Steven Soderbergh

by Anthony Kaufman

  MH: One of the main sets, the one in which the fate of the protagonists is sealed, is an abandoned movie theater. Is this not a confirmation that this story is filtered through all the films we could have seen in the postwar era, documentaries or fiction?

  SS: I screened many films of that time, but I do not know if I should come back to this topic since American criticism had a fixation about it. Maybe I spoke too much about Michael Curtiz and Warner movies of the forties. They were not my only references. And I had no intention of copying them. For me, it was only a starting point. Because the film is a compendium of all the films noirs, all the studio films, all the black and white films I’ve ever seen! Now I regret having mentioned Curtiz. If you start to compare the film to Casablanca or Mildred Pierce, it cannot be to our advantage. I should have shut up!

  MH: Hollywood filmmakers who addressed this subject at the time were expats: Jacques Tourneur of Berlin Express, Billy Wilder’s Foreign Affair, Douglas Sirk’s A Time to Love and a Time to Die. They wanted to capture the documentary reality of a devastated city. For you, on the contrary, it is myth that interested you, a myth perpetuated by the films in question.

  SS: Art cannot be factual, period. I’ve never felt compelled to be realistic. The irony is that the problem will resurface on the two films that I will dedicate to Che Guevara. The questions remain the same: What is real? Where is the truth?

  MH: Cate Blanchett’s Lena is not Alida Valli in The Third Man. You were more interested in the influence of corruption rather than the romantic plot of the story?

  SS: The Lena in the novel was a tragic figure, but more traditional, more romantic. For Paul and me, the most important decision was to make her both a victim and a monster. In the book, there were two characters like this, but it was not Lena who denounced the refugees to the Gestapo, it was the other character. Paul and I decided to merge them. To make a monster of a woman who is half Jewish and beleaguered in Berlin in 1945 was quite disturbing to some viewers, but that was the whole point of the film. We could never have done this in 1945. But I wonder if the taboo does not continue to exist sixty years later. But what fascinates me about the period is that there must have been men and women like her. All the victims were not saints or heroes.

  MH: None of the characters is endowed with a moral compass. There is no objective or innocent character that can counterbalance the general feeling of duplicity.

  SS: They are all compromised. Nobody can claim to have moral superiority. The choices facing each character can only be bad ones. They all involve compromises. I do not, however, see this as anti-American. This corruption is the inevitable by-product of postwar society. The immunity granted to Nazi scientists is the most obvious example. I was fascinated by a documentary on the subject, which I saw on PBS a few years ago. There was an interview of a man who had worked as a slave in the underground factories of Wernher von Braun. He told how von Braun could see from the window of his office the gallows where his victims were hung. He could not understand that, in the sixties, Congress had awarded a medal of honor to an executioner. This story had really struck me. When I approached Warner Bros., I warned them that this would be the first American film on the war from which the viewer would emerge depressed! Where we would not make sacrifices to the myth of the “last good war.” Where you would see the flip side of the coin.

  MH: Although the film deals with the past rather than the future, one cannot help thinking about Solaris. Like Kelvin the astronaut, Jake lives in an unreal world. He imagines reviving his romance with Lena, although he no longer knows anything about her.

  SS: I’m attracted to characters that believe they can change the world through willpower alone. And make the world conform to their desires. I realized making this movie that this has always been my motivation for making films. The three protagonists see only what they want to see. They are so obsessive, and their environment is so malleable, they have, for a moment, the illusion of controlling it. But they are doomed from the start. It is a frustration that I feel myself strongly in life, the frustration that all is not as I would like it to be. Making movies is a great outlet for the desire for control.

  MH: Is Lena not an incarnation of defeated Germany, seeking redemption?

  SS: And she goes about it in a strange way! This project made me think a lot about the difference between helping people and saving them. Tully, for example, has a more realistic vision of the world than Jake. He tries to help Lena, while Jake tries to save her. They’re both wrong. That’s the whole difference. Both of them underestimate her, they do not see her as she is, even though she incessantly tells them. One of my favorite exchanges is the second scene in the jeep, the one where Tully takes Jake to Potsdam. Jake predicts everything that will happen in the film. He states it very clearly: “Your Fraulein knew exactly what was happening. Did she even lift a finger?” He guessed it all, everything he says is right. But everything evaporates as soon as he meets up with Lena! This kind of blindness fascinates me.

  MH: In your work, every other film is experimental. Doesn’t The Good German fall into this category? Despite the presence of George Clooney, it’s closer to Schizopolis, Full Frontal, and Bubble than Erin Brockovich or Ocean’s Eleven.

  SS: Indeed. Which is not trivial when we have stars and we refer, at least in part, to classic movies! At first, the public believes that it will be a normal movie, but things turn out differently.

  MH: Isn’t it the extreme stylization of the film that bothered people? You remind us constantly that we are at the movies.

  SS: There is a deliberate tension between glamour and poison. A constant struggle between beauty and decay, between outside and inside. I thought this conflict would fascinate the public. But I’ve come to believe that the public does not like to be reminded that it is a movie. This resistance is not new. Godard was confronted with it many times when he tried to remind us as viewers, of our role as spectators, placed in front of an artificial object.

  MH: Wasn’t Full Frontal dismissed for the same reasons?

  SS: And how! It is possible that this dialectic only concerns filmmakers themselves. After all, all the spectators want to do is lose themselves in the film. Maybe autosymbolism isn’t such a good idea. For me it was the best approach to such a material, but I have to admit that it creates a distancing effect that leaves some viewers cold. The first sequence in the jeep is a good example. I realized it during the screenings. There are those who find it intriguing and play the game, and those who find it fake and no longer want to play the game. What can I do? I can only hope that the film will be better received in ten years.

  MH: Are you capable of cutting the umbilical cord?

  SS: What happens to my completed films depends on social questions. I invest in the process, not in the results. I don’t fall apart if the film doesn’t get good reviews. The pleasure I get from shooting is enough for me. My only concern, if the film ends up being a commercial failure, is that it will be harder for all of us to finance a project that’s out of the ordinary. But I can’t complain. There’s no better job in the world.

  MH: Let’s go back to Bubble. It is a crime story, but you do not see the crime. An America story, but it could happen anywhere. A slice of life, but the lighting suggests a series of still lifes. The film does not answer any of the questions it raises.

  SS: The initial idea that the writer [Coleman Hough] and I began with was a triangle. Then we thought of individuals who would work in an assembly line. She suggested a doll factory, and I loved the idea. There are only three left in the United States, including two in the city in question. We went there, we interviewed people on site and we incorporated their stories in the characters’ storylines. The style was set when I decided to take advantage of high definition video. Since there are no perforations, the image is absolutely still. I decided not to move the camera, except for panoramic shots. To be as visually economical as possible, and composing the shots meticulously. I thought constantly about Antonioni.
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  MH: The protagonist is haloed twice by a mystical light. Before and after the crime. Isn’t that a reference to Buñuel?

  SS: Like the mysterious bells in the carriage in Belle de Jour! It’s the idea that all things have many facets. As in The Good German. When you see a character like Martha lit this way, you think she has found a refuge, a place of peace. But nothing is ever that simple. Everything is double-edged, including the church which, under certain circumstances, can become its opposite. Especially when Martha is filled with anger aroused by the presence of her rival with the young employee. For me, this blue ray oscillates between the two extremes of the spectrum.

  MH: You baffle the public by questioning the foundations of realism. In addition, each of your movies expands or blurs the boundaries of the genre it seems to belong to.

  SS: Most people want a movie to have one idea, and for it to belong to one style. My most popular films fall into this category. But the Ocean films have been a good laboratory because I can afford to play, experiment, in a way that would be inappropriate in any other genre. Above all, these films rely on zooming. An obsolete process, or at least considered retro, one that serious movies avoid. There is also the opportunity to make long takes, sequence shots, complex camera movements. We can get away with anything because they’re comedies and use stars. The spectators accept everything with a smile because they’re watching Brad, George, and Matt. I take advantage of it as much as I can. You’ll see it in the third one we’re putting together [Ocean’s Thirteen]. This should be the last in the series. Where could I ever find another melting pot of culture like this? I’m trying to develop a musical that will be pretty wild if I can film it the way I want to. I’m a fan of Ken Russell, his extravagances, and the risks he dared to take.

  MH: Your project on Che Guevara demonstrates once again your versatility.

  SS: Che is a historical character that I don’t always agree with. But he’s the prototype of the individual who is trying to change the world single-handedly. This is one of the reasons why I thought of making two films in one go. The first concerns Cuba, the second New York and Bolivia. We cannot understand Che’s ambitions for Bolivia unless we see Cuba, where the revolution had triumphed. What he lacked in Bolivia was an indigenous leader who had the charisma of a Castro. The prospect of shooting in the jungle for four months excites me a lot. But it will not be Apocalypse Now because we don’t have enough money for that. Visually, I would like these to be very austere, very primitive, like silent films. To be unvarnished and blunt.

  What is the purpose of movies? This is a question I’ve been wrestling with a lot lately. Today, only the privileged are likely to go see a movie that depresses them, or would consider making a film that is depressing. You could argue that someone in my position should do only comedies. What right do I have to make a movie that leaves people depressed? When I spoke to the actors in Bubble, they told me they only wanted to see films that made them happy. Erin Brockovich was one of Debbie’s [Dobereiner] favorite films. It is a drama, but you come out uplifted. On the other hand, as an artist, we must have the freedom to paint all aspects of the human condition.

  MH: Would you have been comfortable in the studio system?

  SS: Totally. I would have loved to work here [at Warner Bros.] in the forites. Make two films a year, tackling different genres, have the best technicians, the best writers, the best actors. But once the system collapsed, directors like Curtiz were lost; they were not used to developing and completing a project by themselves. For my part, I am lucky because I am comfortable in and out of the system. I like to fill an order, but I also like to initiate my own projects. I follow both paths simultaneously. What I like in the Ocean series is that they are odes to camaraderie and especially professionalism. Both of which are very important to me. Starting with punctuality. Our motto here is: “If you’re on time, you’re late.” The other day, our production designer arrived ten minutes before our meeting. We were already there, and he told us we were crazy! I must have inherited this from my father who was obsessive on this point. It’s a sin not to respect your craft. Nothing makes me angrier. Truffaut was right. Whether you love or hate making films, your passion has to be visible. There are filmmakers whose movies I don’t all like, but if I feel their sincerity, it doesn’t matter. The day I don’t feel that passion any more, I’ll stop and give my spot to someone younger.

  Guerrilla Filmmaking on an Epic Scale

  Amy Taubin / 2008

  From Film Comment, September/October 2008. Reprinted by permission.

  Many movies take the form of a hall of mirrors, where narrative is reflected in the filmmaking process and vice versa. Few, however, accomplish this with the dedication, clarity, and brio of Steven Soderbergh’s fraternal twins, The Argentine and Guerrilla (bundled under the shorthand title, Che). In the press conference following Che’s Cannes premiere, Soderbergh remarked that what most fascinated him about the Latin American militant was his will. Although revolution, as Mao chided, “is not a dinner party, not an essay, nor a painting” and, despite the heady sentiments of ’68, not a film either, Soderbergh’s own will—to shape every aspect of this project from conception to release—is palpable in Che, the film that places him in the ranks of the masters.

  At Cannes, where responses ranged from “a triumph” to “a disaster”—which coincidentally describes the respective trajectories of Ernesto “Che” Guevara in Cuba as depicted in The Argentine and in Bolivia as depicted in Guerrilla—the only near consensus was that Che would never again be seen in the version that was shown at the festival, a version that many believed was a rough draft. “No doubt it will be back to the drawing board for Che,” brayed Variety, where prognostication about box-office performance colors every paragraph of critical evaluation. As far as this viewer was concerned, I was almost certain, however, that what was screened at Cannes was 98 percent finished. Bearing in mind that Kubrick famously went into projection booths and clipped bits out of his films even after they were in release, it was a given that Soderbergh would do some tinkering; digital postproduction makes the temptation irresistible. The more serious worry was that in the U.S., the full four-hour-plus version would prove as elusive as Vertigo after Hitchcock withdrew it from distribution.

  Not so. The Argentine and Guerrilla will premiere in North America at the Toronto Film Festival and then play in the New York Film Festival, showing, as in Cannes, back to back with a short intermission. According to Soderbergh this “road-show” version will open for limited one-week engagements in some twenty cities at the end of the year—a year that marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Cuban revolution and the eightieth anniversary of Guevara’s birth. “I think, for hardcore people who have a day to throw away, it’s the fun way to see it because all the call and response is right there,” he says. The two films will then be split up. In the foreign territories where Che was pre-sold (the pre-sales covering $54 million of the $58 million budget) there are, to Soderbergh’s knowledge, no plans to show the two films together. Given that Che is already nearly paid for, the movie only needs to do enough business in the U.S. to cover the cost of prints and advertising. “The definition of what is financial success for us in this country may not be good enough for people who write about movies,” the director said with barely detectable irony, “but if this movie does $5 million and then sells a couple hundred thousand units on DVD, we’ll be very happy with those numbers.”

  Writing about Soderbergh in Filmmaker in 2002, I argued that the structuring principle underlying his films is contradiction, not in the Marxist political sense but as an aesthetic according to which an object is defined by what it is not. Contradiction determines the shape not only of Soderbergh’s individual films but also the relationship of one to another. The sexy, extroverted Out of Sight (’98) and the melancholy, introspective The Limey (’99), for example, are more dazzling as a pop art couple than either is on its own. What Soderbergh terms “the call and response” relation between T
he Argentine and Guerrilla is intrinsic to their form and meaning. The Argentine depicts the 1956–58 campaign in Cuba’s Sierra Maestra and ends in glory with Che and Fidel en route to Havana. Guerrilla follows Che’s disastrous attempt to repeat the Cuban strategy in Bolivia in order to spearhead a revolution throughout Latin America. Largely based on two books written by Che, Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War and Bolivian Diary, The Argentine and Guerrilla are action films, couched from the perspective of the man who was at the center of the action—who experienced the physical agony and the adrenaline rush of guerrilla warfare (heightened because he was asthmatic) and who, because he was a military strategist fighting for a political cause and ideology he articulated with great brilliance, also saw himself and his situation from the outside. The character of Che Guevara (embodied by Benicio Del Toro with intelligence and an unflagging conviction) gives rise to the push/pull experience of both films, the sense that one is both immersed and distanced.

  “It was something I couldn’t say no to, which is different from saying yes,” Soderbergh remarks about Che. “I can’t sit here and say I wanted to do it. I only knew I had to do it.” Soderbergh, Del Toro, and producer Laura Bickford began talking about a Che movie when they were shooting Traffic in 1999. When Del Toro and Bickford discovered that Terrence Malick had been in Bolivia as a journalist in 1966 working on a story about Che, they asked him to write a script. Malick’s involvement with the material was intense, and Soderbergh thought he should direct it as well: “I said to him the list of people that I’d be willing to step aside for to see their version as opposed to mine is pretty short, but you’re at the top of it.”

  At that point, the film was entirely about Che’s 1966–67 Bolivian campaign. After about a year and a half, the financing and the timetable hadn’t entirely come together, and Malick left to do The New World. Fearing that their multi-territory deals would fall apart, Bickford and Del Toro asked Soderbergh to come back on as director. He agreed, although he had begun to feel that there was a problem with focusing just on Bolivia: “Although I love movies about quixotic journeys, there was no context.” A new script was generated with multiple interwoven time-lines: Bolivia, Cuba, New York, Mexico City.