Disenchanted film maker walks away
Steven Soderbergh’s latest film almost didn’t see the light of day because studios thought it was ‘too gay’, writes Matthew Garrahan
LIBERACE, the late flamboyant pianist who is the subject of Steven Soderbergh’s latest, award-winning film, Behind the Candelabra, liked to make an entrance. Soderbergh’s entrance is more muted. When I enter the cavernous lobby of the Directors Guild of America headquarters, I spot a studious-looking man in the far corner reading something on his phone. There are a few days of stubble on his chin and a pair of dark-rimmed glasses perched on his nose. He is in town for a meeting at the guild, of which he is vice-president, and which represents directors in pay negotiations. We are here to discuss Behind the Candelabra, the 27th feature film in a career spanning almost 25 years — and one that could be his last if he follows through on a recent promise to retire.
His disenchantment with Hollywood was inadvertently revealed by Matt Damon, who stars as Liberace’s young lover, Scott Thorson, in the film, when he told a journalist that Soderbergh intended to quit the business. “That’s when this all started to get traction,” he says, referring to the outcry sparked by his proposed retirement.
Soderbergh’s plan to retire sparked angst among film aficionados, distraught at the prospect of losing one of the best directors in the industry. He first burst on to the scene in 1989, when he won the Palme d’Or with his debut feature, Sex, Lies, and Videotape, and after a few years when he made “five films that nobody saw” he had a critical hit with Out of Sight, directing the only good performance ever given by Jennifer Lopez. He won an Oscar for Traffic in 2001, was nominated for another in the same year for Erin Brockovich and assembled one of the starriest casts (George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Julia Roberts and others) of the past 20 years for the Ocean’s Eleven series. He has made a few flops — his four-hour biopic of Che Guevara is one — but has also had big commercial successes, most recently Magic Mike, his 2012 movie about male strippers.
And now he is walking away from it all. Why? “It’s less fun than it used to be,” he says, simply. “Studios have become more risk-averse: there were no takers for Behind the Candelabra until pay-TV channel HBO stepped in.” (In SA, it is on at Ster-Kinekor’s Cinema Nouveau.) “I think their feeling was this will only appeal to gay people. We were looking for a tiny amount of money for domestic release because we had already sold the foreign rights. But to put a movie out is $25m$30m in marketing, so you have to do $60m-plus at the box office. And they weren’t convinced it would do that — because it’s so gay. And that looked like too much of a risk.”
The rejection was a wake-up call, of sorts. There are other reasons for his disenchantment with the studios. He has spoken before about audiences treating cinema less as a mirror and moving towards a cinema of total escapism. Ambiguity has become a dirty word. “They’re moving toward an attitude of: I want it all spelled out and tied up at the end.”
Several factors have driven this shift, he says. Audiences seeking emotionally complex and ambiguous stories can now find them on TV — think of shows such as Breaking Bad, Mad Men and The Sopranos. He has also detected a change in mood since 9/11: escapism has become more sought after as public anxiety has increased.
He enjoyed making Behind the Candelabra, which is based on a book by Thorson, the young man who falls in love with Liberace. “It didn’t feel like anything else I had done. I wanted to take this interesting, true story … and turn it into every camp melodrama you’ve ever seen.” He had the idea for a Liberace film 13 years ago, when he was making Traffic with Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones, two other periodic collaborators. “I asked Michael if he’d ever thought about playing Liberace. He had met him a few times and immediately went into a little routine. I thought: ‘I’ll just file that away’.”
Damon and Douglas both give terrific performances,
I wanted to take this interesting, true story and turn it into every camp melodrama you’ve ever seen
Douglas camp and slightly creepy in outrageous outfits; Damon, the doe-eyed innocent driven close to madness by a cocktail of drugs and Liberace’s philandering.
I wonder if he had trouble convincing Douglas and Damon to sign on: this is, after all, an unconventional story about a physically intimate gay relationship. He shakes his head. “Michael thought this was one of those handful of characters that he’ll be remembered by.”
Soderbergh then approached Damon. “I knew enough about Matt to know that he’s not the kind of person who has to protect anything or that he has an image to uphold. He wants to be challenged. They just grabbed hands and jumped off the cliff.”
There is no such thing as a typical Soderbergh film.
He jumps from thriller to love story, from popcorn heist movie to political biopic. He takes risks and pushes boundaries. He explored global pandemics in Contagion while the murky world of antidepressants became the setting for a thriller in Side Effects. He recently returned to Kafka, his biopic-cum-thriller about the writer, to re-edit it and dub it into German. “Another naked money-making scheme,” he deadpans.
His taste was formed as a young man growing up in Louisiana, where he had an upbringing as unconventional as some of his movies. His mother was a parapsychologist — an expert in so-called psychic phenomena — while his father was a university professor. “In terms of this job (as a director), I got the best of both of them: his discipline and focus and her ability to go my own way.”
He took animation classes as a teenager and after finishing high school came to Los Angeles periodically to do freelance editing jobs. He wrote some scripts and was hired to work on sports documentaries for NBC. Then he was commissioned to write a spy movie but wrote the script for Sex, Lies, and Videotape instead.
He likes casting nonactors in his work. “They don’t have any bad habits. It can be really interesting to watch someone who is not trying to do anything to pull you in.” He doesn’t want his actors thinking too much. “I don’t want to be in their heads, which is why I rarely give them notes with any psychology about their characters.”
Cinema has been part of Soderbergh’s life for such a long time, what will he do without it? He says he has plenty to keep himself busy — such as a rock musical about Cleopatra. He is working on a book about filmmaking and has the rights to a comic novel set in 17th-century America about a young tobacco farmer who aspires to be a poet, called The Sot-Weed Factor (he envisions making it for TV).
Longer term, he wants to come up with a different way of telling stories, to free himself from the “tyranny of narrative”. He is convinced there are other ways to convey narratives, a way “to transmit information to an audience that isn’t so … traditional”. A few days later, I discover he has embarked on a Twitter novel project, writing Glue one tweet at a time from his @bitchuation address.
In terms of his political views, he begins to rail against the “two sets of laws” that exist in the US. “The people who can pay get the justice they want and the people who can’t, don’t.”
He is referring to a recent money-laundering scandal, which the bank settled after paying a record $1.92bn fine. “What do you have to do to get sent to jail? What the hell is going on? Nothing happened! They wrote a cheque that the company turns in profit every six weeks and it’s done.”
You should make a movie about it, I say. “No,” he says. Or a TV show. “A TV show,” he ponders. “Maybe.”