Steven Soderbergh

by Anthony Kaufman

  MF: What do you most love about directing?

  SS: When the solution arrives, however it arrives. When the problem is being solved in front of you, by you or someone else, and you can suddenly see the next twelve moves and you’re just in a hurry to execute it. That’s fun. Try standing on a film set with 150 people and you’re stuck and they’re looking at you because you’re supposed to be the guy with the answer. And when it comes, it’s the most exhilarating thing.

  MF: After you got fired off Moneyball days before production began, it seemed you changed the way you made subsequent movies, down to how they were financed. How did a blow like that impact what happened after?

  SS: To my mind, you have to do two things when that happens. You have to spend seventy-two hours doing self-criticism, analyzing how that happened and “what role did I play in this?” You have to take your emotions out of it, take that 30,000-foot view. How do I keep this from happening again, because it is not an ideal outcome. Then, I had to go to work; I had fifty people who thought they were going to make that movie and we have to find something. It took awhile for things to play out, but I can tell you there was good news. If Moneyball hadn’t blown up, I don’t meet Channing Tatum. And I am really glad I did.

  MF: How did one spark the other?

  SS: We did Haywire with Gina Carano, I met Channing there, and we were off and running. If Moneyball hadn’t fallen apart, we don’t make Haywire and I’m glad we did; I’m glad for all the relationships that followed, and I’m glad for Magic Mike. You just can’t let anything slow you down.

  MF: Didn’t you also put a priority on financing strategies that gave you more security?

  SS: I started thinking like that awhile ago, after The Good German. I came out of that thinking, “I gotta be a lot smarter about this algorithm of the idea, the cost of executing it, and the potential audience.” Because I clearly got that one way the fuck wrong, and it’s not fun to spend a couple of years on something nobody goes to see. Maybe it was too strange an idea to pull off at all, because I look back and even if I made it for $12 million, we still lose it all. Whereas if I’d found something else and made it 40 percent cheaper, it would have been profitable. You always have to weigh the accessibility of the idea against the cost of executing it properly. I try to be aware of that. That’s why that Leni Reifenstahl movie Scott Burns and I were going to do, at the last minute I said, “I don’t want to do this.”

  MF: You could do that movie on HBO.

  SS: Too obvious.

  MF: So I can’t talk you out of this? You’re really closing the chapter on movies, and retiring?

  SS: Closing one chapter to open another? Yeah. For the foreseeable future, the movie door is closed.

  State of the Cinema Address

  Steven Soderbergh / 2013

  Soderbergh’s keynote speech delivered at the San Francisco International Film Festival, April 27, 2013. This official written version is printed by permission.

  a few months ago i was flying jetblue from new york to burbank—and yeah, i like jetblue because—obviously—it’s a good deal and the terminal at JFK is (i think) the best terminal in the US, although if you’ve been to airports in major cities elsewhere in the world you know we’re way behind in terms of figuring out airports, just go to france or spain or germany or asia if you want to see some crazy ass terminals, they’re stunning and they don’t assault you from all directions with bad music and bad news on TV screens—anyway, so there’s a guy in the row ahead of me on the other side of the aisle, white guy, mid 30s, and when we make altitude he takes out his ipad to watch something, and i can see everything he’s watching, and what i see is that he has loaded like six blockbuster action extravaganzas into his ipad, and he’s just skipping from one action sequence to the next, so basically he’s going to watch six hours of total mayhem porn, and i get this wave of—i don’t know how to describe it, not panic exactly because my heart rate doesn’t increase, but a sense i get every so often of—am i going insane or is the world going insane, or both, or neither?

  and then the CIRCULAR THINKING starts: i think maybe it’s me, maybe it’s generational, maybe i’m just old—shit, i’m four years older than elvis—and maybe my 22-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER doesn’t feel this way (i should probably ask her, at some point), but then part of me thinks, no, NO, there IS something happening that can be measured somehow, things are out of whack, people are more outraged about the ambiguous ending of the sopranos than a thirteen-year-old girl being stoned to death, and other people think the government stages terrorist acts when everyone with a brain larger than a walnut knows the government isn’t nearly competent enough to pull shit like that off AND keep it secret BECAUSE THERE ARE NO SECRETS ANYMORE, and the best analogy i can think of is the rhythm of your life being a like a DRUMBEAT, right, and so the drumbeat starts at a certain rhythm and then sometimes it accelerates and then sometimes it slows down . . . but lately i feel the beat just keeps increasing in tempo, so much so that now i can’t distinguish between the beats; it’s just a steady hum. and again, maybe it’s GENERATIONAL, maybe my DAUGHTER can hear between those beats, and it’s not a steady hum to her because she’s wired differently and every generation feels like this when it reaches a certain age (but i should probably ask her, at some point), and then i remembered reading that someone proved that if you’re in a car going more than twenty miles an hour, it becomes impossible to distinguish the features of a human face, and i thought that’s another good analogy and i also thought that’s a very weird experiment for someone to think up and so that was my jetblue flight.

  but the circular thinking continued, and then i got my hands on a book by douglas rushkoff and discovered that i’m suffering from PRESENT SHOCK (which is the name of his book), and this quote made me feel a little less insane.

  “When there is no linear time, how is a person supposed to figure out what’s going on? There’s no story, no narrative to explain why things are the way they are. Previously distinct causes and effects collapse into one another. There’s no time between doing something and seeing the result; instead, the results begin accumulating and influencing us before we’ve even completed an action. And there’s so much information coming in at once, from so many different sources, that there’s simply no way to trace the plot over time.”

  that’s the hum i’m talking about, and i mention this because i think it’s having an impact on all of us, on our culture, and, by extension, on the movies; how they’re made, how they’re sold, how they perform, and especially what we look to get from them.

  but to talk about what we get from the movies we have to talk about art in general and what we get from it, if that’s even possible.

  given all the incredible suffering in the world, i wonder sometimes what art is for, because really if the collected works of Shakespeare can’t prevent genocide then what IS art for? shouldn’t we be spending all of our TIME AND RESOURCES trying to help people, instead of going to plays or concerts or movies or art installations? and how about the resources involved in making art? the electric bill on the casino set of OCEANS THIRTEEN was 60K a week—how am i supposed to justify that? by saying the people that could have used that electricity will be entertained by the movie for two hours, when they may not even have electricity because we used it all up making the movie? and what about all the RESOURCES spent on all the other pieces of entertainment? how about the carbon footprint of me flying here? and why am even i worried about this shit or my car’s miles per gallon when there’s NASCAR on TV and monster truck pulls? right?

  so, what i’ve come to realize is: art is simply INEVITABLE, it was on the walls of a cave in france thirty thousand years ago, because we are a species driven by narrative and art is storytelling. we need stories to pass along information and ideas and attempt to make sense of this chaos. and, when you combine a compelling story with an talented artist or two, you can get very close to the impossible, which is entering someone else’s consciousness, seeing the world as
another human being sees it. that’s when i think, OKAY, maybe things would be EVEN WORSE if we didn’t have art. but ultimately the best argument i can make for art is that while you’re experiencing it, you are not alone; you are connected to the artist. and when it’s over, if the artist is really good, you’ve been transformed in some way. i like that.

  art is also about problem-solving, and it’s obvious from the news we have a real problem with problem-solving. the main obstacle to problem-solving, in my experience, is entrenched ideology, so what i like about making movies is—with some exceptions—the kind of ideological positions that keep us from solving problems in society don’t come into play. everything is on the table; every possible solution can be considered and debated; all that matters is SOLVING THE PROBLEM, and everyone submits to that task. it’s a very elegant problem-solving model.

  and now we finally arrive at the subject of this lecture/rant: the state of cinema. first of all, is there a difference between movies and CINEMA? in my view, yeah, or, as team America would say: fuck yeah.

  the simplest way i can put it is: movies are something that you see and CINEMA is something that is made.

  CINEMA it isn’t about the capture medium or the size of the screen or whether the screen is in a theater or in your bedroom or on your ipad or whether it’s a movie or a TV show or a commercial.

  CINEMA is specificity of vision.

  it’s an APPROACH in which everything matters.

  it is the polar opposite of anything arbitrary or generic, and the result is as unique as a fingerprint or a signature.

  CINEMA isn’t made by a committee, or a company, or an audience.

  CINEMA means if this filmmaker didn’t do it, then it either wouldn’t exist at all or it wouldn’t exist in anything near this form. it is utterly distinct.

  this means a perfectly solid, successful, acclaimed movie doesn’t necessarily qualify as cinema, and it ALSO means a piece of cinema can not only fail to qualify as a movie, but can be an absolute, irredeemable, unwatchable piece of shit.

  but, as long as you have filmmakers out there with a specific point of view, CINEMA as i define it will never disappear, because CINEMA is not about money; it’s about good ideas backed up by an aesthetic, and good ideas tend to be very economical. and this new technology . . . man, i love it. smaller, lighter, faster. you can make a big-looking movie with your own hands now for super cheap, and whenever someone starts to get weepy about celluloid i think of an orson welles quote about why he always embraced new technology. he said: “I don’t want to wait for the tool—the tool waits for me.”

  but the problem is that CINEMA, as i define it, and as something that inspired me, is under assault by the studios, with the full support of the audience, from what i can tell. the reasons for this, in my opinion, are more economic than philosophical, but when you add an ample helping of fear and a glaring lack of vision into the mix, it’s a trajectory that’s very difficult to reverse.

  of course there are exceptions to everything, and i’m saying that so no one thinks i’m talking about them. also, let’s be clear: the very idea of CINEMA as i define it isn’t even on the radar at the studios; it’s not a word anyone would ever use except as a reason NOT to hire someone. it’s certainly not a word i would ever use in a meeting. here are some other words i wouldn’t use: “elevated” or “ambiguous.” you have to be really careful in these meetings, because fewer and fewer executives are in the business because they love movies, or know movies, so if you’re pitching to someone who is cine-illiterate, you can’t refer to anything that didn’t come out last week, and if they don’t watch movies for pleasure, you can’t use your shared passion as the basis for a discussion. it’s fucking weird. i mean, can we all agree it takes more intelligence to build a car than to drive one? okay? and maybe you think i’m being hard on these folks, but this is years of my life we’re talking about here, so it’s scary when you’ve got people who don’t know about movies and don’t love movies and don’t know how to make a movie deciding what movies get made by people like me. that’s one reason studio movies aren’t better than they are, and why CINEMA is shrinking.

  so how does a studio decide what movies to make? well, one thing they take into consideration is foreign markets, since foreign markets are bigger than ever, and what travels best—apart from male strippers, obviously—is action/adventure and science fiction/fantasy. spectacle. and the occasional animated film.

  but bear in mind, the bigger the budget, the more people the movie has to appeal to, so things like cultural specificity, narrative complexity, and AMBIGUITY become potential obstacles to success here and abroad (we had a test screening of CONTAGION and in the focus group one guy said: i hated the jude law character because i didn’t know if he was a hero or an asshole. and he viewed this as a flaw in the filmmaking). then there’s the process known as RUNNING THE NUMBERS, which for a filmmaker is like having a doctor say there’s a shadow on your chest x-ray. basically it’s a way of using a totally fungible mathematical algorithm as a reason to say no. i’d tell you a story of how “running the numbers” recently got me pushed off a movie, but i’d get shot in street, and i don’t want my cats to be fatherless.

  then there’s the expense of putting a movie out. for a domestic mainstream movie, your point of entry into the market is 30m. that’s where you START. then add that amount again for foreign. so that’s 60m out the door before you’ve even decided what to make. and remember, you’ve got to gross 120m to get 60m back from the exhibitors. this is why the LIBERACE film didn’t get made at a studio. we were asking for a 5m domestic deal, but then it’s 30m to release it, so you’d have to gross 70m to break even, and the feeling from the studios was the material was too . . . “specialized” to gross 70m dollars. so the obstacle in that case wasn’t just the “special” subject matter, but the fact that no one has figured out how to reduce the cost of putting a movie out in wide release. there have been attempts to figure it out, but as it happens, analyzing why people go or don’t go to a movie doesn’t reveal any kind of linear, predictable behavior. it’s still kind of MYSTERIOUS, how people decide want they want to see. for awhile people thought social media would solve this, you could just sell a movie online. didn’t happen. TV commercials are still the most effective way to reach people. here’s another MYSTERIOUS thing: sometimes you reach people without even knowing how you reached them. take MAGIC MIKE. this is a success story, right? 39m opening weekend. but the tracking said we would do 19m. so that’s 100% wrong. now, it’s nice when the surprise goes in that direction, but how did all those people get missed? i know someone at a studio who suggested (on a modestly-budgeted movie) not using any tracking at all and cutting the spend from 30m to 15m. this was on a title that had some built-in brand identity. they wouldn’t let her do it. they were scared it would fail, even though they fail all the time doing it the normal way! maybe they were scared it would succeed. and you would think on a BIG FRANCHISE SEQUEL you could spend less, right, you’ve got a built-in audience? i mean, everyone on earth knows IRON MAN 3 is coming out next Friday, so they should stop carpet-bombing TV spots, right? not gonna happen. in fact, they’ll spend even more on a movie like that to see if they can get the gross up as high as possible.

  and if you’re wondering why all the POSTERS and TRAILERS and TV spots look and sound alike, it’s because of testing. anything interesting scores poorly and gets kicked out. now i’ve argued that the METHODOLOGY is faulty, that if you’re going to test a trailer or a poster, you test them amidst six or seven other examples, because that’s how people experience them. then maybe the thing that makes them different isn’t a problem. but i’ve never won that argument. we had a trailer for SIDE EFFECTS cut by a friend of mine in london and the filmmaking team all loved it. it didn’t test well, not nearly as well as the trailer that was cut here, so we abandoned it. now, look, testing can be helpful—there’s nothing like 400 people who aren’t your friends to tell you when you have a problem,
especially with a comedy—but it’s not the last word on a movie’s quality or playability, and it shouldn’t always be used to hammer the filmmaker. MAGIC MIKE didn’t score well, and luckily, WB chose to ignore the scores and stick with their plan to open the movie wide during the summer. but let’s get back to SIDE EFFECTS. the film didn’t perform the way we wanted, even though the materials tested well. why? it can’t be the campaign, right, because the trailer and the TV spots got above-average scores. what about the date, feb 8th? well, as it turned out, Oscar nominees got a bigger-than-usual bump this year, and then nemo storm shut down theaters in the northeast, which was our core audience, so obviously god was against us, which was probably my fault because of all my screeds about monotheism. was it the concept? well, there was an active decision early on to sell the movie as a pure thriller and not try to connect it to the larger social issue of pill-taking, did that make the film seem more commercial or more generic? what about the cast? four attractive and talented white people, that’s usually not an obstacle. we got good reviews and the exit polls were strong, so what happened? we don’t know, and no one has come up with a way to find out. and no one is going to; they’re too busy working on the next one.

  now i will attempt to show how a certain kind of rodent might be smarter than a studio when it comes to picking projects. if you give a certain kind of rodent the option of pressing two buttons for food and one button gives out food 60 percent of the time and the other button gives out food 40 percent of the time, this certain kind of rodent very quickly learns to only press the button that gives out food 60 percent of the time. so, the studio, by attempting to determine on a project-by-project basis what will work—INSTEAD of just backing a talented filmmaker over the long haul—actually INCREASES its chances of being WRONG. in other words, it should be about horses, not races. example: if one entity had paid for every film i’ve ever made, it would be in profit, and that’s how i think the business should work: you should build long-term relationships with talent and let them do their thing, within certain economic parameters. if i were running a studio, i’d call shane carruth or barry jenkins or amy seimetz and say: what do you want to do that we might like, or what do we have on our slate you might want to do? and if there’s interest in either direction, i would say: i want you to make three films over the next five years, here’s the amount of money you have for the movies and here’s how much we’ll set aside for marketing, apportion it any way you want. because REAL TALENT doesn’t need tons of money, it needs AUTONOMY. granted, in order for this to work, you have to be very, very good at identifying talent, real talent, the kind of talent that will sustain, and if you’re judging largely on commercial performance or hipness or hype, this plan won’t work. but it seems to me if you’re responsible for how billions of dollars get spent every year, identifying talent should be part of your job description. and yeah, i get it, you need comedies, and horror films, and shoot ’em ups, and kids films, of course, but can’t they be cinema, too? they used to be. it’s kind of what we tried to do at SECTION EIGHT, bring interesting filmmakers into the studio system and try to protect them. but the only way a studio will ever allow new talent that kind of freedom is if the budgets are low, and the simple fact is the most profitable movies for the studios are the big movies. the home runs. singles and doubles aren’t worth the money and the man hours. and they’re not as sexy as a home run. and, psychologically, it’s more comforting to spend 60m promoting a movie that costs 100m than 60m promoting a movie that cost 10m. you’re probably thinking: “but you’ll be in profit sooner” but you would be wrong. 60 plus ten is 70. you have to gross 140 to get to your 70. how many movies that cost ten million gross 140m? very few. now take your 100m movie plus 60m, so you have to gross 320m to get out. how many 100m movies gross 320? way more than a few, way more than movies that cost ten and gross 140. you see where this is going? and there’s a financial domino effect to the movie that costs 100 and grosses 320: you do better on home video and you get bigger sales to TV, and you can see why this is all going in a certain direction.