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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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State of independence
Writer and director Steven Soderbergh struck gold with Sex, Lies and
Videotape before nearly disappearing up his own oeuvre. Now he has found
mainstream hits like Ocean’s Eleven give him licence to take as many risks as he
wants.
(Scotland on Sunday, January 23, 2005) If you want to sum up
Steven Soderbergh’s career to date, look no further than the title of the diary
he published in 1999. Called Getting Away With It, or: The Further Adventures of
the Luckiest Bastard You Ever Saw, it is the perfect measure of the man’s
humility, self-deprecating humour and self-belief. This, after all, was before
he became one of Hollywood’s most sought-after directors, with a trio of
back-to-back 100 million hits in the shape of Erin Brockovich, Traffic and
Ocean’s Eleven. At the time he wrote the diary, he was a Hollywood pariah,
considered untouchable by any executive worth his salt.
After Sex, Lies and Videotape, his 1989 debut as a writer and director, had
catapulted him to fame, it was a fall of Icarus-like proportions. Winner of the
prestigious Palme d’Or, and nominated for an Oscar for Best Screenplay,
Soderbergh was just a green 26-year-old from Louisiana when he made his story of
dysfunctional sexuality. Frequently heralded as the film that kick-started the
American independent-movie revolution, it didn’t quite take its creator with it.
By 1996, the year his book details, he had a string of perceived failures behind
him and a reputation for disappearing up his own backside. From Kafka, his
playful 1991 black-and-white tribute to the Czech writer, to Gray’s Anatomy, a
monologue spoken by the late raconteur Spalding Gray, who had starred in
Soderbergh’s unsentimental period drama King of the Hill in 1993, he was
following just one rule. As he puts it, "I’ve always said to some degree that
whatever you’re working on should annihilate what you’d done before."
Unfortunately, it almost annihilated his career. It was teaming up with George
Clooney that saved him, on the well-respected Elmore Leonard adaptation Out of
Sight, in 1998. Just three years later, with a Best Director Oscar for the drugs
drama Traffic, and Soderbergh could do no wrong - again. "I think I’ve learned
more from the films that have not done really well than from those that have,"
he says. "Success is like this mysterious person you meet at a party. You feel
like you have this connection, you spend the night together, and you wake up the
next morning and they’re gone. Failure is like the house-guest who won’t leave.
As a result, you can learn more from it. Success just feels like lightning
struck. You could stand on the roof with a rod for the next two years and
lightning wouldn’t strike. You just can’t conjure it up."
Having turned 42 this month, he’s no longer the gawky kid who accepted the Palme
d’Or in Cannes with the infamous (and somewhat prophetic) words, "It’s all
downhill from here." Although still reed-thin, gone is the curly mop that made
him look like a fluffed-up cotton-bud. That hair is now receding. Minus his
trademark baseball cap and thick-rimmed glasses, today he’s wearing a navy blue
jumper and equally plain trousers - a nondescript uniform that seems to match
his self-effacing personality.
But if his dress-sense is bland, his conversation is anything but. Lucid and
analytical when it comes to talking about his work, he seems like a man entirely
in touch with his creativity, yet one completely grounded in the practical
nature of managing a career in the long-term. He attributes his resurrection to
deciding against making films that "were only appropriate for art-house
theatres". As he says, "I wanted to go back and forth between more traditional
movie-star-driven films, and smaller films. I think if you stay in either one of
those all the time you can become complacent."
It’s a doctrine he has stuck to. After the swagger of Ocean’s Eleven, gathering
together a stellar cast that included Clooney, Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts for a
superior remake of the Rat Pack classic, he made the no-budget (and
much-maligned) Hollywood satire Full Frontal and then remade Tarkovsky’s sci-fi
masterpiece Solaris, again with Clooney. Talk about putting yourself in the
firing line. This February sees him back on familiar ground for the first sequel
of his career. Ocean’s Twelve recalls the same cast - with the addition of
Catherine Zeta-Jones - for the further adventures of some more of the luckiest
bastards you ever saw.
Set in Amsterdam, Paris and Rome, as the gang of thieves who robbed three
casinos in the original are forced to find 93 million to pay back the man they
swindled, it recaptures the laid-back vibe of Ocean’s Eleven, while deepening
the characters’ relationships. Not that Soderbergh wants to get too heavy. "At
the end of the day, it’s almost criminal to talk about either of those movies in
anything but the most superficial terms, because they’re literally meant to
party," he says. While many of the cast relaxed at Clooney’s Lake Como villa,
Soderbergh himself had time to neither party nor get star-struck. "At that
point, I’m running on adrenaline and panic," he laughs. "I’m somewhere else,
trying to hang on by my fingernails."
While the film has already made around 115 million in America, it still has some
way to go before it tops the receipts of its predecessor, which took 183 million
in the US alone. "It’s definitely weird to make a movie and you know that if
doesn’t make as much money as the first one, it’ll be considered a failure,"
says Soderbergh. "That’s weird. But there’s nothing I can do about it - I can
only make something I think is good and see what happens."
Cynics might say that with Soderbergh’s production company Section Eight, formed
with Clooney in 2000 and housed at Warner Brothers, the studio behind both the
Ocean’s films, the sequel is a convenient way to keep his paymasters sweet.
After all, Section Eight productions - from Clooney’s directorial debut
Confessions of a Dangerous Mind to his ensemble heist movie Welcome to
Collinwood - have hardly set the box-office alight. "It’s tricky," he says. "I
want them all to do well, at least within the scale of how they were made. But
it’s hard. Our only rule is not to second-guess ourselves. We’re just trying to
make stuff that we think is interesting.
"On one level you could say, ‘They made Ocean’s Twelve because all these other
movies that they are making aren’t performing and they need to make a hit film
once in a while to finance all these other mistakes.’ That is partially true.
But I made Ocean’s Twelve because I wanted to make it. Nobody asked me to make
it. I wanted to make it - and I made it the way that I wanted and was totally
left alone by the studio. But it so happens that it does buy us a lot of
‘mistakes’ - or at least smaller movies that may not become profitable."
True or not, Section Eight is beginning to find its feet, and giving an
opportunity to leftfield film-makers such as John Maybury (whose much-admired
debut was Francis Bacon biopic Love Is the Devil, in 1998) to work in the
mainstream. Maybury’s psychological drama The Jacket, with Keira Knightley,
makes its bow at the Sundance film festival this week, a vindication of Section
Eight’s remit. "I felt that, in the United States at least, people who were
writing about films were not being helpful, in that they tend to encourage young
film-makers to look at studios as antagonists," says Soderbergh.
"I was drawing my lessons from the late ’60s and ’70s, where you had really
interesting film-makers working successfully in the studio system. My assumption
was always that we should be trying to emulate that. What we should all want is
for the smartest directors around to have the resources that the dumb directors
have."
Next month sees the release here of Criminal, a remake of the Argentinian film
Nine Queens, directed by Greg Jacobs. It was co-written with Jacobs by
Soderbergh (under his pen-name Sam Lowry, a reference to the Jonathan Pryce
character in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil). "Under different circumstances, Criminal
is a movie that I would’ve been interested in directing," he says. "It plays to
everything that I’m interested in."
Yet what makes Soderbergh such an intriguing director is his willingness to dig
into his own life, when necessary, for the sake of his art. Culled from his own
personal problems at the time, Sex, Lies and Videotape was written during an
eight-day road trip from his home-town of Baton Rouge to Los Angeles. Then
duplicitous to those he was dating, he even tried therapy. Like the four
characters he would create - whom he said were his own four personality traits -
Soderbergh would admit that he too struggled with the gulf between himself and
those around him. "[At the time] I was deceptive and mentally manipulative," he
recalls. "I was just f**king up. There was one point at which I was in a bar,
and within a radius of about two feet there were three different women I was
sleeping with."
Shortly after the success of that film, he met his first wife, the actress Betsy
Brantley, who had almost bagged the female lead in Kafka. Soderbergh was
smitten. After a rapid courtship, he married her in December 1989 and the pair
moved into a 40-acre estate in Virginia. Within a year their daughter, Sarah,
was born. But it was not to last. By 1995, as his career was crumbling before
his eyes, his marriage was too. Rather than crawl under a stone, Soderbergh did
what few would dare: he obliquely channelled it into the movie that would
reinvigorate his belief in film-making. Schizopolis, shot over a
period of nine months, remains, he says, "probably one of the weirdest movies
made by a mainstream director". Inspired by his love of the films of Richard
Lester, who made The Beatles’ films Help! and A Hard Day’s Night, it’s an
anarchic comedy about the redundancy of language that casts its director as the
central character, office drone Fletcher Munson. Opposite Soderbergh, playing
Fletcher’s unfaithful wife, is Brantley. One can only imagine the tension on
set. "It just had to be done," Soderbergh reflects.
"Everybody involved would say that it was a very loaded atmosphere, because I
was acting with my ex-wife and it was all pretty recent. It just felt like
something that needed to be done. It was probably cathartic in some way,
although I didn’t assume it would be and I wasn’t looking for that. I was just
trying to find my own language, or a new language, or something. I think at that
time I was more specifically aiming at a feeling in a marriage that has lost its
way and lost its spark, and you’re play-acting: you’re not present; you’re
somewhere else; you’ve just become an automaton."
Since 2001 Soderbergh has been with Jules Asner, a statuesque brunette and
former model who has since turned to acting and working for US showbiz programme
E!. In comparison to the lavish celebrity marriages of many of his actors,
Soderbergh’s marriage to Asner was an anonymous affair in New York, where they
now share a home. Despite being the face of independent American cinema and an
Oscar winner, the director still values his privacy. "I remember Brad Pitt, on
Ocean’s Eleven, when he had that wig and glasses on, going off on his own and
walking around the casino. Nobody recognised him, and he was so excited by that.
He was so happy to be anonymous that he took off for a few minutes to walk
around. That stuck in my mind - Jesus! What a life, where you can’t move without
someone recognising you."
Celebrity has only ever been a minor theme in Soderbergh’s body of work - seen
in Full Frontal and Ocean’s Twelve, with its numerous industry in-jokes. In
fact, it’s hard to pinpoint many overall patterns in his oeuvre, particularly as
he adopts distinct visual styles for each project. Yet an interest in our
culture’s need for alternative ways of looking at the world (be it via the
therapy sessions of Sex, Lies and Videotape, the Scientology-esque cult seen in
Schizopolis or the Indian sweat-lodge in Gray’s Anatomy), do frequently occur in
his work. Even in Ocean’s Twelve, Elliott Gould’s gaudy ex-casino owner
frequents palm-readers.
"I’m a hardcore atheist," Soderbergh admits. "That magical thinking, while I
understand it and will admit that I have a pair of good-luck boots that I wear
usually when I’m shooting..." He trails off for a moment. "I’m interested in
that stuff to the extent that I’m very curious as to how people get into a frame
of mind that allows them to think this way and to design their lives around this
thinking. It’s very interesting to me. My mother was into a lot of this stuff,
so it’s something I grew up around. I’m not allergic to it. I just don’t relate
to it."
His mother - whom Brantley reputedly once described as "the nightmare that looms
in all of his sleep" - would regularly hold seances and palm-readings.
Soderbergh’s father, meanwhile, was an academic - a professor of education at
Louisiana State University. It was he who first introduced his son to film,
enrolling him in an animation class at the university. Only 13 at the time,
Soderbergh quickly grew bored, but it afforded him his first industry contact.
After graduating from high school, he was hired as an editor by his former
tutor, who was then working on the short-lived television show Games People
Play. After a spell working in Los Angeles as a freelance editor and even as a
cue-card holder, Soderbergh eventually cut his losses and headed back to Baton
Rogue. While there, a chance meeting with Yes, the prog-rock band, resulted in
him being asked to shoot their 1986 tour.
As can be seen from his films, Soderbergh was no committed radical growing up,
trying to change the world. "I’m not apolitical, but I’m also not Ken Loach," he
says. "I grew up in a suburban subdivision in a very resolutely middle-class
environment, and I had two very intelligent parents, who were very engaged in
the world, so it’s not like I’m not interested in that. But it depends on the
subject-matter. I think you could make the argument that Traffic was a political
film. But I don’t want to make a political film where the only people who can
sit through it are people who agree with me. There would be no point to that. So
then you have to choose your subjects very carefully. And the best films with
political content are also about something else."
Soderbergh has two films in the works that could easily be dubbed political.
Furthering his interest in the evil machinations of corporations, after both
Kafka and Erin Brockovich, first up is The Informant. Based on the true story of
Archers Daniel Midland, a food-processing company that is in cahoots with the
Japanese to fix prices in the global food market, it hinges upon a whistleblower
who turns out to be a pathological liar. Then comes a project devoted to the
final days of Che Guevara’s life and is set to reunite Soderbergh with Traffic’s
Benicio Del Toro.
"I don’t feel I’ve made anything as good as the movies that made me want to make
movies," he says. "I’m on that treadmill, trying to make something I think is as
good as those films. It’s frustrating in that you always feel you missed."
Yet, a decade and a half on from Sex, Lies and Videotape, it’s thanks to
Soderbergh that the fight for independence is alive and well and living in
Hollywood.
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