Steven Soderbergh has a new movie, “Logan Lucky.”
Steven Soderbergh’s “Logan Lucky” is a screwball comedy of a heist movie, set at the Coca-Cola 600 in Concord, N.C., with an ensemble of misfits determined to rob the speedway. The word “deplorables” was already taken.
Soderbergh, 54, calls his first movie after four years of abandoning big-screen filmmaking a genre film. Sitting in his modest office in Lower Manhattan, he sounded pleased and confident.
“Genre films can be a really great delivery system for ideas,” he said. “They can be this great Trojan Horse, and allow you to engage in some preoccupations that are underneath the main narrative. It touches on a lot of different things, but it’s all coupled to this engine which is the plot about a heist.”
“Logan Lucky” has at least two parallel stories to its heist tale. One is Soderbergh’s gambit to skirt the studio system by financing and distributing the film on his own, “essentially doing what a studio does, without a studio.”
“I felt out of sync creatively with them and didn’t feel that anybody was analyzing the economics to change the way that they were doing things,” he said. “I had a lot of questions that began with the words ‘what if ?’, and decided that the only way to answer them was to go and do it myself.”
The other parallel story is the timely portrayal of the white working class. The film’s hero, coal miner Jimmy Logan (Channing Tatum), a former high school quarterback, loses his job because of a pre-existing condition. His wife has ditched him for a good old boy with a McMansion, his only health care comes from a van that treats the uninsured, and he fights in bars that seem designed for brawling. As one critic put it,
As one critic put it, Jimmy Logan is everything about struggling white America without using the T-word.
he’s everything about struggling white America without using the T-word.
A perfect storm, or in this case, a perfect steal?
“You can’t control timing. You can only respond to it,” Soderbergh said.
“How could we have known three years ago that all these issues would be in the public consciousness so clearly? I was concerned for a while about whether this is a good thing or a bad thing,” he said. “Is it too topical, that people might be put off by it? But we did test screenings, and people seemed to like that it was taking place in a world right around them.”
That world also includes Daniel Craig as Joe Bang, an explosives whiz serving a prison sentence, and Adam Driver as his one-armed Iraq vet brother Clyde, a sullen bartender. Seth MacFarlane is a foulmouthed British NASCAR driver. Katie Holmes is Jimmy’s angry, designer-clothed ex. Dwight Yoakam is a prison warden who’s too meek for his inmates.
“All comedy is about stereotypes, that’s all it really is, so when you find somebody who’s able to flip that, it’s going to be fun to do,” Soderbergh said of his cast.
NASCAR is helping to market “Logan Lucky,” although data suggest that NASCAR fans aren’t filmgoers. “If people who followed a certain sport went to see movies about that sport, bowling movies would be huge,” Soderbergh said, “and they’re not.”
In discussing “Logan Lucky,” Soderbergh kept returning to the business, rather than the fun, of this comedy. For most directors, he said, the business of making movies tends to focus on how that business relates to their own work.
“I’ve always been of a mind that the deeper my understanding of the business I’m in, the better I’m able to navigate within it,” he said, noting that, for the film studios, “it just reached a point where it was clear that whatever I bring to the table is just not that interesting anymore.”
Then came Soderbergh’s detour (some might say exile) into television, and to the series “The Knick.” “It was a nice change when people were encouraging you to push things as far as you could push them,” he said. “It was fun to work on a canvas that big, where you’re not succumbing to the tyranny of the two-hour format.”
Television was a sharp career turn for a director whose no-budget debut, “Sex, Lies, and Videotape” (1990) defined independent filmmaking after it won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Back then, Soderbergh said, “I spent the next five films trying to figure out what kind of filmmaker I was and what kind of filmmaker I wanted to be. I don’t think filmmakers have that luxury anymore. I think the business is much tougher. If you make a few movies that nobody wants to see, then you’re in movie jail.”
Ten years later, in 2000, Soderbergh won the Academy Award for best director for “Traffic,” a film that he said Hollywood did not want to make — “the studios said that there was never a movie about drugs that ever made money, and that was true.” Until “Traffic” made money, that is.
Soderbergh offered some basic advice to young filmmakers: “The key, if you’re fortunate enough to have a success, particularly an outsize success, is not to become frozen in that moment, in terms of your evolution as an artist, and to not get stuck there.”
The director wouldn’t say whether he saw another movie beyond the current moment of “Logan Lucky.” “Ask me in a few weeks,” he said.
“All comedy is about stereotypes, that’s all it really is, so when you find somebody who’s able to flip that, it’s going to be fun to do.” Steven Soderbergh