MS: Because Out of Sight and The Limey have such stylistic confidence, it’s odd to think of them as in any way “tossed-off.” What you call relying on instinct must also mean relying on whatever craftsmanlike reflexes you’ve built up.
SS: I had the luxury of making a first film that was successful enough to afford me a lot of mistakes. The good news was I took advantage of them. By the time Out of Sight rolled around I felt pretty light on my feet and secure in my ability to work in a way that was expedient but detailed. That was my seventh film—if I was paying attention at all I should have been able to do that!
But as we both know, a lot of people aren’t paying attention. Directing has become the best entry-level job in show business. You have to keep your eye on the long term—which is why I understand what Charlie Kaufman is doing. I try to be careful about things I do and not promote myself separately apart from a film I’m talking about. I’ve never taken a possessory credit, because anything that furthers the idea of you as a brand name is risky—because people get tired of certain brands.
MS: Lester is frank about decisions he made that have sometimes been called forced and inorganic. For example, he admits that he conceived the elaborate structure of Petulia because he was afraid that if he didn’t, it might have come off as “a romantic novelette.”
SS: In point of fact, does it matter that Lester and the writers who worked on Petulia sort of deconstructed it because otherwise it would be a terrible melodrama? No. The bottom line is, that’s a great film, no matter how you cut it. Everything is working against it being a terrible melodrama, from the way it’s cast to the way the performances are pitched on the set to the way it’s composed and cut. That’s why it works—it’s because he’s cutting against the grain of what’s inherent in that material. Sometimes that’s a mistake, but in that case it certainly isn’t.
Talking with Richard Lester reminded me of how rigorous you have to be; conceptually, you have to sit down and make sure you’re wringing everything out of the material that you should be wringing out of it. What frustrated me about The Underneath was that I felt I wasn’t rigorous with it. On the one hand, maybe there should be an international cultural police force—so when someone like me says, “I want to splice an armored-car heist movie together with Antonioni’s Red Desert,” they come and stop you. But on the other hand, if you make a revisionist nonlinear noir movie, there are more places to go with it than I did in The Underneath. I was not at a time in my career when I understood that; and I was just feeling sort of dry.
MS: Out of Sight is juicy—just as ambitious stylistically, but with emotional coherence and impact. When I first saw the opening flourish of George Clooney ripping off his tie and the jacket of his suit, I was happy to accept it as an expression of anger and frustration, without knowing whether it would fit into the rest of the movie.
SS: Absolutely. But I don’t think you can be arbitrary about that stuff. In Out of Sight I knew I was going to use freeze frames and zooms and jump-cutting, but I was also trying to be very aware of the reason for each of them. For instance, intercutting Clooney and Jennifer Lopez in the cocktail lounge and the hotel room: The reason I was doing that was because I wanted to make the sense of intimacy and electricity more palpable to the audience. I thought back to that sequence in Don’t Look Now, and how those two scenes of Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie making love and getting dressed suggested an intimacy that was stronger than either of those scenes alone. As for The Limey: That is about a guy who cannot stay rooted in the present. He is completely dislocated.
MS: From the start, the cutting in The Limey conveys the play of thought and memory, but I wasn’t prepared for the cumulative effect. The whole movie hinges on a speech and a gesture that the daughter of the antihero (Terence Stamp) makes to him as a little girl and to the villain (Peter Fonda) as a woman. Via flashbacks, a woman who is dead carries the film’s emotional weight—and turns it from revenge film to tragedy.
SS: I remember the day when the screenwriter, Lem Dobbs, and I were at his house, talking about the climactic sequence and my belief that there needed to be an emotional reason for why all of this happened. We came up with the idea that when finally forced to tell his side of the story, Peter Fonda’s character would essentially repeat something that had happened to Terence Stamp’s character. And the result is not explosion but implosion.
Looking back at the movies we were riffing on, Point Blank and Get Carter, I realized that I love those movies but they’re not the most emotional experiences in the world. They’re very compelling and they’re pretty cold. And I thought that if we were going to do one of those movies, we needed to have a strong emotional undercurrent. When you see most shoot’em-up revenge movies you don’t get too emotionally invested. The combination of how we thought about it and casting Terence and finding that footage from Poor Cow helped build the quiet emotional foundation that pays off in the end.
MS: When Lester was in his prime, he would get an idea and get a writer and just go off and do it. Are you able to operate the same way? Would you want to?
SS: I don’t have a lot of stuff that I’m contemplating or attached to or developing; I try not to work more than one or two movies ahead of myself. I tend to feel differently about things when I get out the other end of a movie. For instance, there’s Erin Brockovich, which I’m finishing now. Jersey Films had spoken to me about it right after I did Out of Sight for them, and it just sounded terrible to me. But when I got out the other end of The Limey, it sounded like the perfect thing to do; it was so different from my previous two films, and so unlike anything I had made before.
MS: All I know is that it’s based on a real-life story about a woman (Julia Roberts) involved in researching a health-related lawsuit against a utility company. It sounds like A Civil Action.
SS: But it’s not about the lawsuit, it’s about her, and that’s what drew me to it. There’s one courtroom scene halfway through the film that’s two minutes long. I just found her character fascinating. And the story was so aggressively linear that it required a completely different set of disciplines than The Limey or Out of Sight. I had to be a different filmmaker to do what I thought was appropriate for telling it. There are movies where you can get away with a certain amount of standing between the screen and the audience and waving your hands. This isn’t one of them. You need an understanding of when you need to let things play and not be intrusive. At the same time, I hope you’ll absolutely recognize Erin Brockovich as something that I’ve done, because there is an aesthetic at play that relates it to films I’ve made before. And it does have a protagonist who is at odds with the surroundings; I tend to be drawn to those. Here it happens to be a lower-income woman. It was fun to make a movie where the protagonist was female and was in every scene of the film.
If you’re a certain kind of filmmaker, everything is personal, whether a movie is about yourself or not. But I think, for the most part, people who write about film have a very limited idea of what personal expression is and how it can manifest itself. As a result you often find directors being encouraged to make “personal films” when they would probably grow faster and go further if they began to look outside of themselves. That was the real turning point for me: I wasn’t interested in making films about me anymore, and my take on things. I thought, “I’ve got to get out of the house!” And I’ve had more fun and I think the work is better since that occurred to me. I’m interested in other people’s experiences—filtered through mine, obviously. I’m absolutely as connected to Erin Brockovich emotionally as I was to sex, lies. Some people just either can’t believe that, or don’t want to believe it, or just don’t understand the process. You don’t spend a year and a half on something you don’t give a shit about.
MS: There’s a great passage in the book where you ponder an American director’s alternatives: “. . . make stupid Hollywood movies? Or fake highbrow movies with people who would be as cynical about hiring me to make a ‘smart’ movie a
s others are when they hire the latest hot action director to make some blastfest?”
SS: What was bugging me was that both those possibilities were equally calculating, which I think is the enemy of good work. Now what I have managed, luckily, because Out of Sight was waved in front of me and I jumped at it, is to find a certain meeting place. As somebody once put to me, bluntly, “If you think Hollywood movies are so fucking terrible, why don’t you try to make a good one instead of bitching about it?” So I’ve been trying to carve out half-in, half-out of the mainstream ideas for genre films made with some amount of care and intelligence and humor—to see if we can get back to that period we all liked in American cinema twenty-five years ago.
Steven Soderbergh: From sex, lies, and videotape to Erin Brockovich—A Maverick Director’s Route (with Detours) to Hollywood Clout
Anne Thompson / 2000
From Premiere Magazine. December 2000. Published with permission from Premiere Magazine. Copyright © 2000, Hachette Fillipacchi Magazine, Inc.
Steven Soderbergh keeps up with the details. He likes footnotes, whether he’s reading David Foster Wallace or writing his own in his most amusing book, Getting Away with It, Or: The Further Adventures of the Luckiest Bastard You Ever Saw. He promptly answers his e-mails on his Power-Book—even now, while he’s juggling finishing the edit on Traffic, writing his adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s space classic Solaris, making notes for the sequel Son of Schizopolis, and prepping his next, Ocean’s Eleven.
It’s hard to imagine that this bespectacled egghead was once a Little League pitching ace who threw no-hitters and hit .500. (“I was in the zone,” he says.) Now he’s in an equally rarefied zone: that of Hollywood’s A-list directors. Soderbergh is three-for-three with Out of Sight, The Limey, and Erin Brockovich, whose star Julia Roberts, is heading into Oscar season as a Best Actress front-runner. Finally, the movie world is figuring out that Soderbergh is an actors’ director (“I happen to like them,” he says.) Performers from Andie MacDowell (sex, lies, and videotape) to George Clooney (Out of Sight) to Terence Stamp (The Limey) have done their best work with him. And his cachet among actors is such that his upcoming update of the Rat Pack curio Ocean’s Eleven attracted an almost unheard-of collection of A-list talent, including George Clooney (who’s also producing), Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts, Matt Damon, and Bill Murray. “His real signature is that he brings out the best in all his collaborators,” says screenwriter Howard A. Rodman (TV’s Fallen Angels, for which Soderbergh has directed an episode). “Erin Brockovich would have been a movie-of-the-week in anyone else’s hands.”
The directors he reveres range from Richard Lester (Getting Away with It features an exhaustive Q&A with the director of A Hard Day’s Night) to Jean-Luc Godard. Giant posters of such Godard rarities as Les Carabiniers and Bande á Part dominate Soderbergh’s Burbank office. “Godard is a constant source of inspiration,” he says. “Before I do anything, I go back and look at as many of his films as I can, as a reminder of what’s possible.” But the director Soderbergh probably resembles most is that master of many genres, Howard Hawks, who cannily, craftily improved just about every story he got his hands on.
Ever since Soderbergh arrived on the scene in 1989 with the $1.2 million Sundance smash and Cannes Palme d’Or winner sex, lies, and videotape (“a film about deception and lost earrings”), the writer-director has avoided letting Hollywood’s overheated praise go to his head. For one thing, he labored for years in Hollywood and in his hometown, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, as a worker-for-hire on TV game shows, music videos, documentaries, and after-school specials, honing his skills as a writer, editor, and director. He’s also intensely self-critical. He was not only willing to reveal himself in the semi-autobiographical sex, lies, and videotape and Schizopolis—the latter film starring himself, his then-wife Betsy Brantley, and their daughter, acting out their family life—but he recognizes that the artier experiments Kafka, The Underneath, and Schizopolis were less than satisfying to audiences. Yet he insists that those three features and his six short films were crucial to his own growth. “He’s an authentically gifted, idiosyncratic filmmaker,” says producer Ron Yerxa (King of the Hill). “He’s not afraid to fail. And he doesn’t kiss anyone’s ass.”
Soderbergh’s latest radical move has been to join Los Angeles Local 600 as a card-carrying cinematographer. Having operated his own camera on his shorts and on Schizopolis, Soderbergh decided to be his own cinematographer on the drug drama Traffic, his “$49 million hand-held Dogme film.” Not surprisingly, the ensemble movie—which stars Michael Douglas, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Dennis Quaid, Don Cheadle, and Benicio Del Toro—has the raw immediacy of a documentary. Soderbergh tried to get the screen credit “directed and photographed by,” but the Writers Guild wouldn’t give him a waiver to put the “photographed by” credit between the writer’s and the director’s credits, and he was unwilling to credit himself twice. So, using his late father’s first two names, he concocted the pseudonym Peter Andrews for the cinematographer. Will he also shoot the glossy studio picture Ocean’s Eleven? “I don’t think you can go back,” he says. “You feel so close to the movie when you shoot that it would be hard for me now to insert someone into that process.”
Anne Thompson: It’s difficult to find a thematic thread in your films; you’re a bit of a chameleon.
Steven Soderbergh: Good. You know, there are two kinds of flimmakers. There are filmmakers who have a style. And they look for material that fits that style. I’m the opposite. I look at the material and I go, “Okay, who do I have to be to put this across?”
AT: Many of your characters are spinning out of control and then find their way, from James Spader in sex, lies, and videotape to George Clooney in Out of Sight and Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich.
SS: Protagonists in my films tend to be at odds with their surroundings and/or the people around them. This is what I liked about Erin. She was more interesting than a fictional character. Somehow, when you’re writing fiction, it’s hard for the characters and the situation not to seem constructed. Erin was there full-blown and she drove the narrative, and you thought, “ok, now what? What is she going to do?” Because she can be as self-defeating as she can be successful. You have to work back from that and say, “What’s the best way to put her and the story across?”
AT: You brought more realism to that film than your average studio director would have. At the same time, you were working with a major star. When you looked at Roberts’s work every day, did you see what a star brings to a movie?
SS: God, yeah. She was ready to go. She was on the blocks, day one. It was a great time to get her. I’d look at dailies and understand why she was a star and why she has the career she has and that you can’t—though we do—put a price on it. Some people have it and some people don’t. She’s got it—a lot.
AT: Clooney is coming along as a producer-star. You’re working together on Ocean’s Eleven.
SS: He’s got all the tools. There’s nobody like him around his age, who has the kind of vibe that he has. He’s a man. He’s not a boy. George’s thing is, “I don’t need any more money; what I want is a legacy of movies I can look back on and feel good about.” He’s very pragmatic, smart. He knows why he makes the choices he makes, and he understands dispassionately the result.
AT: Warner Bros. sent both you and Clooney the Ocean’s Eleven script?
SS: We got sent it simultaneously without knowing that each had been sent the script. I called Warners back the next day and said, “I want to do it.” And Lorenzo [Di Bonaventura, Warners’ production chief] goes, “That’s good, because George read it and he wants to do it.”
AT: So you and George worked out the deal structure?
SS: Our whole deal was, “Remember those Irwin Allen [producer of The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno, et al.] movies with its stars—wouldn’t that be cool?” There’s only one way to do it: Come up with a formula that everybody adheres to. And the bottom line is, nobody’s getti
ng what they normally get, up-front [salary] or in the back-end [share of the revenues]. The studio said, “This is how much back-end you can have.” It’s a slice of a certain size, and we all said great. It was led by George, and Brad [Pitt] and Julia [Roberts] said, “We’re in.”
AT: The film noir The Limey was designed as a vehicle for Terence Stamp, complete with footage from his 1967 film, Poor Cow.
SS: [Writer Lem Dobbs] and I decided on him before we did any work, which was great, and so when I called him on the phone, I was very anxious because I didn’t know him. I didn’t even know anybody who knew him, or what I was in for, but I wanted him and luckily he wanted to do it. He’s a dreamboat.
AT: While the storytelling in The Limey is quite innovative, your next picture, Erin Brockovich, was a more conventional crowd-pleaser.
SS: Erin Brockovich is not the place to be standing between the audience and the movie screen, waving your arms. Coming off The Limey, I wanted to try a different discipline that was really pleasurable. I thought, “I need to let my interest in fragmented narrative go for a while,” and Erin just seemed like the perfect antidote. And then coming out of that, I was ready to do something a little harder.
AT: What attracted you to Traffic which you made at USA Films after the major studios passed?
SS: Back in ’96, I was thinking about drugs, like, what role do they have in a person’s life, and culturally, what are the reasons for the way we view them the way we do? So it was in my mind that I didn’t want to make a movie about addicts. When I found out that Laura Bickford owned the rights to the Traffik [British Channel 4 TV] miniseries, I said, “I know what to do with that.” And we started that process.
AT: Why was it so hard to set up? Stephen Gaghan’s script read like an accessible thriller, like Costa-Gavra’s Z.
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