Cinema is still in crisis, says director Steven Soderbergh

Technically speaking, Steven Soderbergh shouldn’t still be making movies.

In 2013, the Oscar-winning filmmaker delivered a speech at the San Francisco International Film Festival in which, with his distinctive combination of self-deprecatory wit and stinging insight, he diagnosed the economic, cultural and corporate forces that were turning Hollywood into a monoculture of escapist spectacles and bombastic action flicks. Differentiating between movies (“something you see”) and cinema (“something that’s made”), Soderbergh bemoaned how “cinema, as I define it and as something that inspired me, is under assault by the studios and, from what I can tell, with the full support of the audience.”

It was around the same time that Soderbergh announced his retirement from directing. Although he did retreat from feature films, he produced and directed several episodes of the Cinemax series “The Knick,” only to surprise and delight his fans in 2017 by re-emerging with the left-handed caper comedy “Logan Lucky,” followed by the psychological thriller “Unsane,” which he filmed on an iPhone.

Although Soderbergh’s reports of his own retirement turned out to be premature, he believes that the trends he identified have only taken hold more strongly in the ensuing years. (Certainly the debates he ignited have only gotten hotter. Martin Scorsese just delivered his own version of Soderbergh’s movies-vs.-cinema thesis when he suggested that Marvel films are more akin to theme parks than “the cinema of human beings,” provoking “Avengers” avengers to assemble far and wide.)

During a recent visit to Washington, D.C., Soderbergh was no more optimistic than he was in 2013. “The speech I gave in San Francisco six years ago still holds, in terms of what’s working and what’s not working,” he said flatly.

One thing that has changed is that streaming sites have largely stepped into the breach created by the studios’ blockbusters-only business model, lavishing Soderbergh, Scorsese and their fellow auteurs with profligate amounts of money to make their passion projects. Earlier this year, Soderbergh released another iPhone film, “High Flying Bird,” on Netflix, which is also releasing his new film “The Laundromat,” a darkly comic anthology film based on the corrupt tax-avoidance schemes revealed in the 2016 release of the Panama Papers.

“The Laundromat” is the perfect example of something that I think doesn’t get made (anymore) at a studio,” Soderbergh said. “This is a midrange-budgeted film for grown-ups (that’s) just not something the studios are seeing as a viable business.”

Part of what has made Soderbergh so distinctive is his lack of preciousness, both in terms of how he captures his images and how they’re seen. He’s not a celluloid purist and is an eager adopter of nascent technology. “Early on in my career, even if I was shooting on film in the ‘80s, I was transferring to video and cutting on video,” he observes. “I was constantly on the hunt for the new wave of iterating.”

“The Laundromat” - which stars Meryl Streep, Gary Oldman and Antonio Banderas - is yet another example of the spontaneity that Soderbergh prizes. It’s constructed of various chapters - which Soderbergh and screenwriter Scott Z. Burns constantly shuffled before production started - illustrating the arcane financial dealings that allow criminals and the superwealthy to protect their assets in offshore accounts while remaining unaccountable to the millions of people who are victimized by the shady practices of anonymous shell companies and unethical lawyers. Because the issues it examines are so complex, Soderbergh found himself showing the film to friends and family throughout the editing process, cutting out massive amounts of material if he caught them zoning out. “It was just information overload,” he recalls. “People just got tapped out.”