Steven Soderbergh

by Anthony Kaufman

  SS: You’re stoned! Oh, it’s compelling, but it was hard for me to describe what it was like and who the audience was going to be. I was hard-pressed to come up with a drug movie that had made money. And it’s long: two hours and twenty minutes. Most people haven’t seen Z, which was the model we were using. It’s not an unreasonable thing for someone who is spending $49 million to ask, “Can you give me a taste of what’s in store?” So I talked about things like The French Connection.

  AT: Harrison Ford was originally slated to play Traffic’s role of the drug czar whose daughter is hooked on drugs; he then stepped out, and the role was taken by Michael Douglas. What happened?

  SS: This was something very different for [Ford]. I talked about how I’d like to work with our run-and-gun approach, that in addition to operating [the camera] I would be the director of photography and there would be a lot of available light and it would be moving really quickly. And with two cameras, he would spend more of his day acting than any other movie he’d been on. He seemed very jazzed by that. But I also knew that this was not a slam dunk. He never said, “I’m in and I’m doing it.” While this process was going on—and the deal by which he would take $10 million, half his usual price, which he was totally open to, was being conceptualized—we fixed Robert [the character Ford was to play] and found a way to make him the emotional center of the movie. And [then] he said, “I don’t feel like this is what I want to do right now.” I wished it were otherwise, but I’m a big believer in instinct. If something’s holding him, do you want an actor on the set who doesn’t want to be there?

  [For his part] Michael Douglas really enjoyed being able to spend most of his day working instead of waiting. There were a couple of key emotional scenes where we were moving so quickly that it enabled him to stay right there, and there would be a break of two minutes between one angle and the next. I was really impressed, performance-wise, at how readily he fell into the low-key, naturalistic approach that I was trying to maintain. It’s not a movie-star performance. It’s a very secure performance, and it comes from someone who doesn’t have to show off anymore.

  AT: You shot this movie yourself mostly, using a handheld camera, which must have been logistically complex, given that the picture has no principal roles and was filmed in nine cities. Why do this project that way?

  SS: I’d been refining the idea of doing a run-and-gun movie over the last couple of films, trying to make things more naturalistic, and this seemed to be the one to do it on, because of the subject matter, the size, and the short schedule. Shooting this way helped us to be able to get it done in fifty-four days, [with] what started as a 165-page screenplay. And the momentum was maintained from beginning to end, which is great for the actors.

  [As for doing the cinematography myself], it was a natural progression. I was trained as a still photographer. I shot my short films, and Schizopolis. I watched the [cinematographers] whom I worked with very closely—too closely, probably, for them. It’s very comfortable for me.

  AT: You easily could have filmed it as a more glossy, conventional thriller, with a boom-boom pace and music pumping. Your way is more daring.

  SS: The riskier thing would be to do it the other way. What you’re selling is that we’re giving you a snapshot of what’s going on right now, and if it doesn’t feel like that, then the people are going to check out. Any attempt to gloss it up would be rejected, whether consciously or subconsciously. The intent of the film didn’t line up with that sort of traditional Hollywood film approach.

  AT: Are moviegoers tired of the same old formulas?

  SS: They’re tired of all the same movies that feel like they were directed from the back of a limousine. I know I am.

  AT: Is that the reason so many filmmakers, such as yourself or even a more traditional Hollywood filmmaker, like Joel Schumacher, are becoming interested in the ultra-realistic Dogme-style moviemaking philosophy?

  SS: It’s used in an attempt to get at something that feels emotionally honest and immediate. There are similar things happening in writing right now. I’m intrigued by what Dave Eggers [A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius] and David Foster Wallace [Infinite Fest, Brief Interviews with Hideout Men] are up to because it’s in service of trying to get at an emotion. Eggers’s book wouldn’t be as powerful if it weren’t so deconstructed. For the first time since I can remember, somebody has written a book in that format that is actually moving. And Wallace is after the same thing. It’s going on quietly, but I think it’s a huge thing. In movies, the formal choice has to be appropriate to the material. I’m trying to sort out now how much of that feeling I can bring to a movie like Ocean’s Eleven, which is very stylized. You derive a certain pleasure from the artificiality of watching a big caper movie with a bunch of movie stars. And I need to be careful not to subvert it needlessly and piss the audience off, because they want to be entertained. [But by the same token] you have to resist the impulse that when you have a movie of a certain size with certain people in it, you must execute it in a way that is consistent with how those movies are normally done. If I have Michael Douglas, then I have to do it a certain way, because that’s what people will want—I don’t think that’s true. I think if you do something that is consistent with the intent of the material, people will go in whatever direction you want.

  AT: Sometimes too much realism can be a problem, as was the case with Clooney and Jennifer Lopez’s infamous trunk scene in Out of Sight as you originally shot it.

  SS: With everybody encouraged to be auteurs, [directors] tend to not talk about the importance of people like [Out of Sight producers] Jersey [Films]. I was bouncing everything off these people, I got notes from them. My idea was that by shooting this lengthy scene in a single take, the sense of emotional proximity would be increased. You were sharing their experience exactly—you were in there with them for the same amount of time as they were. And then it would be great to watch the emotional ebb-and-flow of the scene uninterrupted. The Jersey people knew I was wrong. They would just smile. So a day and half, forty-five takes later, you watch it in dailies, and as a self-contained shot, it works. It’s like a short film. My belief is that the period between when you know you’re going to get together with somebody and when you actually get together is the most electric—we know it’s going to happen, and then we have to wait for it to happen. I was trying to elongate that for as long as I could. And I had two performers who understood that. It was only when I watched it in context with the rest of the movie that I realized how wrong I was. It was so obvious when I had our first preview. It was comical how the audience literally turned on the movie at that point. It just ground the film to a halt. What I should have understood is that every time you cut away and came back, you bought so much, because the audience filled in the gap for you.

  AT: After sex, lies, and videotape, Hollywood anointed you the next big thing. Robert Redford and Sydney Pollack asked for meetings. But you followed sex, lies, with Kafka, an $11 million art film!

  SS: That was all calculated. I wanted to try a lot of different stuff, ’cause when you start out, you feel like, “I can do anything.” It takes you a while to realize, “No, you can’t do anything. In fact, here are the things you do well, and here are the things you don’t do well.” [As far as Kafka is concerned], I don’t do well with material that is inherently cold. The experience of it I wouldn’t trade for anything: I got to work with Alec Guinness and Jeremy Irons, and Prague was amazing. Going from Kafka, to King of the Hill was a result of my wanting to have the experience of making a picture that was a little warmer.

  I’m good at finding a piece—whether it’s Out of Sight which is a melodrama, or a star-crossed romance—and finding a way to make that story satisfying for an audience, so that they don’t feel like they’re getting hit in the forehead with the points that you’re trying to make. I’m a good neutralizer for material that could very easily tip over into being just obvious or irritating or pedestrian. You come up and you realize, “Ok
ay, I’m not Fellini. [Laughs] I’m not one of those people who come along and alter the landscape.”

  AT: But you did—sex, lies, and videotape actually altered the indie-film landscape.

  SS: Because sex, lies, and videotape made a lot of money at a time when films like that were not making any money; that’s why we’re talking about it today. If it had made half a million dollars, things would be very different right now for me. [Laughs] That movie bought me so many mistakes. It bought me the luxury of being able to make King of the Hill and Kafka.

  AT: In the case of The Underneath, a little-seen caper film you made in 1995, you thought it was a disaster even as you were making it.

  SS: I knew it before we started. But I want to be very careful here not to denigrate the efforts of everybody who worked on that movie. Nobody knew that while I was making it, I was miserable, and that I felt it was a broken-backed idea to begin with and that I had not been rigorous with the material and I had not come up with a way to make it distinctive. I disconnected so far from the excitement that made me want to make movies. It took sitting on a set and wondering if I wanted to be on a set anymore to shake me awake. And so in many ways, it was the most important film that I made.

  I woke up one day and said, “If you feel you’ve lost yourself, then you need to retrace your steps.” And so I literally went about recreating the conditions in which I made my early short films. I thought, “I’m gonna go back home, get five people together”—four of them were the ones I grew up with, making films—“and I’m going to start over.” And we made Schizopolis. It was like my second first film. I think everything since then has been much more fun to sit through.

  I was a baseball pitcher as a kid, and I was really good, and then I woke up one morning. I was twelve, at my peak, and I didn’t have it anymore, whatever that thing is that makes you know that you’re better than the other guy. I still had the technical skills, but that thing was gone. It was an overnight thing—the next game I played, I got hammered, and I never recovered. I knew when I woke up that morning when I was a kid—I knew that it was over, that I didn’t have it. When I had that experience while making The Underneath, the feeling was different—because I understood that I could get it back.

  Having Your Way with Hollywood, or the Further Adventures of Steven Soderbergh

  Dennis Lim / 2000

  From Village Voice, January 9, 2000. Reprinted by permission

  Alternately credited and blamed for single-handedly inventing the American independent film as we know it (with a little help from Miramax, Sundance, and the Palme d’Or), Steven Soderbergh spent the nineties distancing himself from sex, lies, and videotape. Or rather, from the catchall icon, deathless tabloid headline, and generational albatross that his precocious first feature soon became. He embarked instead on a quietly prolific career notable for its chameleonic about-turns and willful resistance to anything that might be regarded as repetition. In 2000, with the calm resolve and authority that has bolstered his recent work, Soderbergh once again stared down Hollywood, and this time emerged triumphant.

  It’s not just that he had two high-profile studio features in a calendar year (right now there’s comparatively little fuss over Robert Zemeckis’s What Lies Beneath and Cast Away), but that they both rank among the five or so most widely lauded Hollywood releases of 2000. The Julia Roberts vehicle-cum-crusading Norma Rae inspirational Erin Brockovich has grossed $125 million domestically (his biggest commercial success to date). Released last week to rapturous reviews, Traffic, an ambitious, tough-minded panorama of the disastrous War on Drugs, has been scooping up critics’ prizes by the armful. It’s likely that both movies will wind up on the Oscar shortlist next month; Soderbergh, for that matter, could be the first filmmaker to battle himself for directing honors since Michael Curtiz was nominated for Angels with Dirty Faces and Four Daughters in 1938.

  In more concrete terms, Traffic is Soderbergh’s fourth film in three years, and it caps a prodigious winning streak that began with the neo-noir smolder of 1998’s Elmore Leonard caper Out of Sight, perhaps the sexiest Hollywood movie of the nineties, and continued with the following year’s splintered reverie The Limey, which ingeniously enlisted Terence Stamp’s still-magnificent visage to transfigure a vigilante thriller into a memory-saturated lament. The most gifted and fleet-footed genre deconstructionist of his generation, Soderbergh is also one of the very few American filmmakers working today who sees reinvention as the lifeblood of his craft. After years of apparently perverse career choices, the payoff—it’s now evident—is considerable: Soderbergh straddles Hollywood and the indies with remarkable ease and on his own idiosyncratic terms, not least because his résumé implicitly rebuffs the lazy habits and restrictive conventions of both spheres. In the ultimate irony, this onetime wild card has, for now, reinvented himself as a sure thing, an attractive hire for studios for a host of increasingly obvious reasons: speed and economy, an uncanny track record with career-making performances (his knack for casting is matched by an unfailing generosity with actors), a newfound populism (or at least a newfound ease about his latent populism) merging profitably with his abiding restlessness and longstanding taste for quirk and foible.

  Soderbergh assesses his evolution with characteristic bluntness: “I’m no longer a control freak,” he declares. “The implementation of whatever aesthetic I choose for each film is as considered and systematic as it used to be, but I have a completely different way of doing it now. I used to be a perfectionist but it was the wrong kind of perfection. And I no longer think perfection is interesting—by definition it’s not lifelike. On the set, it’s really about refining your sense of what’s important within a scene, and within the context of the film. You train yourself to start gravitating toward it, like a metal detector, and you let the other stuff roll down your back.”

  With more than one hundred speaking parts and a relatively compressed fifty-four-day shooting schedule, Traffic presented Soderbergh with his most daunting logistical challenge to date. “In the production meetings, I’d say, ‘Look, what’s most important is energy and emotion. Just be on your toes and be ready.’“ To sustain momentum, the director shot the movie himself—a highly unusual choice for a production of its size and scale. “It’s not often you get to be a trainee in such an important position on a $46 million movie,” as he puts it. Soderbergh, whose cinematography experience had previously been limited to microbudget projects, says he plans to continue shooting all his films from now on, big or small. “I don’t know that I could go back. Reinserting another person into the process would be awkward and frustrating.”

  Like Soderbergh’s 1995 heist movie The Underneath, Traffic adopts stylized color coordination to steer viewers through a three-part narrative. “I was trying to push to look to its extreme, in each case, which is one of the good things about being your own DP,” he says. “Occasionally my gaffer would go, ‘Steven, I just want you to know that the window is eleven stops overexposed,’ and I’d go, ‘Yeah, I know.’ That’s just stuff you don’t do if you want to get hired again, but that was also what made it fun.” The burnished-brown Mexico segments were shot through filters and with a forty-five-degree shutter to create “a stroboscopic feeling,” then digitally desaturated. In the San Diego portions (“to create an idyllic look that I thought would contrast nicely with the slimy undercurrent”) Soderbergh employed a process known as flashing: overexposing the film to white light before the negative is developed. “It was very common in the seventies, pioneered by Vilmos Zsigmond,” he explains. “It’s used to its best effect in [Hal Ashby’s] Bound for Glory, but you know, I’m not Haskell Wexler and I was fucking up a lot. It’s not a very quantifiable process—what you were seeing through the lens bore no relation to what you were going to see on film.”

  Shooting handheld and with available light where possible, Soderbergh sought to cultivate an atmosphere of loose-limbed immediacy on set: “The aesthetic, combined with the fact that I was operating the ca
mera, greatly reduced the number of things the actors had to block out.” He acknowledges a certain kinship to the Dogme school. “I went through a similar psychic break myself, where I felt like formalism was a dead end. You could polish stuff into oblivion and strangle the life out of a movie. I realize Dogme’s a gimmick, but I don’t doubt its core of sincerity.”

  Soderbergh’s immersion in the process is hardly a new development. He edited his first three features, and in fact, the role of editor seems a natural one, given his longtime fascination with narrative ellipses and time loops. But he suggests that the shift in emphasis, from postproduction to production, is instructive. “I haven’t seen the early films in a while, but I’m curious to know if I shoot differently knowing I’m not going to cut it, whether I was protecting myself, or trying to make my life easier as an editor by shooting a certain way. On Traffic, I’d shoot any fucking thing and just think, you know, we’ll sort it out later. On the early films, I’d be figuring it out in my head, like exactly how it was going to go together and I wouldn’t leave the set until I knew, and that’s a boring way to work. I’m more of a gearhead anyway. I just love camera equipment.”

  Traffic is hearty Hollywood entertainment with a social conscience (as is, to a lesser degree, Erin Brockovich), and Soderbergh, who worked closely with screenwriter Stephen Gaghan in adapting it from a British miniseries, says evenhandedness was vital. “I didn’t want to come off like we had answers. The idea that some silly filmmaker after two years could sort it out would be outrageous. But there seems to be a huge vacuum in the public debate and I guess this is one of the few times I felt a movie could actually help. The funny thing is, everybody who sees it thinks it puts their point of view across, and I was expecting exactly the opposite. We had a screening in Washington for Customs, DEA, and the Department of Justice and they all came out saying they really liked it. The following night, there was some hardcore leftie NPR/PBS screening in L.A. and some guy stands up and goes, ‘Thank you for making the first pro-legalization movie.’ Then the other night, Commissioner Safir came to a screening and said he thought it was the most accurate representation of law enforcement he’d seen in a long time. And I have, you know, stoner friends who are going, like, ‘Dude, yeah, great. . . .’”