Unretired, Soderbergh wants to pull a fast one on Hollywood

NEW YORK “Populist Pictures” reads the buzzer to Steven Soderbergh’s Tribeca office. You might easily mistake it as ironic. It’s a grand title for a little nameplate on an otherwise nondescript Manhattan building. But he means it. Four years after dramatically quitting moviemaking, Soderbergh is back with “Logan Lucky.” His hiatus — in the end so abbreviated as to be nonexistent — hasn’t been spent toying with a Major Artistic Statement to be showered in Oscar buzz. (He long ago lost his taste for self-serious prestige films.) Nor has he drastically remade himself as a filmmaker. “Logan Lucky” is a heist movie so similar to his “Ocean’s Eleven” films that the more down-and-out West Virginia characters of his caper even refer to their plot as “Ocean’s 7-11.”

“I thought the first line of every review would be, ‘He came out of retirement for this?’” said Soderbergh in a recent interview at his modest office. “Of course my answer to that would have been: The only thing I would have come out of retirement for is to make something like this. I wasn’t going to come out of retirement and not make something fun. Why would I do that?”

Instead, Soderbergh wants to prove a point. When he said goodbye to the movie business four years ago (and went off, in a filmmaking marathon, to direct every episode of the acclaimed Showtime series “The Knick”), he exited fed up with a riskadverse Hollywood unwilling to innovate, to problem solve, to shake up anything.

“Logan Lucky” isn’t just a comeback movie, it’s a grand experiment. Soderbergh independently financed the film, selling distribution rights to foreign territories to pay for the budget and then making ancillary deals (like Amazon) to pay for prints and ads. While ballooning marketing costs have made little beside franchise films appealing to major studios, Soderbergh believes he can put out “Logan Lucky” with a more modest marketing approach centred on the 10 days before release and the social-media followings of its stars — notably Channing Tatum.

It’s a way to prove that the broadappeal movie can be made by a filmmaker with a plan, without committee or corporation

“I’ve been very vocal about my issues and it's an opportunity to learn some stuff. And I’m prepared for any scenario. But at least we got to do it the way we wanted to do it,” says Soderbergh. “And that’s a win. We're going to learn something. We may learn a lot. I’m hoping it works so I can continue to put my work through this system and have other like-minded filmmakers put their work through this system.”

“We don’t need another boutique distributor,” he adds. “This is designed for wide-release movies. This isn’t an arthouse proposition.”

Movie financing arrangements are infamously byzantine, but Soderbergh has set up an account that anyone who has put money into the movie can log on to and check to see the movie's expenses, grosses and their cut. The whole scheme is more than a little like the plot of “Logan Lucky,” in which an out-of-work miner (Tatum) rallies a team to rip off a NASCAR track. A tongue-in-cheek line at the end of the credits reads: “No one was robbed during the making of this film except you.”

“We don’t know whether it’s going to work or not. We certainly hope like hell it does. We'll know after a couple weeks. One way or another, we’ll get to prove our point,” said executive producer Dan Fellman, Warner Bros.’ former distribution chief. He anticipates the film will be in 2,800 theatres, with many in the industry keenly following the results.

“There’s a lot of people watching, I can tell you that,” says Fellman.