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CALENDAR
8th February: Side Effects released (US)
15th March: Side Effects released (UK)
THE FANLISTING
There are 445 fans listed in the Steven Soderbergh fanlisting. If you're a Soderbergh fan, add your name to the list!
UPCOMING PROJECTS
LET THEM ALL TALK
Information | Photos | Official website
Released: 2020
KILL SWITCH
Information | Photos | Official website
Released: 2020
ADVERTS
NEW & UPCOMING DVDS
Now available from Amazon.com:
 Haywire
Contagion
Now available from Amazon.co.uk:
Contagion
DVDs that include an audio commentary track from Steven:
Clean, Shaven - Criterion Collection
Point Blank
The Graduate (40th Anniversary Collector's Edition)
The Third Man - Criterion Collection
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
ADVERTS
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Rolling the dice with Ocean's 11, a big, fat
Vegas heist flick
By Stephen Rebello
(Movieline, January 2002) Cut from original interview:
On the Ocean's 11 cast:
There's a lot of expectation here, and Ted Griffin wrote a great script
that's genuinely witty without being glib. There's a real knack to performing
with apparent ease, but they all seemed to understand that they needed to bring
their A-game. I said, "If you don't, you're going to get shown-up either by
someone around you or the audience."... Going in, there was a lot of like, 'OK,
who's going to be the asshole?' Didn't happen. There wasn't a buzz-kill in the
bunch. They were all having such a great time on it... Matt [Damon] said, "It's
so much fun to be part of a flying wedge but not feel I'm at the front of it."
Coming off three movies in which he'd played the lead and had to work every day,
he loved being part of the team as opposed to having to shoulder the whole
movie. George and Brad have slightly larger roles but they very much felt it was
a team effort... The cast was very self-sufficient. They all knew what they're
doing. I think they were sympathetic to my day-to-day struggles and were very,
very low maintenance. They recognized that it was not as fun an experience for
me as it was for them. It was just impossible for me to be as loose as I might
be normally. I was trying to wrap my head around how to physically put this
movie together.
On George Clooney:
He's a better actor than he thinks he is. He's now starting to build a body
of films that indicate that he has very good taste. He's really funny in a
seven-minute performance in Welcome to Collinwood, this movie he and I
have produced for our company Section 8. It's a glimpse of something he doesn't
normally do or is asked to do. And when the time comes, he's going to pull one
out that's really going to surprise people.
On Carl Reiner:
Do you know that nobody left the set when they were done because they were
afraid they were going to miss Carl being hilarious and cool?
On shooting in Las Vegas and the Bellagio Hotel:
I was dreading it. We were going to be there six weeks and I just thought,
Oh, boy. It went smoothly. I didn't gamble a nickel, either. Separate from the
idea of robbing casinos, if it wasn't Las Vegas, you don't really have a movie.
I don't know if without The Bellagio Hotel, the movie would work. It's the
opulence of the hotel itself, its upscale look. The Bellagio is like a character
in the movie. I was so lucky that Jerry [Weintraub, the producer] was able to
get the incredible access that we needed.
On the challenge:
This project all started with Lorenzo di Bonaventura saying, "Can I send you
a script?," hearing it was Ocean's 11 and thinking, Good idea for a
remake. There's a good premise at the heart of that movie I felt never get
exploited. When I heard it was Ted Griffin's script, I said, 'Send it over
today.' Those are hard movies to write. Well, now having the movie, I found it
really difficult. I was constantly confronted with the irony that here I was
making a movie that was just supposed to be fun and not about anything, but it
just beat my brains out. It was a struggle trying to learn a new language and to
shoot in a style I don't normally work within. I never felt fluent. I never felt
comfortable. The good news is that it's not necessarily a bad thing to feel like
you're constantly being challenged and that you may not win.
On the research:
Ghostbusters. When I saw it, it was amazing to me that a movie with
that sort of physical scale feels so tossed-off, with such understated
performances and obvious generosity among all the performers. I thought a lot
about The Hot Rock, too, because that's a movie I like a lot. From a
technical level, I kept watching movies by Fincher, Spielberg, McTiernan, people
who know how to orchestrate physical action the way I like to see it. I kept
looking at lens length, lens height, when they moved the camera, when they cut,
how they would use their extras, how they structured movements within shots that
carried you to the next movement and the next. In their movies, you always know
exactly where you are, no matter how fast you cut. That's a real gift and it's
innate. It sounds pretentious but with Ocean's, I was hoping to combine
that visual strength -- that masculine, muscular style of filmmaking, with the
feminine, a more gentle, emotional approach to character and performance. If you
could combine those two, that would be a really interesting hybrid. Or not. But
that's what I wanted to try.
On the style:
Traffic was a different way of shooting, a different way of seeing
things. Working in that sort of run-and-gun style is a lot easier than this was.
The last hour of Ocean's 11 doesn't have a lot of repeated shots. It's a
series of interlocking shots and sequences and, when I studied the filmmakers
who I thought worked well in that style, I noticed they didn't repeat shots that
often. Each piece is a new one. I thought that would be a good thing to try and
emulate.
On the finale:
I wanted that whole end of the film to be elegant. I'm a big Debussy fan and
Clair du lune has always been one of my favorite pieces, but I put a
special thanks in the final credits to Philip Kaufman because he uses that same
music to similar effect in The Right Stuff. I know a lot of people will
see the movie and go, "Hey!," so I thought I'd better cop to the fact that I
know I've stolen it. To me it was organic because they play that kind of music
at those fountains all the time. David Hall did the score and he really nailed
it.
On speculation regarding Hollywood's promulgation of violence:
My concern about this kind of stuff is less that it's having some sort of
influence on an ideological level, that people are getting ideas from watching
these movies than I am that we become anaesthetized to events like that, that
our responses are stunted or distorted or delayed. The sort of ILM aspect of
those events was very disorienting, especially when they chose to back off so
that you didn't actually see people jumping out of buildings. That was an image
that you couldn't deny. Our ideas of what is far-fetched have been completely
eradicated. All bets are off now and we're living like almost every other
country in the world. My fear is that it's going to turn into the '50s again in
America. You're amazed when you hear a story of some individual's courage and
then you're disgusted when you see somebody on TV espousing some reactionary,
fascistic attitude about how this should be dealt with. It has brought out the
best and worst in people. It's a flawed society, but we live in a free and open
one in which people get to dissent, to say what they want to about all of it. Do
we have imperialist tendencies overseas? Absolutely. But you can also make the
argument that, with some exceptions, we're the most open society on the planet.
On Traffic's impact on the drug war:
Oh, for, like, a week. The best-case scenario for that movie, I thought,
would be a couple of weeks of Op-Ed pieces and late-night TV discussions, then
we'd go back to wherever we were. You could make Traffic every two years.
I never thought it was going to change anything. What surprised me is that it
found an audience.
On where he keeps his Oscar:
In my apartment in the room that functions as my office on a shelf with
other award certificates and other things. If you said to me, "That didn't
actually happen," I would go, "You know, I thought so." It was totally surreal
and I was totally unprepared.
Read the full Movieline interview here.
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