Steven Soderbergh

by Anthony Kaufman

  EM: You talk about this elusive quality of European art films, [but] you also have the burden or maybe not the burden of having a movie star. What those movies depend on really is that audiences respond to the atmosphere rather than having the actors dictate certain things to us, don’t they?

  SS: Yeah, I think so. But in this case I felt I had an actor who I just thought was the best actor for this part. It just happened to be George Clooney, who’s a movie star, but I think that’s good because certainly from a practical stand point, it’s a big help to me if I can get someone who is great for the part and a movie star, who’s going to pull people into the theater, and I think the fact that George delivers such an extraordinary performance, such a different performance more than anything we’ve seen him attempt, I hope people will be compelled by that. It’s tricky when you use movie stars to do things they don’t normally do and certainly this is that for George. But I think it played on what he does well. He has great integrity on screen and he actually has a very active inner life on screen, which he’s never really been encouraged to develop. So I think anybody who’s a fan of George’s will be really satisfied with what he does because it’s not as though he’s sort of backhanding what he’s done before; he’s just deepening himself.

  EM: I’m thinking about the first time you worked together in Out of Sight; he seems to essentially be doing James Garner from The Rockford Files. Here, there’s so much sadness, and there’s so much that he doesn’t say, and he doesn’t communicate physically—he’s really an actor who plays a lot of stuff, leading man, physical comedy, and he doesn’t throw stuff away here; if you felt he was being too shaded, too guarded, in terms of making the part work, because it’s a fairly passive role for him.

  SS: I think in certain key moments he has to be incredibly expressive; you think about the fever dream sequence; that’s very, very difficult stuff to do: You have a character who has reason to believe they he may be, if not experiencing the actual moment of death, at least something that is completely off the chart and might be some sort of psychic break, and doesn’t know whether to be terrified or exhilarated by what he’s experiencing. That’s difficult stuff to portray with a Panavision camera twenty inches from your nose.

  EM: But he doesn’t have that moment for a long time into the movie.

  SS: I think it’s a key moment in the movie, but again I think there’s scenes in it [where] I think he’s very emotional but not to my mind sort of movie-movie emotions; they’re emotions that are very, very driven by the circumstance that he finds himself in, and I think he did a great job of giving them the sort of appropriate weight and emphasis, and not trying to turn them into moments in the way we usually see movies; the movie star gets the moment to be this or the moment to be that.

  EM: You’ve done a couple of those.

  SS: Absolutely. Oceans Eleven is built entirely out of those, and that’s what was fun about this. I don’t think George and I wouldn’t have wanted to work together again so soon had we not felt this is a different thing. It’s a different thing for both of us.

  EM: You talk about George was not your first choice for this.

  SS: I like to have a face when I’m writing a script to have an image in my mind and at the time I was thinking of someone like Daniel Day-Lewis. I thought he has the right. . . .

  EM: That protean quality of his?

  SS: Yeah, he looks like a thinker. All along I knew Gangs of New York had been in production for some time, so during the period that I was writing the script most intensely, they were shooting that film, and my sense was that this guy works once every three blue moons. I had him in mind just to keep me focused, but felt it was a long shot. And as it turned out, it didn’t even get that far you know. We determined pretty quickly that he wasn’t interested in doing anything for quite some time. So it became one of these funny situations where I think, I was interested in asking George because I felt that it was something that he could do and should do, but didn’t know quite how to say that, and I think he felt the same, but didn’t want to be in a position of coming to me and saying “Hey, why don’t you let me do it,” so he actually sat down and wrote me a letter.

  EM: In the stuff he’s done that’s been a departure he’s still essentially a man of action or at the very least a catalyst in some way and here he is not.

  SS: I think he is a catalyst in a sort of thematic way.

  EM: To the extent that there can be a catalyst here which there really isn’t one.

  SS: Well, no, because the entire film is about grappling with issues that you can argue don’t have any clear answer, so it’s difficult you know. There’s the famous quote about Steven McQueen where he says, “I don’t want to be the guy who learns, I want to be the guys that knows.” And there isn’t that character in this movie and so in that regard, you’re right. The protagonist doesn’t act in a typical fashion but he has a lot of baggage, he has a lot of baggage, all the characters do, but we’re sort of focusing on his character and he has an enormous amount of baggage and so I feel like his dilemma is the most dramatic and the most clear.

  EM: Did you return to anymore, Jean-Luc Godard, as you often do when you start to shoot?

  SS: Yeah, I watched Alphaville obviously because I was fascinated by how Godard made, to my mind, one of the most interesting science fiction films that’s ever been made without a single art department element to be found. It was all conceptual sci-fi and very successful and that gave me some ideas about how to portray the future in that I don’t really—it’s set in some indeterminate future.

  EM: It’s set in a work space, basically.

  SS: Yeah, but there are not specific products to be seen in the movie, you don’t know what city you’re in and you don’t know what year it is exactly because I felt it wasn’t really germane and I’m not really that interested in technology. I think our lives, for all the technological advances, we’re going to have the same problems and still be dealing with the same issues.

  EM: It reminded me a little bit of Tarkovsky; it’s quotidian. I mean it’s very much textural about the things people do to get through the day.

  SS: Absolutely. I find that stuff fascinating. The three shots [that] basically show him at work in the beginning of the film say everything about what he does and how he feels about what he does, and he’s done it basically by giving no personal information at all but sort of showing us in three sort of quick pops what a typical day is for him and I think you sense immediately that he’s hollowed out. This is a guy who’s just getting through and has thrown himself, for whatever reason we don’t know this yet, completely into work and yet seems disconnected somehow.

  EM: I want to ask you about what seems like something that’s been happening more specifically in your last four or five pictures, which is really sort of collapsing the narrative stuff. It’s like you’re throwing that stuff away, the structural things interest you less; you make the movies more and more about behavior.

  SS: I think so. I’m about to take a year off because I’m a little tired but I also want to reassess what I’ve been up to and I find that I am sort of less and less interested in the “typical” ideas of what constitutes a narrative and I’m more interested in how people behave because I think there’s more variation in it. There’s a wider range of possibilities for the film if you’re interested in behavior then if you’re sort of entirely driven by narrative, which tends to fall into pretty definable categories and has a set number of rules. I have some ideas for some films when I come back from my little vacation that really push further in that direction that would be called “less realistic” but to my mind, strangely enough, they’re more realistic; they seem to me more life-like.

  EM: In taking to Tarkovsky, kind of an examplar of this, I don’t want to use the word languorous, but when I saw this movie, I thought a little bit about Last Year at Marienbad just walking into one sort of temple after another and having these things happen.

  SS: [Alain] Resnais, a
s you know, has always been a big influence on me and I think that as I was preparing I thought many, many times of Last Year at Marienbad and Hiroshima Mon Amour.

  EM: Especially the two of them together. . . . I think we should say we’re talking about George Clooney and his wife or who may not be his wife in the movie. I don’t want to give too much away. [But] let’s have a minute and tell the audience what the movie is about.

  SS: What is the movie about? I can tell you what happens in the movie because that really doesn’t tell you what it’s about. George Clooney plays a psychologist who has a prior professional and personal relationship with a crew member on a space station orbiting Solaris that seems to be experiencing some difficulty. And he goes to investigate what’s happening on this ship and comes to find that apparently, from what they can gather, Solaris is able to generate living beings out of everyone’s subconscious and that this happens every night when they go to sleep.

  EM: Not only living beings, but also these sorts of beings that come in from fairly traumatic points in their most recent history.

  SS: Yeah, and this presents Clooney’s character with a bit of a dilemma. He had a wife who committed suicide under what I guess you could call questionable circumstances and that he feels culpable for her actions. And then there’s this other dilemma which comes up which is the subjectivity of our existence. You know, my experience of what you and I are doing right now is very different from yours.

  EM: It would have to be.

  SS: I would hope so. And so here he is faced with someone who appears to be his wife and yet has been conjured out of his subconscious and therefore, in theory, conforms to his ideas of what happened, his memory of her, and she’s aware of the fact that she’s been manifested from his subconscious and sort of calls him on this idea of “maybe you’ve got it wrong. Maybe . . . maybe you’re remembering wrong.” And so, what do I do about that? How do I retain my own sense of sense of self when I am having to deal with the fact that your memory is, you know, logically distorted and tilted toward your version of things. And so if I’m feeling a certain way right now because you remember me feeling that way it may be wrong. You may be wrong. That combined with the fact that she’s not a human being, although she feels and acts like a human being makes for a great love story.

  And, you know, Marienbad is a film in which basically a guy goes: Don’t you remember this thing happened last year between the two of us? Don’t you remember? And it’d hard to determine within the film whether she does remember and she’s just in denial or whether she doesn’t remember. Of course, if that played out today within five minutes this guy would be arrested for sexual harassment. So it’s kind of funny to watch this film now, this guy stalking this beautiful woman through this incredible landscape.

  EM: Let’s take a look back at what that Tarkovsky movie was and look at the book. You make a big change in the last third of your movie, compared to Tarkovsky’s, but also in terms of the novel because it really is about this sort of trying to push through this weight that doesn’t exist in that material.

  SS: Right. It was kind of based on an article I was reading while I was writing the script, in which some scientists were suggesting that thought, actual thought, can exist separately from consciousness. That they had done these studies of people who had been dead for seven and eight minutes, no brain activity, and yet apparently there was still thought going on even though they were technically dead. So they thought this was curious. They didn’t know what it meant, but it suggested to me that we may go into this sort of perpetual dream state in which we’re not even really aware that we’re dead. Which is part of the reason I liked Richard Linklater’s movie Waking Life so much was that I felt it was an entire movie built out of that idea. My theory was that the Wiley Wiggins character was dead and this was all part of this permanent dream state that you go into.

  EM: It’s weird too because it’s all about trying to capture a couple of last minutes, which is what Solaris is about, too. There’s an existential beat in the last few movies, even at the end of Ocean’s Eleven, which, tell me if I’m wrong, reminded me of the ending of The Underneath. And that’s the same beat at the end of Traffic, it’s sort of almost the same beat at the end of Erin Brokovich, it’s certainly the same beat at the end of Out of Sight, there’s this almost circular . . .

  SS: Yeah, absolutely. I’m big on circles, and loops within loops. There are a lot of them within Solaris, actually. If you look very closely, we come back to the beginning of the film actually near the end of the film. I think it doesn’t really matter if you understand that or not but in point of fact, him on the bed in his apartment and sitting on the edge of his bed near the end of the film brings us to those same images that begin the film. And I always viewed, in that regard, the whole film as a flashback from that moment of him sitting on the bed, and he hears his wife’s voice. But the film’s also about the fact that if you’re going to love someone in any meaningful way, then you have to acknowledge that there is going to be a significant loss for one of you at some point. Because none of us gets out of here intact, and somebody’s going to go first, and if you’ve really committed yourself, and opened yourself up, and surrendered to loving someone, then you’re going to face a point [where] one of you will face this loss, and I think that’s fair in a way. I think you can’t have one without the other, and that’s ok, that’s what we’ve got. And that being here beats not being here. But I think when it happens the way it happens in the movie, and I think a lot of people have experienced this, which is somebody being lost prematurely, somebody being lost without an opportunity to say goodbye.

  EM: Getting back to the circular thing: Is one of the reasons you want to take some time off because you feel like you want to separate from that a little bit just so that you can look at what you’ve been doing, if there are patterns a little bit?

  SS: I don’t know, I want to change the way I work a little bit, or I want to change the work a bit. I want to step up a little more.

  EM: Step up how?

  SS: I just don’t feel like I’m taking the kind of risks, or big risks that really great . . .

  EM: This seems like a big risk though, or a departure.

  SS: Does it?

  EM: Is there a difference for you between a departure and a risk?

  SS: I think so. I mean you can make a departure, you can make a film that’s not like any film that you did before . . .

  EM: Define something you did that’s a risk. What’s something you would think of that’s a risk? Would it be Kafka? Would it be Schizopolis?

  SS: That’s what I mean. I feel like those have all been pretty calculated risks, and I think Solaris is a calculated risk. I feel like it’s an unusual movie, not like the typical studio film that you would see. But I don’t think it’s an obscure movie. I think people can go and I think emotionally it’s pretty clear. When I think of making something risky, I mean something that really could either be memorable or be could be a complete folly. I think of the great filmmakers that I’ve admired over the years took big risks. I mean really did things that a lot of people conceptually would look at and say, “You can’t do that, you’re not allowed to do that.” That’s interesting to me.

  Steven Soderbergh: “Everything Is the Director’s Fault”

  Scott Indrisek / 2006

  From The Believer, August 2006. Reprinted by permission.

  Steven Soderbergh’s Manhattan studio is littered with decapitated doll heads—souvenirs from Bubble, his most recent feature film, which was shot digitally and released simultaneously in theaters and on DVD, causing an uproar among studio executives fearful of losing their grip on the industry. Also in Soderbergh’s studio are an in-progress painting of onetime James Bond incarnation George Lazenby and a massive magazine collage composed of celebrity faces and bodies that Soderbergh has carefully excised from gossip magazines. The objects illustrate Soderbergh’s predilection for the perverse, his enduring obsession with cinema from the
1960s and 1970s, and the way he’s elicited staggering performances from actors like George Clooney, Julia Roberts, and Brad Pitt by lifting them out of their Hollywood context, but it does beg the question: how does the man who single-handedly reinvigorated independent cinema in the 1990s with sex, lies, and videotape manage simultaneously to edit his latest feature The Good German, plan a sweeping Che Guevara biopic, and crouch on the floor of his studio, meticulously slicing images of Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston out of Us Weekly with an X-Acto blade? The answer, of course, is that behind Steven Soderbergh’s modest, bald, bespectacled facade lies an individual bursting at the seams with a staggering surfeit of talent, vision, and motivation. His Schizopolis—a cult favorite released in 1996 about a speechwriter for a self-help organization, his wife, a dentist, and a seductive exterminator—could serve as a metaphor for his entire career: unpredictable, offbeat, and obsessed with sampling and mixing disparate genres, be it a tense political drama like Traffic or the Ocean’s 11/12 franchise’s celebration of wry A-list criminals.

  This interview began with an email exchange in which Soderbergh outlined the various topics he’d be most interested in talking about. The short list included pornography, Chris Rock, how the Olympics relates to the killer instinct, and the cost of panda bears as compared to the cost of getting off (in the legal sense). We met twice, on America’s most important holidays—Valentine’s Day and President’s Day—for a free-form chat that ended up spanning several hours and generating a short film (see Wholphin No. 2, available at wholphindvd.com).