape, which cost $1.2 million and grossed almost $25 million domestically after winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes and making it into multiplexes everywhere. Its critical and financial success marks a milestone in independent film history, launching the current chapter in which indie film is taken seriously by industry, audiences, and college career counselors. From there Soderbergh went on to direct Kafka (1991), produced by Barry Levinson and backed by French financiers to the tune of $11 million; Universal’s King of the Hill (1993), made for $8 million; and the $6.5
million The Underneath (1995), also made with Universal. Schizopolis, in contrast, cost a mere $250,000—about one-fourth the budget of sex, lies and videotape.

  Filmgoers who have caught Schizopolis on the festival circuit have called it everything from “brilliant” to “the worst movie ever made.” Filmmakers tend to love it, especially its freewheeling energy and wacky, witty film jokes that recall the cinematic shenanigans of Richard Lester (the subject of a book Soderbergh is writing), Monty Python, and the French New Wave. But critics thus far have tended to hold their heads and groan.

  Schizopolis is a wild ride, to say the least, and it’s giddy fun for those willing to lay back and let it happen. Bursting with an exuberant sense of experimentation, Schizopolis is loaded with verbal and visual jokes, bizarre non sequiturs, and goofy slapstick. While it sticks to a three-act structure (watch for the numbers), the plot careens like a drunken sailor between its story of double doppelgangers, involving a corporate-drone speechwriter for a New Age guru and a randy dentist (both played by Soderbergh), and their love interests (played by the director’s ex-wife, Betsy Brantley). But beneath its jokey surface lie some more serious concerns: anxiety in the workplace, the loss of meaningful communication at home, and the vaporous content of New Age gurus who pretend to offer solutions to a society that’s adrift and alienated.

  Schizopolis was a tough sell to distributors, most of whom were stumped by the question of how to market such a feature. Northern Arts, a small but growing distributor based in Massachusetts, took up the challenge, picking up domestic theatrical rights. (Previous releases include Drunks, Tokyo Decadence, I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times, Wallace & Gromit: A Close Shave and The Best of Aardman, and Chameleon Street.) Fox Lorber has domestic video rights and will handle world sales. Schizopolis opens in theaters this month.

  The Independent caught up with Soderbergh at the Toronto and Hamptons film festivals, where he was presenting both his film of a Spalding Gray monologue, Gray’s Anatomy (an Independent Film Channel commission), and the surreal, irrepressible Schizopolis.

  Patricia Thompson: Let’s begin with the genesis of Schizopolis. How long were the ideas for the various strands floating around—the doppelganger theme, the New Age religion, your play on the language of cinema—and when did they coalesce? Or did the idea for the film come as a piece?

  Steven Soderbergh: It was a little bit of everything. Some of the ideas I’d been carrying around for a long time. Some were discovered when I began to write the screenplay. Others happened while we were shooting.

  PT: How did the pseudo-Scientology theme, here called “Eventualism,” develop?

  SS: It grew out of my interest in gurus and people’s desire to find a way to order their lives in a world they’re finding increasingly hostile and complicated. I’m always fascinated when people relinquish control of their lives to someone else, especially a stranger. That’s always struck me as odd. I didn’t really have Scientology in mind specifically. I don’t find Scientology stranger than any religion. Personally, I find them all weird. But Scientology is one of the few religions that advertises on television and has images that are instantly recognizable that I could appropriate—the volcano, the book. You see that image and it conjures up something.

  PT: And it’s not the Methodist Church.

  SS: Right. So there was that and also it played into the idea of paranoia and in-fighting within a company. That sort of thing tends to be more pronounced in an organization that is run by one very mercurial personality.

  PT: Have you ever worked at a place like that?

  SS: Sure. When I was doing odd jobs, I worked for companies that were basically run by autocrats and they were very unpredictable. Your life hung in the balance seemingly every half-hour.

  PT: You play the two main characters: Fletcher Munson, the speech-writer for the New Age guru, and a dentist who has an affair with Munson’s wife. I saw these characters as two different people. But when the dentist says, “I’m having an affair with my own wife,” that throws that interpretation into a tailspin. What’s that line about?

  SS: Well, basically what’s happened is he’s jumped rails onto somebody else’s life, but is aware of that. So when he realizes “I’ve jumped into somebody’s else’s life” and it turns out that somebody was having an affair with his wife, he’s a little freaked out by that, as anybody would be.

  So in the part of the film with Fletcher Munson, which takes place over the course of two or three days, when he jumps ship to this other life, he has been reliving those two or three days as the dentist—sort of skipping backwards. Then in the third act we see those days from [the wife’s] perspective. That grew out of my interest in parallel time structures.

  PT: Where did the two main characters come from? They’re off the beaten track, and I doubt they came from your immediate sphere. . . .

  SS: Oh, sure, why wouldn’t they be? I’ve seen a lot of dentists.

  PT: Reaching that age where your fillings fall out?

  SS: No, I’ve just had a long history of correction and bullshit. I actually have come into contact with a lot of dentists. So I picked a profession and a type I thought I knew well.

  But the idea of doppelgangers, parallel universes, and parallel time frames is something that’s always interested me. I had an idea to do something about that for several years. But it wasn’t until I was making The Underneath that I decided it was time to change what I was doing and how I was doing it. Sort of start over again.

  PT: In terms of what? The scale of production? Narrative structure?

  SS: Everything. Just start over again. Rediscover the joy of filmmaking, which I’d slowly begun to lose over the course of the four films I directed.

  PT: Why was that?

  SS: I don’t know. I was just drifting off course. I’m sure there are tons of reasons, some personal and some professional. The bottom line was I sort of woke up in the middle of The Underneath and felt I was making a movie I wasn’t interested in. When I began to question whether or not I wanted to make movies anymore, I realized that what I needed to do was change what I was doing. So it’s a progression, in a weird sort of way. Even though The Underneath is my least favorite, in retrospect it may have been my most important film, because the dissatisfaction drove me into a new area.

  PT: Is this direction related to your earlier shorts?

  SS: The shorts I made were very similar.

  PT: In what respect?

  SS: Energy, comic stance.

  PT: When watching Schizopolis, if you’re into the humor—and some people weren’t . . .

  SS: How could you not be?

  PT: Well, some people really weren’t—the overall feeling is that you’re simply having a lark, that you yourself weren’t taking the film too seriously.

  SS: I needed a lark. Schizopolis is extreme in one way, and I think what will happen is I’ll end up applying a lot of the things that I got out of Schizopolis to something a little less schizophrenic in terms of its story. The follow-up to Schizopolis that I’m getting ready to write is going to have the same energy, be made in the same way, and have the same m.o., but be a bit of a more linear story and not quite so complicated. This thing, I just had to get a lot of it out of my system. Now I think I can see a balance between Schizopolis and a “normal” movie, whatever that is. I’m hoping I can apply some of what I’ve learned making Schizopolis to that film—just a way of working that is interesting and allows me more freedom.

  PT: Freedom in terms of what specifically?

  SS: Stripping the crew down, getting rid of things that have been getting in the way, both from a technical standpoint and a practical crew standpoint. Things like video assist. You know, we made Gray’s Anatomy with a crew of about a dozen, when it came right down to it. Meet the Parents [Soderbergh’s remake of a low-budget first feature by Chicagoan Greg Gliana, which is now in development] could easily be made with a crew that size. A lot of things like that—operating the camera myself, tryin
g to strip it down. I’ve decided that anybody who’s not actively involved in what’s going on in front of the camera needs to be eliminated, that somebody who’s just standing there is an energy vacuum.

  PT: What kinds of changes did this freedom and flexibility allow you to make to the Schizopolis script during production?

  SS: Sometimes you couldn’t do what you thought you’d be able to do from a practical standpoint. You’d sit around—there’d be the four of us, or the five of us, if we were lucky—and say, “Hmm, I just don’t think this is working.” You’d go eat lunch and talk about why it wasn’t working. And you’d drive around, see another location, and think, “Maybe the problem is location.” You know, it was all very loose and informal, and it was strictly based on, do you feel it at the time? Do you feel like it’s really happening? If it’s not, let’s not do it, and let’s figure out why.

  PT: Did that create structural changes?

  SS: Sometimes; not major ones. But some of the best things in the film resulted from either accidents or problems that were turned into advantages. One of my favorite scenes is where [Eventualism guru T. Azimuth] Schwitters is going down the list of people who sent him condolences [for an assassination attempt]. In the script it’s a scene between him and his wife. Well, the actress who played the wife had left town and not told anyone [he laughs]. So I said, “Does anybody know a girl in her early twenties who we could use to play his assistant?” Somebody goes off to make the phone call. In the meantime, I sit down and think, “Alright, here’s the scene: They’re in there, the right-hand man is pacing and she’s reading out this list.” We wrote the list right there. The girl showed up, we gave her the note pad, and we shot it. It’s one of my favorite things in the movie.