Back and in control
Steven Soderbergh directed films such as Ocean’s Eleven, Traffic and Out of Sight. But he hated the way Hollywood worked. So he quit. Back with his first film in five years, he explains what’s changed. Exclusive interview by
Steve Kilgallon.
Steven Soderbergh was a recordbreaking 26 years old when he won the Palme D’Or for his debut movie sex, lies and videotape and considered: ‘‘Well, I guess it’s all downhill from here’’. It was a joking attempt at modesty, he explains now.
But while Soderbergh has made plenty of movies since - some celebrated (Traffic, Erin Brockovich), some roaring commercial successes (Out of Sight, Ocean’s Eleven, Magic Mike), some, admittedly, criticallydisdained or box office poison (Che, The Good German) - his relationship with the industry itself indeed travelled downwards. Eventually, in 2013, he quit, declaring: ‘‘It’s become absolutely horrible the way the people with the money decide they can fart in the kitchen’’.
‘‘Every film-maker I know, with very few exceptions, felt the same way I did,’’ he tells me now. ‘‘I was just a bit of a loudmouth about it, and decided, well, instead of complaining, I needed to do something.’’
And yet here he is, on the phone from New York, nervously awaiting first-weekend numbers on his first film in five years, the heist movie Logan Lucky.
There’s a big difference though. Soderbergh has done everything himself on this movie - directing, producing, selling overseas rights - and says he can track every dollar spent by cinemagoers on tickets for his film. Everyone involved will share the profits. No studio has been involved. He sold this concept to the film’s star, Channing Tatum, who signed up on the spot. ‘‘He said ‘wow, I want to be a part of that’. I want to be a part of it creatively, but also ideologically.’’
Having departed Hollywood with a shopping list of life goals - reading, painting, and so forth - he learned, he says, it would have taken five years’ solid work to become any good at art. And as that dawned upon him, the script for an HBO television show, The Knick, arrived on his desk.
‘‘I was the first person to read it, and I knew that the second person to read it was going to want to do it, so I went from a permanent vacation to prepping a 10-hour TV show and shooting for four months,’’ Soderbergh reflects. ‘‘There wasn’t a revelation, so much as an understanding that this is my job, and I enjoy my job.
‘‘I had conflated my frustration with the movie business with directing, and when I was directing The Knick ,Iwas happy. I realised I loved directing, I just didn’t enjoy working in the version of the business that I felt out of sync with.’’
So when a film script arrived that equally tickled him, Soderbergh came up with a plan. ‘‘When I left, I said two things needed to happen: my relationship to my job needed to change, and my relationship to the part of the business I was frustrated by needed to change. As it turns out, it hasn’t changed: I’m just taking it and running. I am passing them on the
Everyone involved will share the profits. No studio has been involved. He sold this concept to the film's star, Channing Tatum, who signed up on the spot.
shoulder of the road, basically.’’
He says there’s not much he’s doing on Logan Lucky that hasn’t been done before. Fifty years ago, people were selling foreign rights in advance to pay for making the film. People have formed their own companies to make movies. People have tried to cut costs. Perhaps the one thing, thanks to technology’s advance, is their ‘‘very granular analysis’’ of how the movie is sold – particularly around advertising. TV advertising is, unusually, not their biggest spend: 65 per cent of budget has gone on social media, about 20 per cent what he calls ‘‘targeted’’ television (over here, they sponsored an edition of The Project), the rest on radio and outdoor advertising. They advertised very late - days before they open - and in tiny markets where nobody usually bothers.
We end up spending a lot of time talking about the mechanics of the film rather than its plot, and this is clearly not unusual for Soderbergh. Amid the sea of accountancy work, he says he had to remind himself ‘oh, you also need to make a good movie’.
Good, because while Logan Lucky is a market-friendly fun film, it’s also got all the cunning complications of Soderbergh’s Ocean’s movies as Tatum leads his brother and sister in planning a daring robbery of their local Nascar track in a bid to reverse the family’s bad luck. From a script by novice screenwriter Rebecca Blunt (internet speculation has it that Soderbergh, who has form for using pseudonyms, actually wrote it, which he denies), it’s clever, funny, and includes a brilliantly against-type Daniel Craig as a safebreaking genius.
Surely the studios will want this film to tank? No, says Soderbergh, describing it as a ‘‘very open-source experiment. If anything, there would be some real curiosity as to whether some of the things we are doing can be adopted or adapted to what they are doing. I just wanted to try it a certain way to see if some of my theories hold true. But I would think if this works, it works enough that a few people on the studio side may look at it and think ‘oh well, maybe we should try some of those things those guys tried’.’’
He’s had to work hard. But he doesn’t mind: he’s enjoyed this film and he’s enjoyed being in control. It probably explains why he’s happy to spend 45 minutes talking to someone in New Zealand about it. It was hard, he said, to sit in a room and try to explain his movie to salespeople and studio execs and have a say on how it was presented when it wasn’t his dollar.