Steven Soderbergh

by Anthony Kaufman

  EK: After Cannes, you said it seemed like there was nowhere to go but downhill, yet you didn’t go downhill. . . .

  SS: Well, I went sideways, basically. Certainly, what I meant was that the odds of my being the focus of such unified positive attention again were probably pretty slim. It just doesn’t happen very often to people and it certainly doesn’t happen very often to your first film.

  EK: Let’s talk about Out of Sight. How did you get involved? Were you a fan of Elmore Leonard?

  SS: I had read a half-dozen of his books, had seen a half-dozen or so of the movies based on some of his books, and liked him. I got a call from Casey Silver [chairman] at Universal, who I’ve known for a long time, actually, and who I dealt with on two movies before. He said: “Look, we’ve got the script over here and Jersey Films is trying to find a director and I think you’re going to like this script and you should go in and talk to them.” So they sent me the script and I read it and it was a terrific script. Clooney was attached at that point and I thought he’d be great in it. And I told them: “Jersey is great, they’re smart producers and I like you guys at the studio, and this is the kind of material I do well—and I don’t want to do it.”

  EK: Why not?

  SS: Mostly because, at the time, I had something else I was trying to get off the ground. Casey said: “Don’t be an idiot, the odds of the planets lining up like this are so small that you really should pursue this.” I realized he was right, so I did pursue it. I went and basically auditioned for Jersey and Clooney a couple of times and got the job.

  EK: Did it bother you, or did it cross your mind, that the subject matter of Out of Sight was somewhat Tarantino-esque?

  SS: Not to me, the way I saw the movie. I felt that its tone and its approach would be very different from his, because we’re very different people and very different filmmakers. When you look at [Barry Sonnenfeld’s] Get Shorty and Jackie Brown and Out of Sight, it’s a nice lesson in what a director does to a piece of material, how a director filters material through his or her goggles, and makes it something specific. So I wasn’t worried about that. I think Tarantino’s influence has been so significant that people forget he was influenced by other people who came before him, in terms of style and tone and structure of storytelling. These things have been around. It just so happens that none of [the films that influenced Tarantino] made a hundred million dollars and sort of invaded the culture to the degree that Pulp Fiction did. So I wasn’t really worried about that. It didn’t even occur to me. I knew he was preparing Jackie Brown, but I also knew that it was probably going to be a very different movie than the one I wanted to make.

  EK: Out of Sight certainly has a great “meet-cute” scene, with George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez squeezed together in the trunk of a getaway car. Was that your idea?

  SS: It was in the book. It’s pretty bizarre. I shot it twice, actually. I shot it wrong the first time. Then I went back and shot it again, and took the opportunity, while we were doing it, for Scott Frank to tweak it a little bit, writing-wise. It’s a tough scene, in a way, because it’s very important and it’s odd, and initially it was very long. It’s shorter now. It was the subject of much discussion on the film, certainly.

  EK: It’s a movie that starts right in, and just goes. It’s a fast-moving film.

  SS: It’s about ten minutes shorter now, so I think it’s moving even better. When I went in to meet with Jersey and Clooney, I said that I saw it as a combination of an early William Friedkin movie and a Hal Ashby movie. It should have the energy of a Friedkin movie from the seventies, but its approach to character and its balance of drama and humor should be like Ashby, and everybody immediately knew what I was talking about.

  EK: What are your strengths as a filmmaker?

  SS: That’s a tough question to answer without seeming to be self-aggrandizing. I like actors. I feel comfortable with them. When you hire good ones, they have great ideas and things happen that are unexpected and interesting and entertaining, and I like that process a lot. In terms of style, there are two ways of working. There are directors who have a signature style and they look for material they can impose that style on. Then there are filmmakers who work from the material outward and who ask what kind of style is appropriate for this material. I’m the second kind. I’m not assuming anything, stylistically, when I open a script, but as I read on, I might have an instinct about what kind of style is appropriate for this movie. But Out of Sight, stylistically, doesn’t feel like King of the Hill or The Underneath. It’s got a different vibe to it, and it’s one that I thought was appropriate to that material. It’s a little rougher around the edges.

  EK: The Underneath was a strange, hypnotic movie that never found its audience.

  SS: It was made at a time when I was having great difficulty figuring out where I was going, creatively. I was not rigorous enough with that film. It should have been ripped apart and put back together in a more interesting way, conceptually. It should have been funnier. It was too somber, too serious. What it did, though, was drive me to start over again and go and make Schizopolis and Gray’s Anatomy in a sort of amateur fashion and reawaken my interest and excitement about making movies, which, during The Underneath was in danger of being extinguished. That was a very scary thing, because I don’t know how to do anything else.

  EK: Is that kind of reawakening something you’re likely to do again in the future?

  SS: It depends. I think I unlocked something. I don’t feel in danger of making a movie that, for me, is hermetically sealed the way The Underneath was and the way Kafka is, to a large extent. I think I’ve gotten through that. Frankly, I think I just had a bad case of the twenties.

  EK: At the time of sex, lies, you said that your initial instinct back then was to shoot in black-and-white, which probably, in retrospect, would not have been such a good idea.

  SS: A huge mistake. A fatal mistake. But a common youthful wish. What’s important is to tap into the passion and excitement that you have when you’re young and starting out, but take advantage of your knowledge of the world and of filmmaking to put that energy across in a way that’s more mature. You know, this is a process. What’s most disconcerting about the business now is how difficult it is to learn and grow and make mistakes. I’m lucky in that all the mistakes I’ve made up to this point have happened in a very small arena and, as such, have not been held against me. Nobody considers The Underneath to be a bomb, even though it lost almost all of its money, because it didn’t cost very much and nobody expected it to make a lot of money. So I don’t get nailed the way a lot of people do. But it’s very difficult to have your head up the ass of Hollywood and keep doing what you want to do. There’s a lot of pressures, both seen and unseen, to bring you into line. It’s not for the faint of heart.

  EK: Observers tend to think of a career as something that a filmmaker sees in the future, but one doesn’t really know what that career is until much later.

  SS: Exactly. The problem is that now people see a career as being eighteen months. I was, from the beginning, thinking: I want John Huston’s career. I want a lot of movies over a long period of time. And then we’ll go back, if we want to—I don’t want to, but somebody else can—and sort it all out. . . . You need to plug in every once in a while to the thing that made you want to do it in the first place, because it’s so easy to get cut off from that. I worked very hard to keep myself separate from the parts of this business that I think are destructive, at worst, and distracting, at best.

  EK: What’s your next project?

  SS: I’m developing a film based on a TV series called Traffik that ran in Britain about ten years ago. It’s about how drugs move, how the drug business works, from beginning to end. That show was really terrific. It had four separate stories that it tracked in parallel time, and occasionally they intersected. It’s just a fascinating look at how drugs move. It seems like a ripe time to make a movie about that in this country, especially with the complexity of our relati
onship with Mexico. I want to make it like [Costa-Gavras’s] Z. I want it to be a fast-paced run-and-gun movie about how this stuff works.

  Sight Seeing: Steven Soderbergh Loosens Up

  Dennis Lim / 1998

  From Village Voice, June 7, 1998. Reprinted by permission.

  Steven Soderbergh doesn’t think much of the widely circulated theory that Out of Sight is his comeback movie. “What’s that Gloria Swanson line from Sunset Boulevard? ‘I hate that word. It’s a return!’ I guess my question would be ‘Back from what?’ I’ve been pretty busy.”

  Busy reinventing himself, to be exact. After his last studio picture, 1995’s ambitious but confused noir update The Underneath, Soderbergh retreated to his hometown of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and, guerrilla-style, knocked out a couple of no-budget films, the Spalding Gray monologue Gray’s Anatomy and Schizopolis, a brilliant and seriously unhinged psychodrama that combined baffling semiotic games with lowbrow sketch comedy (“I thought it might end up with a small, disturbed following,” he says). Not the most obvious preparation for an Elmore Leonard adaptation–George Clooney vehicle, but the director insists, “Those films really loosened me up. Schizopolis in particular taught me the value of not dissecting things ahead of time.” As faithful as it remains to the source material, Out of Sight is unmistakably Soderbergh’s movie, filled with small personalizing touches. “I guess it was self-evident to everybody that if I did it, there was no way I wasn’t going to pee on it,” he says. “It was going to have my stench no matter what. Fortunately, that’s what they wanted. Jersey Films made it clear that they had no desire to make Get Shorty 2.

  “The trick was finding that balance between not fucking it up and staying loose,” he says. “Schizopolis was the most fun I’d ever had making a movie—running around with five friends, shooting whatever the hell you want, nothing can top that—but I’d say Out of Sight was the most fun you could have making a studio movie.”

  Asked what the new film has in common with his earlier, decidedly more sober work, he replies, “At the end of the day, it’s slightly fatalistic. And thanks to Elmore Leonard, there’s a very nonreductive view of people. I like that the characters don’t change. I don’t see that happening in life very much, so I tend to be suspicious when people undergo big changes in films.”

  Famously good with actors, Soderbergh refuses to take too much credit for the revelatory lead performances in Out of Sight or for the wonderfully vivid supporting ones. “George came in knowing exactly what he needed to do. He got it right and I didn’t fuck with it. And if you look at the cast, these are people who know what they’re doing.” If Out of Sight feels like the kind of film that gets every last detail right, it has much to do with his collaborators, Soderbergh says, citing Elliot Davis’s “space- and color-conscious” cinematography and the “hilarious” score by Belfast DJ David Holmes (“I wanted a combination of Lalo Schifrin’s Dirty Harry and the first year of The Rockford Files, and David just totally got it”).

  A long-germinating Soderbergh project, an adaptation of A Confederacy of Dunces, is now back with him after a legal battle with producer Scott Rudin. He’s also about to start work on an original screenplay, “something with the narrative spine of sex, lies, and videotape, but the modus operandi of Schizopolis.”

  At the end of the interview, Soderbergh says, “Do you think people have given up trying to figure me out?” The official line, I tell him, is that he’s unpredictable and uncategorizable. “Good,” he says. “I knew if I kept going that would happen after a while.”

  The Flashback Kid

  Sheila Johnston / 1999

  From Sight and Sound, November 1999. Reprinted by permission.

  When sex, lies, and videotape won the Palme d’Or in Cannes ten years ago, before making more than $100 million worldwide (on a budget of $1.2 million), Steven Soderbergh, then twenty-six, became overnight the poster child of independent American cinema. The blockbuster event movies pioneered by George Lucas and Steven Spielberg in the mid-seventies had dominated international markets for over a decade; Soderbergh’s brilliant debut pointed to a different way forward. But then his next movies bombed: the angst-ridden Kafka (1991); King of the Hill (1993), the story of a small boy struggling to survive the Depression; the glacial film noir The Underneath (1995). Interviewed about the last, Soderbergh launched into a long, morose attack: “I’ve lost interest in the cinematic baggage you have to use to make a film palatable for a mass audience.”

  Unsurprisingly, his career went quiet. He took on a string of behind-the-scenes producing and script-writing assignments including Pleasantville and the ill-fated U.S. remake of Night Watch. Plans for Quiz Show foundered when Robert Redford hijacked the project. Soderbergh the director appeared to be all washed up: a one-hit wonder.

  In fact he had gone to ground to make Schizopolis, a no-budget, Dadaesque comedy in which Soderbergh himself plays the tragic-comic hero struggling with his sense of alienation and his failing marriage (his wife was played by the director’s own soon-to-be ex-spouse Betsy Brantley). The film’s reception at its Cannes premiere in 1996 was rather more muted than the ovation that had greeted sex, lies, with a torrent of bored and bewildered audience members diving for the exit. With his next film, Gray’s Anatomy (1996), a small-scale piece made with the monologuist Spalding Gray, Soderbergh seemed to have disappeared for good beneath the radar.

  But then in 1998 he bounced back triumphantly with an unpromising-sounding assignment as director-for-hire on an adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s novel Out of Sight, about a failed bank robber and a deputy federal marshall who can’t decide whether to arrest the charming felon or fall in love with him. Sexy, elegant, and profoundly romantic (a new departure for a director whose work has often been regarded as somewhat cerebral), it was hailed by critics as his best film since sex, lies. His return to favor continues with The Limey, which played out of competition at Cannes this year. The story of an English ex-convict (Terence Stamp) who travels to Los Angeles to investigate his daughter’s death following her involvement with a hedonistic record producer (Peter Fonda), it is on one level a straight revenge thriller with strong echoes of Get Carter, while its spaced-out feel and bravura kaleidoscopic editing make it play like a homage to the formal experimentation of sixties and seventies cinema.

  Soderbergh has been described by one U.S. interviewer, a little patronizingly if not altogether inaccurately, as a “goofy, balding, loveable geek.” But underneath that persona, thinly concealed, are a steely intelligence and formidable self-awareness. And though he has worked within an astonishing range of registers—from the avant-garde Schizopolis, through the quintessential U.S. indie sensibility of sex, lies and the arty, black-and-white, middle-European universe of Kafka, to such demi-Hollywood genre pieces as Out of Sight and The Limey—he insists adamantly on the continuity of his work.

  Sheila Johnston: You use a very complex chronological structure in The Limey—was that written into the script or created at the editing stage?

  Steven Soderbergh: I shot it that way. My whole line while we were making it was, “If we do our job right this is Get Carter as made by Alain Resnais,” which I know spells big box office! I was trying to get a sense of how your mind sifts through things and I felt I could get away with a certain amount of abstraction because the backbone of the movie is so straight. Even so, my first version was so layered and deconstructed even people who had worked on the movie didn’t understand it. So I had to start working back to find a balance, which I did through screenings for friends: writers, actors, producers, directors, a new group of guinea pigs each time. At one point Artisan [the production company] wanted a public preview. But I said, “For a movie like this it’s worthless: it’s going to score terribly and I’ll get nothing I haven’t already got by inviting intelligent, creative people to give me ideas.” A week before we were going to do it, they called and said, “You’re right, it’s a waste of money. Just finish it the way you’re going to finish it and w
e’ll figure out the rest.”

  SJ: The film’s steeped in the mood of the sixties, though you’re a little young to have had much direct experience of that counterculture.

  SS: I’ve been working for some time on a book of interviews with Richard Lester called Getting Away with It and I asked him a lot about that period. Mostly we talked about the gradual shift from optimism to disillusion. I was whining about something and then I added, “Still, has there ever been a generation that hasn’t said, ‘It’s never been this bad’?” He said, “Yeah, in the sixties.” But as soon as it became apparent that the youth movement was an ongoing economic force, it began to be co-opted into mainstream culture, and that—combined with other things like harder drugs becoming available—was when things started to shift. When Lester made two trips to San Francisco to research and shoot Petulia in 1966 and 1967 he said he could feel a very strong, dark undercurrent on the second visit that wasn’t there on the first. That’s the feeling that permeates The Limey. There’s one guy whose dreams of himself were lost in prison and another whose dreams were probably never even his own: he just took everybody else’s and made money out of them.

  SJ: How important was it to cast two icons of sixties cinema?

  SS: Both Terence Stamp and Peter Fonda have baggage that’s not only specific to the sixties but has to do with a refusal to compromise: they’ve stayed pretty true to themselves all these years. But I wasn’t trying to turn in a pastiche—though clearly when we had Peter Fonda driving in a fast vehicle up the coast, I thought, “We’ve gotta get Steppenwolf.” Terence seemed like a Who kind of guy—in fact his brother, Chris Stamp, was one of the people who discovered them.