Steven Soderbergh

by Anthony Kaufman

  “It was unreadable,” Soderbergh continues. “You couldn’t do the detail, you couldn’t get a sense of the rhythm of what their days were like. And we had a start date approaching. I said we have to stop and think about this. And two weeks later, I said it needs to be two movies. We need to break it in half, and do each movie in the way we feel is appropriate, and by the way, we’ve got to do them in Spanish. For Laura, this is interesting news. We now have two movies so all the deals have to be redone. And Peter [Buchman, the credited screenwriter for both films] and Benicio sat down and started from scratch to do Cuba.”

  The Argentine and Guerrilla were shot back-to-back beginning in July 2007 and in reverse order: Guerrilla in Spain and then The Argentine in Puerto Rico and Mexico. Soderbergh had shot the framing sequence of part one—a flash-forward to Che’s visit to New York in 1964 when he’s at the height of his rock-star glory—a year earlier. The budget was absurdly small, the schedule—thirty-nine days for each—ridiculously tight, considering that these were war movies set in rugged locations. What made it possible was Soderbergh’s maniacal work ethic (this is a director who praises his collaborators with the words “he works very fast”); the commitment of Del Toro; and a new digital camera prototype, the Red One, intended for moviemaking guerrilla-style but also capable of delivering ’scope-dimension images with the lush, satiny beauty of 35mm.

  “It was such a difficult production that whether or not what you got was up to certain standard was not even in your mind during the day,” says Soderbergh. “You had six pages to shoot and often there were ten or fifteen people in all those scenes or it was a battle sequence, and you were just hanging on by your fingernails to get through the day. But to get pushed that hard creatively is a good thing. What interested me most was the process and the physical difficulty. In the case of Cuba, these people slept outside for two years. Just being out there made you appreciate the mental and physical stamina it took to do what they did.”

  Soderbergh, who has done the camerawork (under the name Peter Andrews) for every film since Traffic, gambled that the Red One would be ready on time. “I tested the camera and felt I held the future in my hands and that it would have a gigantic effect on how we would shoot Che and how it would look. I pushed Jim Jannard [the inventor of the camera] and the Red team to get ready for us because they weren’t prepared for somebody to go shoot a movie with it last July. I refused to order film cameras, so we had no backup plan.” The Red cameras arrived two days before the start date. “In the past twelve months, the camera has gone through these great leaps. So it’s frustrating for Jannard to look at build number one on screen when they’re now on build number sixteen. But I couldn’t be happier with what I’ve got.”

  The two films diverge in style. Soderbergh conceived The Argentine as what he calls, for lack of a better term, “a Hollywood movie”—classically composed, in a widescreen ’scope aspect ratio, with the camera either fixed or moving on a dolly or a Steadicam (handheld camerawork was off-limits). Alberto Iglesias’s jagged score is a proper tension-builder and the battle of Santa Clara a tour de force of visual storytelling. (“I wanted it to feel like a throwback to a John Sturges movie—there were only a few of us, but we beat the odds and we won.”) Guerrilla, on the other hand, is formatted in 1.85:1, shot off the shoulder, and borders on a horror film.

  Both films break at least as many Hollywood codes as they obey. The first half of The Argentine is highly elliptical, leaving it to the viewer to fill in the gaps in the action. “I knew that the last act was going to be Santa Clara, and you don’t get much more narrative clarity than that. So it allowed me to be not so beholden to the traditional setup-setup-payoff structure that you get in most movies and especially in most biographies, which tend to have an inherently reductive attitude about action and reaction. I wanted to show day-to-day stuff—things that have meaning on a practical level and on an ideological level, but that, from a narrative standpoint, aren’t necessarily in support of some goal. It’s a way of showing what it might have been like to be there. It’s not just a relentless surge of movement going forward all the time.”

  Even more striking is Soderbergh’s parsimonious use of close-ups and the absence of the punched-up emotions that usually accompany them. “It never occurred to me to isolate him the way you would in a normal movie because it felt, frankly, un-Che-like. His attitude was that this is bigger than any of us individually, this is a collective effort. And therefore, to isolate him in close-ups is in ideological opposition to his entire set of principles.” The only close-ups in part one are in the New York sequences, where Che was besieged by paparazzi. “That 1964 beret is a very familiar image to people and I really wanted to key off that.” In part two, as Che’s band is encircled by the Bolivian army, Soderbergh’s camera also begins to close in. It’s tightest on Che in the moment before his death when he faces his executioner, saying, “Go ahead, shoot, do it.” “It was a conscious build. When you look at the trajectory of Bolivia, you understand that he can’t go back to Cuba. The CIA has called him the most dangerous man on the planet. At a certain point, he said, ‘We’re either going to have to win or I’m going to die here.’ But I think that really must have started to settle in at a certain point. Even if you escape, where are you going to go?”

  Soderbergh knew that he was going to take a lot of heat for leaving out the executions that Che authorized at La Cabana after Castro took power. “There are anti-Che people who would not be satisfied no matter how much barbarity we depicted. Do I think all the people who were executed were guilty? No. Do I think that they were all innocent? No. Does every regime when it feels threatened at some point act excessively? Yes. The firebombing of Japan? The dropping of a second atom bomb? I think those are excessive. I think those are on a par with the kind of thing we’re talking about. Che says in his speech to the U.N., ‘This was necessary for our survival.’ Would that have fit your definition of due process? Probably not. You could say that in a lot of trials in the United States prior to 1964, due process was something that only applied to white people.”

  In the end, Soderbergh says he focused on the campaigns in the Sierra Maestra and in Bolivia because they are circumscribed events, while Cuba after the revolution is a story that is still unfolding. “The other interesting story to tell would be about his failure in the Congo. He writes about it very eloquently and in a self-critical way. Benicio, Laura, and I talked about, if these movies were, um, hugely successful, doing an eighty-minute movie about the Congo and then showing him writing about it in his apartment in Prague. Boy, after the Congo, you really are stunned that he went off and tried what he did in Bolivia. His ability to sustain his outrage is what is remarkable to me. We all get outraged about stuff, but to sustain it to the point of putting your ass on the line to change what outrages you, to do it consistently for years and years, and to twice walk away from everything and everybody to do it, it’s not normal. And that’s the flip answer when people ask why make a movie about it: because his life is really good movie material. It’s active. The stakes are high.”

  Soderbergh planned from an early stage to use the much-described image of Che’s corpse, shrouded in a blanket, tied to the skid of a helicopter flying over the jungle. He also knew that he would dissolve from there to the final image in Guerrilla—a repeat of an image that occurs early in The Argentine. Che is standing on the deck of the Granma, the boat that is carrying him and the Castro brothers from Mexico to Cuba. “There’s something about him looking up and seeing Fidel and Raul that I think is kind of loaded. I just imagined him being on that boat going, ‘What the fuck is this?’ And never imagining where this would land him.”

  Split Personality

  Demetrios Matheou / 2009

  From Sight and Sound, December 2009. Copyright British Film Institute. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

  Steven Soderbergh seems attracted to liars. From the adulterers and self-deceivers of his 1989 breakout film sex, lies, and
videotape and the talltale-telling child of King of the Hill to the spies and scheming survivors of his postwar noir, The Good German, via the cheery conmen of the Ocean’s trilogy, characters with a penchant for duplicity dominate the prolific director’s output. For a man whose own mercurial nature results in a continual confounding of our expectations—due less to his choice of subjects than to the manner in which he chooses to deliver them—the fascination with people whose surfaces are entirely misleading is perhaps inevitable.

  Hence we get Mark Whitacre, antihero of The Informant! The exclamation mark in the film’s title may seem a trifle over the top, but it’s entirely in keeping with the madcap and marvellously manipulative real-life character of Whitacre and his :you couldn’t have made him up” level of jaw-dropping oddness. More than that, the twists and turns of Whitacre’s adventures in corporate whistleblowing would pose a challenge even to Danny Ocean.

  “I wouldn’t say I’m preoccupied with lying,” demurs Soderbergh, when we meet during the London Film Festival. “I just think it’s a big part of our lives, especially when you’re talking about relationships. You could even argue that it’s a necessary part of our lives. . . . I certainly hope that my wife’s not always telling me the truth.

  “I am particularly interested in the question of degree,” he adds, “of where you cross the line between keeping the peace, maintaining some sort of equilibrium, and that point where not telling the truth becomes destructive. What was intriguing about Mark Whitacre, from the standpoint of making a movie, was that typically you have an antagonist who is in conflict with some external force, another person or an event; in this case the external forces causing the conflict are created by Whitacre himself. So he’s both the protagonist and the antagonist. That made for a really interesting character.”

  Whitacre was at the heart of what remains the biggest whistleblower case in U.S. history. A corporate golden boy with agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland, he suddenly turned informant in 1992, wearing a wire for the FBI for years while gathering evidence of his company’s price-fixing malfeasance. What Whitacre failed to mention to his eager Bureau buddies was that he himself was a multi-million-dollar fraudster. More than just a crook, Whitacre was a pathological liar, an arguably bipolar man (although this has never been confirmed) who just couldn’t stop digging the hole he was in.

  He was certainly no Jeffrey Wigand, another real-life (somewhat more honorable) whistleblower and the subject of Michael Mann’s The Insider. When screenwriter Scott Burns first suggested adapting Kurt Eichenwald’s book on the Whitacre story in 2001, Soderbergh immediately knew that if he were to make another whistleblower film, he would have to tread a different path.

  “As is often the case, you end up defining a piece by what you don’t want it to be as much as by what you do,” he says. “I had just come off Erin Brockovich [which also featured the true story of a corporate crime]. I had no desire to try to top The Insider or repeat Erin Brockovich. So the big creative decision, obviously, was when Scott and I decided it should be a comedy, not a drama.

  “Scott was the one who said: ‘How do you feel about an unreliable narrator?’ He had been reading this material about bipolar disorder, and this [accompanying] distractibility and tangentiality. We both thought that would be a great way in.” Indeed the funniest aspect of the film is Whitacre’s interior monologue, drolly delivered by Matt Damon and containing one spectacular non sequitur after another (my favorite is his reflection, amid the spying antics, on polar bears’ noses). It also keeps the authence one step (though no more) ahead of the FBI agents in understanding who we’re dealing with. As Soderbergh observes, “It takes two people to make a lie work—the liar and the person believing the lie.”

  With some of Soderbergh’s films of late, his chosen approach has come with its own difficulties. Just as the guerrilla procedural of his two-part Che biopic held as much gruel as fascination, and the technical experimentations of The Good German distracted from the story, so The Informant! has one wondering whether we’re watching the right film. It’s replete with stylistic declarations—lighting, funky captions, and Marvin Hamlisch’s energetic retro soundtrack evoking breezy 1970s comedies (the director was going for Neil Simon’s The Goodbye Girl)—that seem strangely disjointed from the actual delivery of the humor, which lacks pizzazz, instead coming slyly and dryly, as understated as the readjustment Damon gives his headpiece at the end of the movie. That tiny movement represents not only a huge tell on the lie Whitacre is living, but a reminder that there’s a darker, sadder story that hasn’t been touched on.

  On the subject of the soundtrack, Soderbergh’s attitude is revealing: “For some people the music’s very polarizing. But I said to Marvin, ‘The music is not for the authence, it’s for Mark Whitacre. It’s Mark’s soundtrack to his life.’” In fact, the whole style of the film reflects the world inside the head of a character who thinks he’s the hero of a John Grisham thriller. We’re left to make of the comedy what we will.

  Soderbergh has never allowed himself to be befuddled by trying to second-guess or coddle his authence. Back in 2002, when I asked him if he was happy with Solaris, he commented: “It almost doesn’t matter, because I’m really driven by process. I’m not a result-oriented filmmaker.”

  Hence the continuing willingness to swing between big-budget movies featuring Hollywood stars and low-budget affairs with nonprofessional actors, such as 2005’s Bubble and the upcoming The Girlfriend Experience, the latter being a meditation on the world of high-end escorts, in which the director elicits a surprisingly effective performance from the porn star Sasha Grey.

  “I really enjoy working with nonprofessional actors,” he says. “It’s an interesting and helpful exercise, because they make you realize how constructed movies are, and how narrow our ideas of performance. It’s great to watch them work, because they’re not result-oriented.” There’s that phrase again, the sort that makes financiers flee in terror. “Because they don’t have a goal in the scene, other than to be themselves, their behavior is so much more lifelike,” he continues. “It really does help when you [then] go into a ‘normal’ movie situation, with actors: it reminds you, ‘Hey, don’t just go into this default mode of movie behavior.’ If you’re an actor, you’re kind of telegraphing where things are going, because your desire to get there is so transparent. And that’s what I’m trying to avoid. In life, when you have an encounter with someone, you’re not sure what the result’s going to be. I’m trying to keep that sensation of mystery alive.”

  The Girlfriend Experience is a lean, thought-provoking affair that presents Grey’s call-girl as a modern businesswoman struggling to keep her boyfriend happy while staying ahead of the competition. Far from being a gimmick, the casting of Grey is a masterstroke, her detached porn persona a perfect match for the role.

  His next outing with a nonprofessional actress is also founded on a pertinent connection. In February Soderbergh starts shooting Knockout, an action spy movie with the mixed martial-arts fighter Gina Carano, which he says will be “very realistic—none of this wire work and shit, very eye-level,” giving a nod to his favorite Bond, From Russia with Love. With that to be followed by Liberace, with Michael Douglas in the title role, and the money in place for his Cleopatra musical with Catherine Zeta-Jones, recent rumors that the hardships of Che had prompted thoughts of an early retirement seem fanciful.

  Actually, the truth—and Mark Whitacre might appreciate this—is somewhere in-between. “There’s no question that the experience of making Che was like a tattoo: it was just difficult to shake off. It was a long process. We started working on it during Traffic, and the shoot was really intense, and the edit was really intense because we didn’t have a lot of time, and it just kind of stuck to me. I couldn’t separate the movie from the experience of making it. And it’s taken a couple of movies to really flush it out of my system.

  “But I’ve had an exit plan in place for a while, and Che really didn’t have any bear
ing on that. I’ve been thinking that I’m not sure when I turn fifty that I still want to be doing this.” As for what he may do instead, he’s not telling. With a director who has cinema in his blood, I’ll believe it when I see it.

  Stimulus Package

  Scott Macaulay / 2009

  From Filmmaker Magazine, Spring 2009. Reprinted by permission.

  Cinema and prostitution have long been intertwined, mostly by writers and directors who have, in moments of pique, reflective analysis, or despair, yoked the two together to describe their craft. Hollywood screenwriters joke about “whoring themselves out”; the director and writer David Mamet has compared studying the job of television writing to learning to become a prostitute; the director Béla Tarr, referring to his state-supported Hungarian colleagues, once declared that “filmmakers act like prostitutes;” and Federico Fellini has even expanded the metaphor to include the entire art form itself. “Cinema is an old whore, like circus and variety, who knows how to give many kinds of pleasure,” he once said. But the conversation becomes more interesting (or certainly less obvious) when it shifts to prostitution as subject matter. In films as different as Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, Klute, Belle de Jour, Mamma Roma, and Anna Christie, prostitute characters enable stories that are not just tales of individual human relationships but are also philosophical, social, and economic critiques of their eras.

  It’s hard to separate the character-based foreground from the almost documentary background in Steven Soderbergh’s new film The Girlfriend Experience. Ostensibly a portrait of a new kind of high-class escort, a woman who is paid not only for sex but for her ability to simulate for her clients a real relationship, the film is set within a New York City moneyed class reeling from the stock market collapse and nervous about the election, the TARP program, and, possibly, the end of global capitalism. But as the stock quotes and electoral polling data form soundtrack white noise, Soderbergh keeps his Red camera trained on Sasha Grey, the adult film actress who is cooly fascinating in her mainstream feature debut. In describing Grey’s work here, it is worth quoting her MySpace page. Discussing her ambitions towards working in adult film, she might just as well have been writing about The Girlfriend Experience: “Despite the controversy that surrounds this industry, I felt I could ultimately bring an enigmatic quality to it.”