Steven Soderbergh

by Anthony Kaufman

  Gavin Smith: So you were working with Scott Z. Burns on a screenplay about Leni Riefenstahl, decided there wasn’t a big enough audience for it, and switched to what became Contagion. Why was this the moment to embrace something commercial after years of paying no heed to it?

  Steven Soderbergh: There’ve been a few times when I’ve spent a couple of years working on something for short money and then having nobody go see it, and that’s frustrating. You’re right: ten years ago I probably wouldn’t have said that, maybe even pre-Che I might not have said that. But coming out of that and feeling like I’ve only got a handful left to go, it just didn’t seem like a very smart idea.

  GS: And if this or your upcoming project The Man From U.N.C.L.E. is a hit, making a comeback will be that much easier.

  SS: Yeah, but it won’t matter. When you’re dealing with an art form that is this expensive, your past performance is used for or against you. I’ve tried to use whatever juice I might have had at certain points to get stuff made that I knew would be difficult. Certainly as soon as Scott said he’d like to make an ultra-realistic film about a pandemic, that felt to me like a good idea. This is the stuff movies do well. And the subject’s fascinating.

  GS: Oddly it’s never been done before—Outbreak wasn’t about a pandemic.

  SS: And the science isn’t accurate. We were trying to find a way to keep it intimate. We had this rule that we can’t go anywhere or show images from a place that our characters haven’t been. So there’s no shot of Paris. That forces you to think laterally. I knew I was going to create a situation where I might be asked to scale it up a bit—kind of disaster it up and show more cities and more dead people. Scott and I wanted to avoid that.

  GS: What other rules did you set yourself?

  SS: I wanted to keep it really simple, as simple as I’ve ever been. No handheld, three lenses basically, no moving the camera unless the character’s moving. No multiple sizes of coverage: if I picked a size, then that’s the size I would use for the scene. Because there’s so much information and I don’t want anything distracting from the performance. I’m not thinking, how many shots do I need to do this? I think, how few? There’s something really freeing in having rules that are that strict, because the solutions are pretty obvious. There’s something great about shooting a scene and thinking that it’s not much more complicated than what Griffith would have done.

  GS: What overall look or feel were you going for?

  SS: You could probably count on one hand the number of shots where we were actually lighting. Almost the whole film was available light. The other thing is the weird paradox of making a movie in which you don’t want people to behave like they’re in a movie. That starts in the writing, then continues through the performance and the framing of the performance.

  GS: When you say the framing of the performance, what do you mean?

  SS: I mean compositionally, what you’re emphasizing within the frame. It’s what I call the “Can the camera be in the refrigerator” question. And this is a movie where the camera cannot be in the refrigerator. Except for certain very specific pockets, namely when somebody’s sick or in the flashbacks to Gwyneth, it’s what I call objective directing. The Ocean’s films are subjective directing, in which I know the outcome visually of each scene and I’m indicating that by how I’m meeting things.

  GS: What things did you want to avoid?

  SS: Crying. [Laughs] I was trying to avoid the typical image of somebody weeping over a dead person. Maybe I’m playing right into the accusations that I’m a cold director. The point is that we were looking for ways to create emotions that weren’t typical. I liked the moment when Matt finds his wife’s camera at the end because for him it comes out of nowhere. He’s had to keep his shit together because he’s got his daughter to deal with. And there’s just shock—the way that his wife and his stepson die is very abrupt. And I liked that nobody else sees [her photos]. A better word for it is restraint or a lack of sentimentality. There’s nothing that ages a movie faster than sentimentality. The stuff that holds up is the stuff that refuses to fall into that trap of doing anything to get a reaction out of you.

  GS: After we saw it Amy Taubin described the film as “efficient.” I can’t top that.

  SS: It’s the perfect word. I wanted the film to be as ruthless in its efficiency as the virus is. That’s why there’s an hour plus of edited material that’s not in the film. At a certain point it wasn’t feeling right, and I went in and did a really radical cut, which is pretty much what you see.

  GS: What was removed?

  SS: A lot of stuff that was clearly filigree. A lot more science. Stuff that worked better when you knew less. There was this one section I was really having trouble with, one of the character’s stories, where I realized, Oh, I can just lose this and leap from here to here, and I don’t need the middle. At this point in my working life, to realize that those things are still possible is both exciting and depressing. Because I feel like that should have been obvious sooner. The only thing I’ll miss, frankly, is editing.

  GS: There are five overlapping plots but there’s also the Marion Cotillard storyline, which is detached from the others. What was your thinking in terms of structure?

  SS: When we began to understand who we were going to follow and what happens when a pandemic begins, I said, Well, one of these is going backwards, in essence. Cotillard is swimming upstream against everything else to try and figure out where this thing started. That’s something that cinema does better than any other art form: play with time. But so much of the structure changed in the editing room. There were no day indications or population cards in the script. It always started with Gwyneth at the airport, and it always ended with her at the restaurant, but everything else in between moved around quite a bit. There was a lot of trial and error. I changed the temp score three times, which sort of drove [composer] Cliff Martinez nuts.

  In the script stage it was hard to judge when to dip in and out of stuff. I was flying blind a little bit and just going off the knowledge that Scott’s capable of writing interesting scenes, and at the end of the day, as long as we had a pile of interesting scenes to work with, there would be a way to sort this out.

  GS: You make extensive use of unusual montages that compress a lot of action to advance the narrative.

  SS: My editor Stephen Mirrione refers to it as “collapsing.” I’ll say to him, I want you to collapse all of that, and he knows exactly what that means. It became obvious at a certain point that things needed to be accelerated. For a while people were saying, “I’m way ahead of it, and there’s way too much information.” When Marion goes to Hong Kong, all those scenes were scripted dialogue scenes that are now part of a montage. Looking at it now, I do need to see her in each of those environments, but I don’t need to hear what she’s saying.

  GS: How long was the shoot?

  SS: Fifty-four and then four days of reshoots, so fifty-eight.

  GS: How long would it have been if you’d shot what you ended up with in the final cut?

  SS: [Pause] Forty-two.

  GS: So that’s a measurement of what happened in the cutting room.

  SS: Yeah. Scott and I were writing The Man From U.N.C.L.E. as we were cutting this, and a lot of these lessons went into the writing of that script, which is ninety-eight pages long. On Contagion, it’s not that we were inefficient; we came in on budget. But I hate waste. So on the one hand, all that matters is: do people like the movie, and is it going to return its investment? But we would both have been idiots not to have come out of that editorial experience writing differently.

  GS: Contagion is another in a series of How We Live Now films you’ve done, films about life in a globalized world.

  SS: That may be because of the kinds of films that I’m not interested in. Despite having made my name initially on a movie about the emotional lives of my theoretical peer group, I’m not really that interested in what I’d call White People Who Feel Empty movies. The Girl
friend Experience was not that to me because of the subject matter. At no point does the film ask you to take on the emotional lives of these Johns or whomever. Getting laid in movies doesn’t interest me. Why Doesn’t She Love Me? movies don’t interest me that much. I don’t think I’d know how to make a good one. So I guess it’s a reflection of my interests, and a desire to get out of the house and look in other places to see what’s going on.

  That being said, if I’m thinking about a project or subject, I have to judge my appetite for immersion in that particular world. And if I feel like I’m not meeting my standards for immersion, then I won’t do it. Filmmaking is the best way in the world to learn about something. When I come out the other side after making a film about a particular subject, I have exhausted my interest in it. After Contagion, I’m still going to be washing my hands, but I don’t ever—I’m not going to pick up another book or article about Che as long as I live.

  GS: What drew you to Haywire?

  SS: It grew out of a couple of different interests that I was able to sync up: one was to make a spy film in the vein of the early Bond films, the more eye-level ones. I’ve always wanted to make something with that feel. And I’ve always got one eye looking for interesting female protagonists, because when you have a female protagonist, the conflicts are immediately elevated because guys run everything. And then I see Gina Carano fighting in a cage on TV, a natural beauty just destroying people, and I thought, I can put all of these together and solve that problem.

  GS: And then you called Lem Dobbs.

  SS: As I reach my twilight I’ve started thinking about people I want to work with again and he was one of them. We didn’t have any of those head-bashing arguments. And he knows that shit better than anyone. He’s the one who turned me on to the scene from this Rod Taylor movie Darker Than Amber, a jaw-dropping fight scene where he destroys a hotel room and Lem said, “This is what we ought to be doing.” I’ve never had a movie where action was front and center. So that was my little pocket of fear; like, what is my contribution to this going to be?

  GS: How did you approach the fight sequences?

  SS: I hate cheating. I like a certain kind of cheating—figuring out how to cheat this interior for Rome, and having people believe it. I don’t like cheating where you’re doing something editorially or visually because you can’t deliver the real thing. So this was an opportunity to have everything happening within the frame without any kind of monkey business going on. And that was our approach in terms of the fights: we have no doubles, they’re really doing this stuff so I can shoot full-length. There’s only one stunt that isn’t Gina or one of the actors, and it’s when the cable breaks and she falls. And the other thing was no music over the fights. That was our rule.

  GS: Who dictated the moves in the hotel room fight?

  SS: The fight choreographers. That stuff doesn’t change at all. There’s no making shit up. Gina and Michael [Fassbender] were rehearsing that over and over again for weeks. With the beach fight, we took an approach that’s risky. We shot it over two days between 4:00 and 5:45 p.m. I had mapped out most of the shots, and then when it got to be 4:45, I’d say, “Okay, let’s go,” and we’d go through it as quickly as we could. I loved the idea of doing it in this very specific light. If you fuck that up, you got no net.

  GS: Why do that to yourself?

  SS: Because it’s beautiful. What am I going to do with this sequence that I haven’t done? And the answer was, I haven’t seen anything lately in which there are fifty-five setups shot exactly at the moment the sun is going down.

  GS: Does your approach to shooting have a default setting?

  SS: Well, there’s my taste. The difference can be inches up or down, this side, that side. What makes me angry in seeing any film that I don’t think is—“beautiful” is the wrong word—but . . . “organized,” is the knowledge that it doesn’t cost any more money to put the camera in the right place. It often saves money. In Haywire, in general, the camera is a lot lower, all the time. I’m shooting anamorphic, it’s a wider frame, and it gives things more power when you drop down. Whereas in Contagion, I’m usually at shoulder height, right at eye level.

  GS: How did you end up in Australia in 2009 directing the play Tot Mom and a film that you made with its cast, The Last Time I Saw Michael Gregg.

  SS: We were doing The Good German and Cate Blanchtt said, “Andrew [Upton] and I are going to take control of the Sydney Theatre Company next year. Have you ever had any interest in doing theater?” I’d done one play before, Geniuses by Jonathan Reynolds, back at LSU, and I’d really enjoyed doing it. So I went to Sydney and re-created the three episodes of the Nancy Grace show that deal with the Casey Anthony case. Nancy Grace only appears on this gigantic screen. And it’s all verbatim, it’s all transcripts. There’s a swamp with water in it in front that slowly drains through the course of the thing, and guys come in and find the skull in the bag. It was a ninety-minute thing. Somebody said to me, “It wasn’t a theater piece, it was a happening.”

  I had a great cast—so good that it became obvious that I didn’t need three weeks to rehearse. So we blocked it in two days, and then they just had a lot of lines to learn—they all played multiple characters. And I just had this sense that I was going to start losing them if I didn’t have something to keep them engaged. So I floated the idea of making a movie between our rehearsing and putting the play on.

  GS: And it had no relationship to Tot Mom?

  SS: In theory, the play that they’re staging in the film is Three Sisters. So we sat around for a week and came up with the characters and a series of situations that we would then build on, and shot the thing in ten days.

  GS: How do we see it?

  SS: Well, my whole thing was that it has to be unavailable. The actors each have copies of it. And I said, “You can bring people over to your house, and you can all watch it, but I don’t ever want it shown publicly.”

  GS: What’s to stop them from putting it up on YouTube?

  SS: I don’t know. Their relationship with me.

  GS: So, seriously, it’s never going to be shown? Not even after you die?

  SS: No. Well, I don’t know. Probably.

  GS: Is it good?

  SS: I honestly don’t know.

  GS: You’ve talked in the past about how being a filmmaker is about control, but in an interview in Empire you spoke of being interested in letting go and being in the moment, which is what acting’s about. Do you envy actors for the freedom they can experience?

  SS: No. There’s a different type of satisfaction that I get. I’m sure that it’s different from theirs, but I’m sure it’s as pronounced to me as theirs is to them.

  GS: What is it?

  SS: The moment of discovery. The moment where you realize how to do it. Or the moment where you see how it is, or what it should be. It’s as exciting for me as seeing an actor find it, and know this is how to pay testament to that by being here. It’s all about showing up and creating this environment where you’re keying off of what’s happening instead of dictating what’s happening. There’s a real pleasure to knowing that you didn’t force it, and that no one was diminished in the process of finding it.

  GS: That sense of discovery is also what an actor experiences though.

  SS: But I get to have it more, and about more things. I get to have it from the writing, through the editing, and they only get to have it that day on set. And a lot of times actors are dealing with people who don’t even see it, or if they see it they don’t know how to capture it. That lack of control would drive me insane.

  GS: Was there ever a time in the past ten years when you weren’t working on anything?

  SS: No.

  GS: And what was the most you were working at one time?

  SS: Right around the beginning of the year, we were shooting Contagion, writing The Man From U.N.C.L.E., prepping reshoots for Haywire, and shooting and editing this documentary about End of the Road. But it’s like going to t
he gym and going from one station to the next. You’re using different parts of your skill set, which is why it’s fun.

  GS: You need to take a break.

  SS: I can’t. I don’t have gears. I don’t have an on-off switch.

  GS: What’s your definition of a director’s job?

  SS: Having an approach. Having a take on a specific take.

  GS: What would you say are your weaknesses as a filmmaker in technical, aesthetic terms?

  SS: Visual stuff is harder for me than I wish it was. Designing the shots. I look at the regatta sequence in The Social Network and it makes my knees buckle. I don’t have that kind of facility. So I’m trying.

  GS: Ten years ago you told me that you and a few of your filmmaking pals were going to set each other exercises where you’d each have to make a film without resorting to any of the things in your bag of tricks. What happened with that?

  SS: The purification film? I’ve done a lot of that. The whole point is to shake you out of your thing, and I tend to find ways of doing that anyway.

  GS: Who was in the group f/64?

  SS: When we were going to do it together, it would’ve been each of us doing it for each other. There were five of us, and so the other four would do it for the one. It was me, Fincher, Spike Jonze, Sam Mendes, and Alexander Payne.

  GS: Why didn’t it happen?

  SS: Barry Diller sold USA [Network] to Universal like the week we were going to close it. It only worked if it were Switzerland. If it were attached in any way to a studio, it wouldn’t work. It had to be an independent entity. What I would love would be for someone to hand me a script that’s been cast, scouted, scheduled, you start tomorrow, and you have eighteen days. You’d have to create it on the spot, all of it.