Steven Soderbergh

by Anthony Kaufman

  Soderbergh’s commitment to roughing up his style coincided with a waning interest in autobiography. “I had come to the end of anything that I had to say about myself that was compelling, and I just got more interested in other people’s stories. My last few films have not really been about me or anyone in my peer group, and I think they’re much more interesting to sit through for that.” Out of Sight is often cited as the movie that jump-started the Soderbergh renaissance, but the real resuscitation began with the two films he made back-to-back in 1995.

  Burned out and disheartened after The Underneath, he retreated to his hometown of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to “start over again, get in touch with the enthusiasm of the amateur.” The results: Gray’s Anatomy, a Spalding Gray ocular-disease monologue filmed with a frantic emphasis on the visual, and, crucially, one final riotous burst of quasi-autobiography, Schizopolis, which Soderbergh directed, wrote, shot, and starred in. Made with borrowed equipment and a five-person crew (all old friends), the anarchic experiment had exactly the galvanizing effect Soderbergh had hoped for. “I was so wrapped up in my own shit that I wasn’t looking out the window. I was just hanging out in my own house with the blinds drawn and the music on and not answering the phone. Schizopolis was about detonating that house, blowing it up and putting myself in a position where I couldn’t go back anymore.”

  An elaborate Mobius strip that entwines deranged semiotic games, doppelganger metaphysics, and bawdy sketch comedy, Schizopolis (in this writer’s admittedly minority opinion, the most undervalued American film of the nineties) is a funny, poignant psychodrama about (among other things) the fallibility and futility of communication, specifically the death of language in a relationship. At the time Soderbergh was not only reeling from his Hollywood misadventures but enduring a painful breakup and, as if to call attention to the personal subtext, he cast his soon-to-be-ex-wife, actress Betsy Brantley, and their daughter, Sarah, as his on-screen family in Schizopolis. “It probably crossed the line from personal into private filmmaking,” he dryly remarks.

  Via published journals, numerous interviews, even his Schizopolis persona, Soderbergh has over the years been subjected to a good deal more analysis—and self-analysis—than your average film director. His fairy-tale beginning ensured that backlash was encoded in the Soderbergh narrative—something the shellshocked twenty-six-year-old neophyte must have recognized when he accepted the Cannes Palme d’Or in 1989 with the words: “Well, I guess it’s all downhill from here.” (Another semi-mythic early anecdote has Soderbergh’s hero, Richard Lester, telling him in Park City: “It gets harder, you know.”) Talk of impossible expectations, squandered promise, and even self-sabotage swirled around the defiantly ambitious Kafka, the Depression-era coming-of-age tale King of the Hill, and The Underneath, obscuring the fact that the films were never without merit and collectively represented a thoughtful, questing attempt to stay independent. Even in evaluations of the subsequent up-swing, the director’s psyche was central. As he was emerging from his crisis with Schizopolis and Gray’s, the Los Angeles Times obligingly ran a huge profile headlined “The Funk of Steven Soderbergh.” Promoting Out of Sight in the New York Times, star George Clooney theorized that the director suffered from a fear of success.

  To complicate matters, Soderbergh is given to his own public displays of soul-searching. His latest book, Getting Away with It, Or: The Further Adventures of the Luckiest Bastard You Ever Saw (published a year ago in the U.K., just out here) flip-flops between thorough, insightful interviews with Richard Lester and journal entries over a twelve-month period starting March 1996—a trying time during which Soderbergh worked with director Henry Selick on the screenplay for Toots and the Upside Down House (never made), polished scripts for schlocky thrillers Mimic and Nightwatch (barely seen), struggled to secure distribution deals for Gray’s and Schizopolis, developed a project called Human Nature (written by Charlie “Being John Malkovich” Kaufman, since filmed by Michel Gondry), and looked for a paying job that would serve as his reentry to Hollywood (he settled, reluctantly at first, for Out of Sight).

  Soderbergh’s writing voice is a humorously exaggerated version of the chronically self-deprecating deadpan that he tends to deploy in conversation. (The diary that accompanies the sex, lies, and videotape screen-play is similarly wry, a success story narrated with mounting incredulity.) While the Getting Away journal is often surprisingly frank, its most revealing aspect may be the constant self-laceration, which eventually registers as protective irony; it’s clear too that Soderbergh is aware—and somewhat disgusted—that the book exists ultimately as a form of self-promotion. (Unsurprisingly, the author of these endlessly reflexive, obsessively footnoted entries confesses to a David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers fixation. “It’s not just postmodern bullshit, but I think an attempt to get at something emotional.”)

  Soderbergh doesn’t hesitate to name names in the journal (from studio honchos to film critics) and, though he’s calmed down considerably, has never been afraid to ruffle Hollywood plumage. He got off to a spectacularly impolitic start, referring to Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson in a Rolling Stone interview as “slime barely passing for human.” He had a falling out with Robert Redford over Quiz Show, which Soderbergh was at one point supposed to direct, and King of the Hill, which Redford had initially agreed to executive produce. He later found himself in a protracted legal battle with superproducer Scott Rudin over the rights to the John Kennedy Toole novel A Confederacy of Dunces (the suit was eventually settled out of court in Soderbergh’s favor).

  Soderbergh is more comfortable in Hollywood now than he’s ever been (though he’s moving to New York once he completes his next film, Ocean’s Eleven), and he says it’s largely because he has a firmer handle on the pragmatics of the job. “I’ve gotten better at determining the key points in the process where I need to focus on incredible amounts of attention for a very short period of time.” He says he performs better at pitch meetings too. “You want to create the impression that this train is gonna leave without them if they don’t jump on. I think the sensation is probably that the trains that I’m talking about move a little faster than the ones I used to be talking about.”

  There may be a new confidence to Soderbergh, but even his most upbeat declarations are buried in self-effacement. “I was in my apprenticeship for some time and I guess I’m now finally open for business. You know, I was sort of working in the backroom, learning my craft, and now I feel, you know, OK, store’s open, let’s go, fire sale.” His declining compulsion to serve as both writer and director played a part in reviving his career: “I’m not good at writing scripts for other people to direct, which only leaves me able to write for myself, and I can’t generate an original screenplay every eighteen months because I’m not interesting enough.” All the same, Soderbergh says he’s “really psyched” about his latest undertaking: He’s midway through the first draft of a script for a remake of Tarkovsky’s Solaris (to be produced by James Cameron), which will “return to the Stanislaw Lem novel and add several of my personal preoccupations.” He’s reluctant to get into specifics (“It’s just going to sound awful”) but says, “Conceptually it would be one of the most ambitious things I’ve attempted.”

  Meanwhile, he’s working on a Son of Schizopolis project: “It’s going to be even more out of control but will have a clearer narrative. The people who liked Schizopolis really responded to the energy and the fact that it threatens to derail every thirty seconds. If I graft that energy onto a narrative that’s possibly moving toward something, people might dig it more.” He’s also developing a football comedy, Leatherheads, with George Clooney and plans at some point to adapt John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor.

  Soderbergh starts shooting Ocean’s Eleven, a remake of the first Rat Pack movie, in February with a cast of heavyweights (Clooney, Pitt, Roberts, Damon). He’s apprehensive about cinematography duties: “It’s a much bigger film physically than Traffic and it requires a slicker look. Unfortunate
ly I sense it’s going to be a hell of a lot more fun to watch than it will be to make.” Lewis Milestone’s original, he concedes, was “more notorious than good. I can’t be along in being somewhat agog that it was directed by the guy who made All Quiet on the Western Front. I mean, talk about range.” But the new script, by Ted Griffin, is a substantial revamp. Soderbergh asserts, a little grandly: “Ocean’s Eleven will be the apex of my yielding to whatever populist instincts I might have. This will be potentially the most indulgent I’ll ever be toward that side of my personality.”

  On January 14, his thirty-eighth birthday, Soderbergh will be in town to collect his Best Director award from the New York Film Critics Circle (which also gave Traffic its Best Picture prize). “It kills me that my dad can’t see this,” he says. His father, who died three years ago, was a Louisiana State University professor who enrolled Steven in a film class while he was still in high school; Soderbergh took his father’s first two names for his pseudonymous cinematography credit on Traffic: Peter Andrews. “He was raised in New York, and to him it was the epicenter, the arbiter of everything. He would have gone out of his mind. I try and remember that. My dad would be levitating right now.”

  Soderbergh says he’s still figuring out how to process the accolades after years of being the underdog. “There’s no question that I’m more comfortable as a disappointment and not having people watch me. I will always be more comfortable in that position. I also recognize that it’s very self-limiting, personally and professionally, and I have to find a balance somehow between my ambitions and my desires to keep my life and my world manageable.” For now, he’s steeling himself for the publicity glare of what promises to be a very busy awards season. “The problem is it totally takes you out of yourself, and that’s something I have trouble with anyway—I don’t need more things to contribute to that. But it’s so fucking nice and I don’t want to be a sad sack. When sex, lies happened, I martyred myself out of enjoying it. And you know, it’s disingenuous and borderline offensive not to enjoy it. I’m going to try to this time.”

  Soderbergh on Soderbergh:

  “This is the career I envisioned. I was very vocal early on that I intended to try a lot of different things and that I had no rules about who was writing the checks. It’s an interesting group of films, some successful, some not, but there isn’t a lot of repetition.”

  sex, lies, and videotape (1989): “Almost by definition, anything that people respond to with that kind of intensity is dated. Something was in the air that people connected to, and I wouldn’t even pretend to know or attempt to analyze it—you’d drive yourself crazy trying to duplicate it.”

  Kafka (1991): “I wish I were older when I’d made it. I didn’t have the chops yet to pull it off. It’s just not fun enough; it was never intended to be really serious but that doesn’t come across.”

  King of the Hill (1993): “It was an attempt to make a classical, straightforward narrative, and also in trying to stretch as a director, I’d always heard kids were a real chore, and I thought, well, let’s try it. I wish it were grittier, but it’s a solid piece of American filmmaking. It’s the least European of the first four and that was part of its appeal: Can I strip myself of my Antonioni obsession?”

  The Underneath (1995): “It’s the coldest of the films I’ve made. There’s something somnambulant about it. I was sleepwalking in my life and my work, and it shows. It offered some challenges in terms of fractured narrative that I was interested in, just not interested enough. The star of that movie, to my mind, is the cinematographer, Elliot Davis.”

  Schizopolis/Gray’s Anatomy (1996): “One was an exercise in verbal and narrative abstraction, the other in visual abstraction, and both of them defined the edges and gave me a shape to work within that I hadn’t had before. They’ve both informed every film that I’ve made since.”

  Out of Sight (1998): “The stakes are higher when you’re playing in an arena of that size. There’s more pressure, more people watching. But I think this helped me get over any fear I might have had because I had such a great time making it and people seemed to like it a lot. I came away feeling it was a good thing to have done.”

  The Limey (1999): “You could, without risking offense, call it a minor work. But it was important for me because of the opportunity it provided to experiment with narrative and indulge some ideas left over from Out of Sight.”

  Erin Brockovich (2000): “Like most people, I don’t like to be lectured, so I was going strictly on my own instincts about how I want to be spoken to by a movie. You know, it’s a Rocky movie, but the point was to make a good one, and that means not having a raised-fist courtroom scene at the end but finding a more oblique way to pay homage to the history of the genre.”

  Man of the Year: Steven Soderbergh Traffics in Success

  Anthony Kaufman / 2000

  From Indiewire.com, published online January 3, 2001. Reprinted by permission.

  You don’t get a better or busier year in this business than Steven Soderbergh got in Y2K. While Erin Brockovich was breaking $100 million at the box office, Soderbergh’s 1999 release The Limey was still winning critical acclaim (with five 2000 Independent Spirit Award nominations). He was also beginning production on his tenth feature film, Traffic, an astutely interlaced story about drug trafficking, which starred newlyweds Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones, and which he shot much of himself. Traffic went on to win a Best Picture nod from the New York Film Critics Circle, and Soderbergh received multiple awards and nominations from citywide and national critics associations all the way to the Hollywood Foreign Press (with two Golden Globe noms, for Traffic and Erin Brockovich). Last year also saw the publication of his second book, Getting Away with It, Or: The Further Adventures of the Luckiest Bastard You Ever Saw, which includes musings on his own work, and conversations with British director Richard Lester (A Hard Day’s Night). Lucky bastard? That, and a lot of skill.

  But success has not spoiled Steven Soderbergh. He remains the same humble, self-doubting, and talented director that made sex, lies, and videotape in 1988 and, consequently, “independent film” a household phrase. With each film, Soderbergh continues to take on new challenges; whether the fractured timeline of The Limey, the push-up bras of Julia Roberts, or the jigsaw puzzle of story and tone in Traffic, he continues to evolve as one of our most accomplished contemporary directors.

  Before the release of Traffic and right in the middle of prep for Ocean’s Eleven—Soderbergh’s adaptation of the 1960 Rat Pack classic—the Studio-Independent hybrid spoke extensively with Indiewire’s Anthony Kaufman about chasing the story, working as a DP/director, shooting beneath a helicopter, his fickle experience with the Studios, and “controlled anarchy.”

  Anthony Kaufman: So last night I saw A Hard Day’s Night in preparation to talk to you and it occurred to me that Traffic is influenced by it, with the same sort of documentary feel. Would you agree?

  Steven Soderbergh: There’s the reportage aspect of the aesthetic, yes. . . . All of the Lester stuff is informing what I’m up to lately, along with a handful of other people. Always Godard. Anybody who is doing anything interesting is ripping off Godard in some way. For this film, I spent a lot of time analyzing Battle of Algiers and Z—both of which have that great feeling of things that are caught, instead of staged, which is what we were after. I just wanted that sensation of chasing the story, this sense that it may outrun us if we don’t move quickly enough. And there’s a lot of that in Lester’s films, especially those from the 1960s.

  AK: This documentary approach that infuses Traffic is helped by you being behind the camera. Which leads me to the question: were you insane? It must just have been relentless working as director of photography and director.

  SS: It is. But it’s so satisfying. Because you’re getting what you want all day. I certainly underestimated the restorative value of being able to leave the set for five minutes, which you cannot do when you are your own cinematographer. Literally. I couldn
’t go to the bathroom until lunch-time. Because I had to sit there and make sure things we’re going. Or we were shooting. Most of our day was spent shooting. The lion’s share of the film is shot available light, so we showed up early, ready to shoot. But in this case, it felt so organic that it didn’t really feel like I was doing another job. It felt very much like when I was making my short films. It was a very stripped down crew. It was really just: Let’s show up and shoot.

  My production sound-mixer who I’ve known since I was thirteen and was one of the college students that I was hanging out with and making films with when I was growing up, sent me an e-mail when it was all done, saying, “This was the closest to what I imagined it could be like when we were making our own films and imagined making bigger films.” This one, I felt like we finally captured . . . we transplanted that sense of work and play that we had in Baton Rouge twenty years ago on to this large-scale production. That was a nice note to get, because I had felt it too, because I think it translates. I know the actors like it.

  AK: How many people did you have on your crew?

  SS: There was me, a second-camera operator, the gaffer, the key-grip, even the grip and electric departments were only three deep each, so it was a pretty tight group. There’s no video assists; none of that shit.

  AK: That’s a bold decision, especially when now everyone is relying on stuff like the video assist.