Steven Soderbergh

by Anthony Kaufman

  The times do not favor a filmmaker like me; the proof of this is in the films that are popular. I don’t know where the spectators for my films are: maybe they are home reading or watching films on video. Before we made The Underneath, the head of Universal told me he thought maybe there wasn’t an audience for this kind of film here in the States. He was probably right. Luckily, it only cost $6.5 million. The studio likes me and they want me to go on working with them, hoping one day I’ll make a film people will want to see! I think they see me as a lost leader. This expression comes from the record industry. If there is a really good record that nobody wants to buy, the record store reduces the price, even if it means losing money, hoping that the promotional sale will bring people into the store that will then buy other records. I think I am a lost leader for Universal, and other filmmakers might say: “If they make a film with Soderbergh, maybe it’s a good place to go work.” With King of the Hill it will have been the second time I do this for them.

  I think I came to the end of a cycle and now I am going to embark on a completely different territory. I would like to make small-budget films that are experimental, that may not draw a large audience, or no audience at all. In fact, I just finished a film with a crew of five people, which might look like something conceived by Buñuel and Richard Lester! Something exuberant but not necessarily logical. I already sold the video rights in the U.S., which gave me enough money to shoot it, about $75,000. I am editing it now. In a way, I have left the movie business and I’ve freed myself from many things. I went back to Louisiana and I put together a small group of people to start from scratch. While making The Underneath I felt the need to start all over: I became aware of the kind of film I would like to make next and for which I was not until now prepared, for reasons that maybe have to do with my life or my profession. In fifteen years, people will look back at my first four films and they will realize that they were just a preface to a book that I am only now starting to write. Some of my personality traits, like my ideas, have not yet found a path to the screen, and some people who know me well ask me why. In a way, what I want to do will look a lot like the short films I made when I was young.

  Q: Your use of music is rather economical.

  A: I think that in American cinema, of all the elements, sound is the most badly used. It’s as if it had to be put to work for the spectator. I wanted the music to contribute to the atmosphere in The Underneath. I was very happy when Cliff Martinez sent me what he had written for the credits. There was a sense of slowness to it analogous to Bernard Herrmann that fit the film well. Then, we set together and I pointed out to him the spots where I wanted the music to gently underscore the mood. I don’t think the music needs to manipulate the audience. Cliff Martinez was remarkable and he worked very fast. I told him about a contemporary piece I had used and asked him to come up with something similar, without risking a lawsuit. I wanted an arrangement of notes with more weight than normal fourteen to sixteen. We worked at Cliff’s with his electronic equipment, composing pieces, twenty maybe, with guitar sounds and we numbered them. Then we looked at a scene and tried out a sequence against it, let’s say 2-7-9. Then we focused on the basic line, either trying to harmonize or create an opposition. We went through the entire film this way, scene by scene, note by note, and sometimes we took up the main motif in the credits and reworked it in a different arrangement. We had very little time because, initially, I didn’t want any music at all, until I realized a little too late that it would have been a mistake. That’s the reason why we were racing against the clock and we nailed down the music in eight days.

  Q: Everything seems to have happened fast with this film.

  A: There are positive things about this speed, the energy you save all along, the tension, but there are also negative sides, the lack of time to think things through, to step back. There is a better balance with the new film that I am finishing up. I have a script, but if it does not work out I can afford to put it in the trash and shoot something else. The only expense is the film stock, since I am working with five people and the equipment was bought very cheaply. When the crew has some free time I shoot, and that’s how it goes. You have a lot of freedom this way, particularly since I don’t have a firm deadline by which the film has to be finished, since I am not working with a studio. I don’t have to release it if I don’t like it! I can always write a script for someone else, which would enable me to pay back the cost for the video rights. Under these conditions there are only two limitations: my imagination and finding a topic that you can shoot with a small crew. I was a little tired of working with those huge crews of fifty people, who are like an albatross tied around your neck that you have to drag behind you and that limits your freedom of action. I was also tired of having to use the cinematic language that is required of a “normal” film, the establishing shot, the closeup, etc. I really needed a new start.

  Q: How did you select your actors?

  A: I wrote the script with Peter Gallagher in mind. I called him and told him he would be perfect for the role of a great kid who was not worth much. He told me that sounded great. I am very happy with his performance: it’s very realistic, without mannerism. It’s a part that does not call for a lot of external action, and he played it out with a lot of subtlety and control. I stayed close to him during the shooting. He was more relaxed than when we did sex, lies, and videotape. I think he understands he’ll never be a superstar, he’ll not reach great notoriety, but that at the same time, he will never fall too low and will always be able to work with people of great worth that appreciate his talent. As a result, I think he is happy and feels safe. In The Underneath, he was synchronous with the kind of rhythm that I was looking for, and we shared the same sense of humor. Also, he’s not afraid to appear unlikeable, which would not be the case for a big star. For the role of Rachel, I wanted someone who was not known to the public because I wanted people to think a priori that she was a jerk. The audience should not have a point of reference. Alison Elliott seemed just right in relation to Peter; the contrast between the two of them was appropriate. When I met her, she reminded me right away of Lauren Bacall: tall, poised, with an opacity that appealed to me and did not let on what she was thinking. I only regret not to have been able to explore her talents to their fullest potential, and have given her a narrow range. Adam Trese also struck me as a convincing brother for Peter. I always liked Joe Don Baker and I was happy to find a part for him. I wanted the secondary characters to be unknown to the audience, but the principals, except for Rachel, to be familiar actors. I was lucky that they all agreed, because we did not pay them much.

  Q: Your use of the subjective point of view in the hospital sequence is very striking.

  A: Our point of departure was the setting. We had five different types of windows, two different kinds of mirrors. The ceiling was on a pivot, which enabled us to vary the angle in relation to the characters present in the room. There was a different color for each person, and little by little, the tones became warmer. When the mother arrives, there is no furniture, which we introduced progressively. It was not until we had set up the first shot with the mother, filmed at an angle, that I decided not to show Peter at all, which was not our intention at the start. We only see Peter once his brother is absent. I also wanted the dissolves to be shorter and shorter. At the beginning, with the mother, the dissolve was between twelve and fourteen seconds; and at the end there were none. What also helped was that my director of photographer, Elliot Davis, was the cameraman as well. When the two detectives are there, you have the feeling that the gaze has suddenly been awakened for an instant from a sound sleep, then blinks again. Had we made a big-budget film, I would have gotten calls from the studio wanting to know why we had no shots of Peter Gallagher’s face. I like the transition from this subjective and extremely stylized shot to the shot of the man appearing in the hallway. He is awake and attentive, and the contrast is striking. We share his anxiety because we don’t know who the intruder is.r />
  Q: What about Shelly Duvall?

  A: I always liked her. Also, the idea of someone who would be in a drug-induced state, almost hallucinatory, and who finds coming out of it that the nurse is as strange as Shelly Duvall, appealed to me. It’s really too much! I also wanted to hear her talk about Stanley Kubrick during the shooting of The Shining; between shots she would tell me some frightening anecdotes! But she did it with a lot of humor.

  Q: In the text you gave to Projections Four, you talked about one of your favorite films, The Third Man, and the words you used—disillusion, betrayal, misguided sexual desire—could also apply to your own films.

  A: And that’s true also for The Underneath; I am incapable of knowing why. There is also a great sense of urban setting in The Third Man, with this city that will soon not be what it was at the end of the war. The great use of black and white. Of all the film noirs, I really like Asphalt Jungle and Chinatown, with its mix of classicism and modern sensibility; it’s hard to do. Everything works to perfection: the setting, the actors, the staging, the cinematography. When Polanski is at his best, he is amazingly economical. When you think back on the film, you remember its density and complexity, and when you watch it again, you are struck by its simplicity. The problem with many directors nowadays is that their complexity is superficial. That’s easy. Polanski’s staging of the action in Chinatown is the opposite: it comes from an understanding of and an experience with cinema that has nothing superficial about it.

  Q: For the first time, you were not responsible for the editing of The Underneath.

  A: Yes, because at the end of King of the Hill, I realized that writing, directing, and editing the film left me in such a state of exhaustion that after editing I made some wrong choices: I had lost all perspective. So I decided not to let myself fall into a similar situation for my next film, and I really enjoyed working with Stan Salfas. It was a luxury to have someone with whom to talk. But for my small-budget films I will be my own editor again.

  Soderbergh’s The Underneath Brings Nineties Style to Film Noir

  Kevin Lally / 1995

  From Film Journal International, May 1995. Reprinted by permission.

  Everything changed—and in some ways, nothing changed—for writer-director Steven Soderbergh with the unveiling of his debut feature, sex, lies, and videotape, in 1989. A wry tale of a young man with a penchant for taping women’s intimate sexual confessions, the film was the surprise winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes and went on to become a major indie box-office success. If he had wanted to, Soderbergh could have leapt into any high-profile studio project he fancied. Instead, he’s remained true to the spirit of his breakthrough hit, steering an independent course with a series of personal, modestly budgeted films that have allowed him to broaden his palette. His second film, the expressionistic thriller Kafka, earned mixed reviews, but his followup, King of the Hill, was one of the best-received movies of 1993, an evocative coming-of-age story based on the memoirs of author A. E. Hotchner.

  With his new Gramercy release, The Underneath, Soderbergh combines the stylistic daring of Kafka with the sharp insight into human relationships of sex, lies. It may be his best film to date. A reworking of the 1949 Robert Siodmak film noir Criss Cross, The Underneath centers on Michael Chambers, a handsome reformed gambler who returns to his home town of Austin, Texas, and finds himself drawn to his ex-wife Rachel, who is now involved with a local gangster. Circumstances lead Michael into the biggest gamble of his life: an armored-car heist which goes horribly awry.

  Rather than construct a traditional film noir, Soderbergh has created what he calls “a relationship movie with a crime in the middle.” Not only does he emphasize character over mayhem, but Soderbergh conceives his own style, with heightened use of primary colors, startling wide-screen compositions and eerily discordant soundtrack effects. Soderbergh’s script (written under the pseudonym Sam Lowry—the hero of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil—after a dispute with the Writers Guild over shared credit with the original film’s writer, Daniel Fuchs) also has a sophisticated narrative structure, alternating among three different time frames. The superb cast includes sex, lies star Peter Gallagher as Michael, newcomer Alison Elliott in an attention-grabbing turn as the enigmatic Rachel, William Fichtner (TV’s Grace Under Fire), Adam Trese (Laws of Gravity), Joe Don Baker, Paul Dooley, Elisabeth Shue, and Anjanette Corner.

  The Film Journal spoke to the thirty-two-year-old filmmaker by phone at his home base in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

  Kevin Lally: Did you know the original film Criss Cross before you got involved with this project?

  Steven Soderbergh: No, not until it was shown to me. Universal sent me a tape and said, “We’ve been thinking about trying to remake this—take a look at it and see if you’d be interested in being involved.” I thought it was okay—I frankly didn’t think it was a classic, and that was part of its appeal in terms of a remake. I thought there were some good ideas in it that I wanted to take a little further. And so I said, yeah, why don’t we take a whack at this?

  KL: I like the way you take what is a typical film noir and totally reconceptualize it.

  SS: That’s either going to be its saving or its downfall, I’m not sure which. Again, part of what attracted me to it was that the skeleton, in a sense, really lent itself to my preoccupations and it was very clear to me that there was plenty of opportunity for me to explore the issues that I generally like to explore—the idea of this guy coming back and trying to fix a relationship and, more importantly, the concept of a character being confused about the idea of something and the reality of something. I don’t think Michael is able to delineate between the idea of putting the relationship with Rachel back together—and whether he’s just enamored of that idea—and the reality of it. And I think she exploits that confusion. All that stuff I found potentially interesting.

  KL: I think most film noirs are about relationships, but the people are archetypes. In this case, these are people you could see in your neighborhood bar.

  SS: Absolutely. Again, it remains to be seen whether or not that ended up being a good thing or a bad thing. That was certainly my intent, to ground the movie in some real behavior and real characters. As a result, the relationships and people’s motives are somewhat more ambiguous. But I feel the best noir films, like Chinatown for instance, really have both going—they have characters that are realistic and a plot that keeps your attention. Chinatown’s a better plotted film than ours, by a long shot, but a lot of noirs tend to be too heavy on plot, at the expense of character. It’s possible I went a little far in the other direction—but that’s what interested me.

  KL: Did you have a personal set of guidelines as to certain genre things that you didn’t want to do?

  SS: Yeah! No wet streets, no smoke, no hats, no long shadows. I wanted to avoid the traditional trappings of the genre, and at least shift them into another area. We tried to come up with the equivalent trappings, which in our case had more to do with the way we would stage things—color, framing, pictorial tonality, light and dark as opposed to just plain shadows. I didn’t want it to look like a pastiche.

  KL: What does the title The Underneath mean to you?

  SS: For me, it means that a superficial reading of the movie and its plot are in a sense the least interesting aspects of the movie. To me, the really fun stuff is the subtext and what is unspoken. I didn’t want to call the film Criss Cross, and I was just sitting down trying to come up with titles that (a) sounded interesting and didn’t sound like everything else out there and (b) were also somewhat appropriate. That one just sort of stuck. It was fun to say and it just seemed to fit. Obviously there was a great fear on the part of Universal that people would think it was some aquatic adventure film, but I convinced them that people would see ads for the movie and there would be no danger of them thinking it was Sea Hunt.

  KL: I was reading a few of the interviews that appeared when sex, lies, and videotape opened, and you were very frank about this ba
d patch in your personal life. It seems to me the Peter Gallagher character is an extension of all of that.

  SS: Yeah. I definitely thought that the film was a flip side of sex, lies, in the sense that I was never really happy with the ending of that film; I think in the long run it’s probably a mistake to go back, and this was a way to rectify that in my own mind, to make something that I felt was a little more emotionally accurate. And also it was the opportunity to see what the relationship was beforehand—in sex, lies, there’s this reference to this person from the past and we never really got to know what that relationship was about. This sort of provided the opportunity to show what he had left, what he was trying to correct. That was intriguing to me, and obviously represents the biggest difference between The Underneath and the original Criss Cross, in that you never saw what the characters’ relationship was like before. I went through several different concepts of what that relationship was like until I settled on the one that’s in the film. I tried out different sorts of addictions, different types of aberrant behavior, different structures. For a while—it was really confusing—the distant past was actually told in reverse order, and when I looked at a cut of the film like that it confused even people that were familiar with the film. I thought: That’s a little too clever for its own good, so we straightened it out.