Steven Soderbergh

by Anthony Kaufman

  SJ: One of the film’s most remarkable features is your use of scenes from Ken Loach’s 1967 movie Poor Cow, in which Stamp played another thief to show his character in flashbacks.

  SS: In cinema you can follow actors over a long period—you can really see the accumulation of someone’s life experience. So the idea of using Ken’s film was intriguing, and as far as I know no one had done that before. There was a lengthy process to get the rights because Poor Cow was based on a book by Nell Dunn, and Carol White, who was in the scenes we wanted to use, was dead. It went on for months and didn’t get completely resolved until we were editing. Then I met with Ken and said, “Look, I’ve got this cleared up legally, but morally I can’t do it if you think it’s offensive.” But when I explained what I was doing, he said it was fine.

  SJ: When you took receipt of your Palme d’Or for sex, lies, and videotape you said: “It’s all downhill from here.” Do you now feel that has been true of your career?

  SS: I was being facetious, but what I meant was that it seemed unlikely I would ever again be the recipient of such unified acclaim. A lot of people never are, and to get it for my first movie seemed almost comical. The Palme d’Or helped me hugely—it made a name for me in Europe, where people sometimes like my movies more than they do in the States—but if sex, lies had made only half a million dollars nobody would be talking about it today. It was modest piece with modest aspirations that happened to be what people wanted to see in a way I obviously haven’t been able to duplicate. It was pure chance: I have a strong feeling that had it been made a year later it wouldn’t have hit in the same way.

  SJ: Unlike many younger American independent filmmakers, you didn’t use the success of your first film as a springboard to a commercial Hollywood career. Are you happy now with the choices you made?

  SS: Let’s put it this way, I don’t regret any of them. There have been good ones and bad ones, but I look back and think, “That’s an eclectic group of movies that, for better or worse, belong to me.” I turned down a lot of studio stuff—or rather traditional studio stuff, because two of my films were made by Universal—until Out of Sight, which seemed the perfect blend of what I do and the resources a studio can provide.

  SJ: What is the difference between coming in on a preexisting project and creating a film from scratch?

  SS: With a screenplay that didn’t come from you, you get on that train and it takes a while to start driving it. But you work your way through each car until you get to the front, and once you’re close to shooting there’s really no difference. By then you usually have a healthy disrespect for—or sense of detachment from—the material, even if you’ve written it yourself. When we rehearsed Out of Sight I started cutting lines because, though Elmore Leonard writes great dialogue, it seemed in scenes like the last one there wasn’t a lot to be said. That’s one of the differences between a book and a movie. I met someone recently who was in Days of Heaven and she said there was lots of dialogue in the script, but when they got on the set Terence Malick would go, “Don’t say anything.” When you look at the film you realize that he ended up having to write all that voiceover in post-production because nobody said anything so nobody knew what was going on! You think, “Oh, that’s such a great example of stripping everything away,” and then you find out why he did it. Sometimes it’s better not to know too much.

  SJ: Along with Barry Sonnenfeld’s Get Shorty and Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown, Out of Sight ushered in a revival of interest in Elmore Leonard, whose work had rarely been successfully translated into film.

  SS: Quentin Tarantino’s rise has so much to do with Elmore Leonard’s world, as he would be the first to admit, that by the time a “real” Leonard adaptation showed up in the form of Get Shorty, everyone had been prepared by Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction for that tone. Actually Get Shorty, Jackie Brown, and Out of Sight are textbook examples of what a director does, because they all three feel like Elmore Leonard movies but are completely different from each other. When you try to explain what it is you do, this is it: you take a piece of material, it’s filtered through your eyes and ears, and it comes out with a very specific atmosphere.

  SJ: Your films have a lyrical, dreamlike quality that gives them an almost European flavor.

  SS: When I was at university I’d see one, sometimes two movies a night: films like 8½ or The Third Man or A Hard Day’s Night. I was drawn to European cinema—its approach to character was more complicated and stylistically it seemed more rigorous and interesting. When you see an Antonioni film at an impressionable age it has a huge impact. Everything on screen is there for a reason—even Zabriskie Point, which is odd and flawed, is astonishing to look at.

  SJ: What’s your prognosis for the new generation of U.S. indie directors?

  SS: It’s much harder for them today. The expectations are much higher and the competition is much fiercer. It’s easier to get a film made now because sex, lies and a handful of others have made money. But it’s much more difficult to get it released because the marketplace is very competitive and distributors are not as adventurous as they used to be.

  SJ: What about your future plans?

  SS: I’ve just made Erin Brockovich, which is an aggressively linear reality-based drama about a twice-divorced mother-of-three living at a very low-income level who talks herself into a job answering the phone and ends up putting together a case against a large California utility company that results in the biggest direct-action lawsuit settlement in history. She’s played by Julia Roberts—if you’re trying to sneak something under the wire, by which I mean an adult, intelligent film with no sequel potential, no merchandising, no high concept, and no big hook, it’s nice to have one of the world’s most bankable stars sneaking under with you. Other than that, I’m riding off madly in all directions. I’ve always had one foot in and one foot out of Hollywood—that’s what makes me comfortable. Together with Scott Frank, who adapted Out of Sight, I’m writing an original spec screenplay that’s a multi-character murder mystery along the lines of an Agatha Christie. And I’m making notes for Son of Schizopolis—the sequel to the film nobody saw.

  Emotion, Truth, and Celluloid

  Michael Sragow / 2000

  This article, from January 6, 2000, first appeared in Salon.com. An online version remains in the Salon archives. Reprinted by permission.

  In 1995, Steven Soderbergh had reached a career dead end, just six years after igniting the independent-film craze with his debut film, sex, lies, and videotape—a movie he recently (and correctly) characterized for the British film mag Sight and Sound as “a modest piece with modest aspirations that happened to be what people wanted to see in a way I obviously haven’t been able to duplicate.” His pastiche Kafka (1990) and Depression-childhood saga King of the Hill (1993) didn’t spark with audiences or generate critical or cult followings. He simply floundered in his flop ’95 neo-noir The Underneath, smothering snappy lines and arresting arcs of character with arty coups de cinema.

  But in 1998, he came up with Out of Sight, a smart, engaging action comedy about the love that ignites between a bank robber (George Clooney) and a deputy federal marshal (Jennifer Lopez) when she stumbles into his jailbreak and gets to know him in the trunk of a getaway car. It won best picture of the year from the National Society of Film Critics, beating out favorites like Shakespeare in Love and Saving Private Ryan. (The group also named Soderbergh, not Spielberg, best director.) And Soderbergh’s The Limey, which opened last fall and ranks high on many a ten-best list, is an unexpectedly touching act of hard-boiled cinematic seduction. It tells the story of a canny British ex-con (Terence Stamp) who flies to L.A. to exact revenge on the man who killed his daughter. Soderbergh puts this basic thriller setup into a time-hopping form that resembles an elaborate paper cutout—the kind that comes all raveled up and reveals its true meaning when the last piece is uncovered.

  Like Out of Sight, The Limey is a light movie, not a superficial one. Soderbergh has learned tha
t an audience will follow any director to what lies underneath as long as he keeps his film expressive on the surface. History and current events meld in the ex-con’s brain, as he thinks back on his daughter and her mother. But Soderbergh does more than play memory games with fleet flash-forwards and flashbacks. At the end we realize that the entire film has been the gangster remembering things past and judging his own culpability.

  The Limey is a salute to 1967 filmmaking: It echoes John Boorman’s Point Blank and actually uses footage of Stamp playing a young thief in Kenneth Loach’s Poor Cow. So it’s wonderfully appropriate that Soderbergh has come forth with a book on filmmaker Richard Lester, who by 1967 had already made A Hard Day’s Night, Help! and the audacious How I Won the War.

  Soderbergh’s Getting Away with It, Or: The Further Adventures of the Luckiest Bastard You Ever Saw—Also Starring Richard Lester as the Man Who Knew More Than He Was Asked was published in Great Britain in 1999. It treats movie fans to a funny, prismatically illuminating experience.

  In addition to his penetrating interviews with Lester, Soderbergh sandwiches in the candid journal of a chaotic year in his own career—1996, right after The Underneath and right before he landed the directing job on Out of Sight. He was finishing up two idiosyncratic, small films, Schizopolis and Gray’s Anatomy, while doing script work for hire, staging Jonathan Reynolds’s play Geniuses, helping to produce Pleasantville and struggling to mount an adaptation of A Confederacy of Dunces.

  What’s neat about Getting Away with It is that you witness Soderbergh renewing himself as he talks to Lester. The younger director opens up to the older one, who delves into matters as different as evolutionary theory and military milestones. Even the structure of the book expresses Soderbergh’s burgeoning energy: It’s a delicious parody of the exhaustive, multi-part director interview—a specialty of Soderbergh’s own publisher, Faber and Faber. Soderbergh’s readers were the first in their arthouse or multiplex to hear the name of Being John Malkovich screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. In 1996 Soderbergh had tried to launch another Kaufman script, Human Nature. The director’s readers were also the first to learn of “tortious interference,” the legal concept at the center of Michael Mann’s The Insider: Paramount invoked it to prevent Soderbergh and his Limey producer Scott Kramer from setting up A Confederacy of Dunces as a co-venture with other companies.

  Most important, the book delivers a privileged glimpse into the sensibilities of filmmakers who use sophisticated film syntax to heighten emotion and find novel ways of embodying old storytelling values of romance, suspense, and catharsis. When I phoned Soderbergh in L.A. in December, he was taking a pause from his forthcoming feature Erin Brockovich (due out in March). He instantly made clear that Lester isn’t his only idol. He said that Erin Brockovich, a socially conscious character study starring Julia Roberts, fit “the John Huston plan for career longevity: Never become too hip or faddish.”

  Michael Sragow: When will Getting Away with It get an official U.S. publication?

  Steven Soderbergh: Most of Faber and Faber’s stuff usually shows up here, but as you probably gleaned from the book they can be somewhat erratic. I still haven’t got my box of author’s copies!

  MS: That’s unfortunate, because it has a lot of topical hooks, including the first mention between book covers of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. Your comment on his Human Nature script—you call it indescribable except for being “very weird” and “hysterically funny”—hits home for anyone who’s seen Being John Malkovich.

  SS: About four years ago, I asked a friend of mine who had some experience in the development-reading world to help me find something to do. She called two weeks after I said I’d hire her and told me “I found the guy.” She sent me Malkovich and Human Nature. At that time Malkovich was already set up; it was obvious that this guy was going to happen. I got to hang out with him while we were trying to get Human Nature set up, and I liked him enormously.

  MS: I really enjoyed interviewing him, but he didn’t want to reveal too much of himself or analyze his own work.

  SS: He’s probably, in the long run, pretty smart to do that. I still have fantasies myself of pulling a Terrence Malick. It’s really a silly problem, but it’s frustrating to be in a situation where you become bored with speaking about what you love to do for a living. You find yourself hating not just the sound of your voice, but hearing it make the work that you do sound boring. It’s a terrible sensation. You definitely get to a point where you feel like a homeless person babbling on a corner, saying the same thing over and over to very little effect.

  In the long run I don’t know how much good talking does. I don’t think audiences pay too much attention—people who want to go to a movie will go. When you look at the selling part of the business, everything that everybody does for every movie feels the same. We did a ton of press for The Limey. Maybe it would have done even worse if we hadn’t, but I can’t say what helped and what didn’t.

  MS: The Limey is loved by the people I know who’ve seen it; I’m surprised to hear you say it didn’t do well.

  SS: It did really well in New York and L.A., so for a lot of people the perception of it is that it did fine.

  MS: Much of your book is about trying to maintain enthusiasm and energy over the course of a career. There’s a wonderful interplay between you and Lester—almost as if you started the book out of devotion to his movies but then had these revelations about your own films.

  SS: It emerged from this period when I felt I had to start over again. I think there are two components to doing that successfully. One is regaining enthusiasm about your own work. The other is regaining enthusiasm about other people’s work.

  When I see people who I think have become either cynical artistically or just competitive to the point of self-destruction, what they share is the loss of appreciation for anything that anybody else is doing. Seeing something good should make you want to do something good; if you’re not careful, you can lose that. And that can hurt you. I still get a charge out of seeing a really good movie or reading a really good book or watching The Sopranos on TV.

  Working my way through Lester’s films, and doing these interviews with him, I was reinvigorating myself. And there was also something cautionary about it. Lester did stop working for a variety of reasons. So for me there is the element, whether it’s spoken or not, of “Wow, will that happen to me? And to all of us?”

  MS: There are recurring topics and themes in the book. You talk a lot about one ofLester’s favorite actors, Roy Kinnear, who died after he fell from a horse during the making of Lester’s last film, The Return of the Musketeers. You touch on whether Lester’s atheism made him feel more responsible for the accident than he would have if he’d believed in a divine plan, and hastened his departure from filmmaking. It makes the reader confront the moviemaker as a person, not a technician.

  SS: I think that’s what we were both hoping for. Between the Q and A and the journal, I just thought it was perhaps relevant to somebody to portray the process of what it’s like to be a person who happens to do this for a living as opposed to a portrait of a filmmaker. It was hard. I was working while I was doing it and it was a massive editing job. I had thirty-five hours of interviews with him, and the journal I had was probably five times the length of what you read.

  MS: And then you have all these self-deprecating footnotes, which touch on comic battles with your editors at Faber and Faber. You have a jokey “Note from Your Publisher” and two mock author’s notes, including an introduction that will contain an “Awesome display of ego disguised as humility; joke about same.” Even the title and the cover design make your book feel as irreverent as a Lester movie.

  SS: The footnote idea came late because I felt something was missing; one more deconstructed element was needed. So in the last two weeks just before I turned it in, I came up with the idea of a fictional person at Faber who hates me. The copy editors at Faber got a huge kick out of the “inside” view of how the company
works. I mean, I love all the director books they do, “So-and-so on so-and-so”; I’ve got all of them. But I thought, We’ve got to tart this up a bit. We’ve got to put on some bells and whistles, so if somebody picks it up off the shelf they’ll feel they have to buy it.

  MS: A lot of younger directors, as different as Danny Boyle (Trainspotting) and Stacy Cochran (My New Gun) and Michael Patrick Jann (Drop Dead Gorgeous), have taken inspiration from Lester’s movies.

  SS: And I know in some cases they are taking the right things from his work—not just the visual dexterity of, “oh, if I shoot a lot of images and do a lot of cutting, it will be just like a Richard Lester movie.” There’s a lot more thought behind it than that. We would all do well to look behind the surface at some of the ideas he’s trying to put across, because he’s an intelligent guy and he expressed a point of view—especially, in his peak years, about society at large.

  I think he has a genuine interest and appreciation for people who do not have power. And I think that’s getting lost a lot these days. I was talking to a buddy of mine who went into a meeting with some executives and they were describing a lead character in a project they wanted to do. “He’s one of these guys, he really has the town wired; he knows everyone and he’s doing all these things.” We were just sitting there going, “Who is that? We don’t know anybody like that. And who, of the people who would go see this movie, knows anyone like that?” The idea that you can make a movie about an ordinary person is almost gone.

  MS: Usually, when you talk about a director of ideas, you think of someone cerebral or self-conscious. But Lester at his best is downright blithe about getting his ideas to the screen.

  SS: That’s the other thing that I took from him, which has helped me enormously in the last few films, including the one I’m finishing now (Erin Brockovich). How should I describe it? Tossing things off, instead of being labored about what you do. I’m serious about what I do, but I think there’s a real benefit to not being precious and working quickly and going strictly on instinct. It’s something I lost and I absolutely got back from him.