Steven Soderbergh: Interviews, Revised and Updated

By Anthony Kaufman

The long and prolific career of Steven Soderbergh (b. 1963) defies easy categorization. From his breakout beginnings in 1989 with sex, lies, and videotape to 2013, when he retired from big-screen studio movie making to focus on other pursuits including television, the director's output resembles nothing less than an elaborate experiment. Soderbergh's Hollywood vehicles such as the Ocean's Eleven movies, Contagion, and Magic Mike appear just as risky and outside-the-box as low-budget exercises such as Schizopolis, Bubble, and The Girlfriend Experience.

This updated edition details key career moments: his creative crisis surrounding his fourth film, The Underneath; his rejuvenation with the ultra-low-budget free-style Schizopolis; the mainstream achievements Erin Brockovich, Traffic, and the Ocean's Eleven films; and his continuing dedication to pushing his craft forward with films as diverse as conspiracy thrillers, sexy dramas, and biopics on Che Guevara and Liberace.

Spanning twenty-five years, these conversations reveal Soderbergh to be as self-effacing and lighthearted in his later more established years as he was when just beginning to make movies. He comes across as a man undaunted by the glitz and power of Hollywood, remaining, above all, a truly independent filmmaker unafraid to get his hands dirty and pick up the camera himself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: May 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781626745407

Book preview

Hot Phenom: Hollywood Makes a Big Deal over Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies, and videotape

Terri Minsky / 1989

From Rolling Stone, May 18, 1989, by Straight Arrow Publishers, Inc. 1989. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

Steven Soderbergh has a pile of phone messages. Sydney Pollack’s been calling for weeks. Demi Moore has invited him to lunch at the Ivy. Taylor Hackford called from his car phone. David Hoberman, the president of Walt Disney Pictures, wants to set up a meeting. So do executives at Paramount, Warner Bros., Columbia, and Universal. Soderbergh sees no point in returning the call from Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, the producers of Beverly Hills Cop. They’re slime, he says, just barely passing for humans.

A year ago, Soderbergh couldn’t have gotten these people to look at him sideways. Then he was just some twenty-five-year-old kid come to Hollywood with six unproduced screenplays and a director’s reel of fourteen-minute films he’d made in his home town of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Now he’s a twenty-six-year-old with the same reel, the same screenplays, and a $1.2 million independent feature he wrote and directed called sex, lies, and videotape. The overwhelming and unanimous praise this film is receiving even before it’s been released has left Soderbergh stunned. It’s not as if his movie is filled with big-screen moments—it has no chase scene or special effects or even, despite the title, explicit nudity. It just has four people confronting their feelings about, well, sex and lies and videotape.

When the movie was shown for the first time, in January, at the U.S. Film Festival, in Park City, Utah, Soderbergh felt the need to apologize to the audience for his unfinished work. It was still too long, the sound mix was temporary and the titles were made on a Xerox machine. Nobody seemed to notice or care. After the first screening, tickets to the remaining three shows became so scarce that they were being scalped. Agents, producers, critics, and even just regular people kept stopping Soderbergh to shake his hand, to press their cards into his palm, even to tell him that they’d seen a lot of movies but they had never seen one quite like his. One woman told him to call her if he ever, ever needed a place to stay in Los Angeles. A man came up and asked him, Can my girlfriend kiss your feet?

It’s hard to know how to act when you’re getting this outpouring of admiration and affection. Soderbergh says he’s never been very good at accepting compliments. His first instinct was to dismiss them, as if such talk were ridiculous, but he was told that was annoying and he should cut it out. For the week of the festival, Soderbergh could have been eating every meal courtesy of some movie muckety-muck. Instead he took a job as a volunteer shuttle driver.

Back in Los Angeles it was more of the same—actually, much more. The reviews of sex, lies, and videotape that appeared in Variety, the Hollywood Reporter, the Los Angeles Times, and American Film were so laudatory that Soderbergh was embarrassed. They’re not even like I wrote them myself, he says, because if I wrote them myself, I would have found something to pick at. Within a month, his agent had gotten five hundred phone calls from people who wanted to meet Soderbergh or see his movie, as well as piles of scripts and novels for him to consider, directing or adapting. One studio offered to make a blind deal—anything Soderbergh wanted to do.

Executives made pitches for Soderbergh to come work for them. The people at Warner Bros. said, "Look, we encourage young talent. Didn’t we give Batman to Tim Burton to direct? The people at Paramount said, Look, we already do our share of big-budget extravaganzas. We need someone like you who makes smaller, more personal films." During his meeting at Paramount, Soderbergh found himself distracted by a bowl of fruit in the middle of the table. He hadn’t eaten lunch, and he was starving. But the bowl was filled with bananas, navel oranges—things you’d have to peel. Soderbergh didn’t want to leave behind a pile of litter; somehow, it didn’t seem appropriate when four studio executives were comparing him to Woody Allen.

You can’t let this stuff go to your head, Soderbergh keeps telling himself; there’s a term in Hollywood for what you are: flavor of the month. Which is no guarantee of success. Far better, safer anyway, to remain suspicious and cynical of the sudden attention, to regard yourself merely as a bone that every golden retriever in town has to sniff. What about Phil Joanou, protégé of Steven Spielberg’s who probably could have made any movie he wanted. He chose to do Three O’Clock High, which nobody saw. Soderbergh has given instructions that he be shot on sight if he ever makes a movie about high school. Or what about Michael Dinner? Soderbergh loved Dinner’s American Playhouse production of Miss Lonelyhearts, but now Dinner’s directing totally innocuous comedies like Off Beat and Hot to Trot. Soderbergh doesn’t know Dinner, but he can’t imagine this is what Dinner wanted to do with his career. Soderbergh can name a half a dozen others who have been the flavor of the month, and these days you practically have to put out an all-points bulletin to find out what they’re up to.

When you meet somebody and you haven’t done anything, you’re just a guy, says Soderbergh. You know that the person’s response to you is contingent wholly upon how you act and what you’re like. Which is as it should be. I got to make a movie. Okay, you know? So? I’m happy that I did. I’m still a schmuck like everybody else. I have problems, just like anyone. There are people who get to make movies who are fucking assholes, who are terrible people. Okay, I know I’m not a terrible person. It’s just that this attention—it’s potentially harmful, and it has so little to do with sitting in a room and trying to write, trying to make something good and make something work. It has nothing to do with that.

All the same, people seem to look at him differently now, with awe; even some of his friends have started calling him the genius—and not sarcastically. While scores of other independent movies will go searching this year for a distributor, sex, lies, and videotape has eleven companies in a bidding war. Soderbergh’s agent, Pat Dollard of Leading Artists, has to work until late at night just so he can give some attention to his other clients. It’s like being the manager of the Doors in 1967, says Dollard, and their first album comes out, and ‘Light My Fire’ goes to Number One. It’s kinda like that.

Soderbergh has to search for things to worry about, so he does. The other night he went to a screening at the Writers Guild. He hated the movie so much he walked out, but not before it registered that everybody else in the room seemed to love it. It’s scary, he says. It was so effortlessly bad that you think that’s how everything is. You begin to think, ‘Maybe my stuff is like that.’ On top of that, Fawn Hall was at the screening too. Soderbergh remembers thinking, Here’s a semipublic personality out being seen, and I’m becoming a semipublic personality, and what does that mean? That someday I’m going to have my picture taken with Fawn Hall?

Soderbergh is living every filmmaker’s fantasy (including his own since he was fifteen)—that you make one picture, and Hollywood spontaneously and collectively heralds you as a major talent—and the most satisfaction he will express verbally is Yeah, it feels nice, or I keep expecting to get hit by a bus. A friend of his was heard asking, Do you think maybe he’s screaming inside?

On the face of it, Soderbergh seems like the perfect, the obvious, candidate for this kind of hype. He is a movie buff’s movie buff, the kind that goes to see Altered States eleven times in a two-week period, four of those in a single day, because the film’s sound technician came to that particular theater to retune and enhance the speaker system. I was there when the subwoofer blew out, he says, the way another person might say, I was at Woodstock. Not only does he keep a mental list of his top ten favorite movies of all time, he also has specific rules for compiling it: It has to be a film that if somebody says, ‘Hey, let’s watch whatever,’ or ‘Let’s go see whatever,’ no matter what format, no matter what time, you will drop everything and go, or sit down and watch. And it can’t be a movie that came out within the past ten years, because you haven’t had enough time to put it in perspective. (His ten favorite movies are, in no particular order, Citizen Kane, The Third Man, The Conversation, The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T, The Godfather (parts I and II), Annie Hall, Jaws, Sunset Boulevard, The Last Picture Show, and All the President’s Men.)

In Hollywood, where a new concept is often cast as the hybrid of two older, proven ones, Soderbergh might be described as a cross between Steven Spielberg and Woody Allen. Like Spielberg, Soderbergh had a precious interest in film and debuted as a feature-film director at the age of twenty-six; like Allen, he has made a movie that is talky and intimate and topically consumed with relationships between men and women.

Sex, lies, and videotape is about four people: John (Peter Gallagher); his wife Ann (Andie MacDowell); Ann’s wild sister Cynthia (Laura San Giacomo); and Graham (James Spader), a friend of John’s from college. John is having a torrid affair with Cynthia, while Ann, ignorant of their deception, finds herself increasingly disinterested in sex. The balance of this precarious triangle is tipped with the arrival of Graham. He is emotionally remote and enigmatic, given to posing the most personal inquiries as if he were making small talk. Despite the fact that Graham hasn’t seen John in nine years and has never met Ann or Cynthia, he is privy to all their secrets within a few days. He is also willing to reveal his own—that he was once a pathological liar and that his disgust with himself has made him impotent, able to become excited only when watching his homemade videotapes of women talking about sex.

If anyone asks—and people usually do—where Soderbergh got the inspiration for sex, lies, and videotape, he tells them about his twenty-fourth year: "I was involved in a relationship with a woman in which I behaved poorly—in which I was deceptive and mentally manipulative. I got involved with a number of other women, you know, simultaneously—I was just fucking up.

"Looking back on what happened, I was very intent on getting acceptance and approval from whatever woman I happened to pick out, and then as soon as I got it, I wasn’t interested anymore, and I went somewhere else. There was one point at which I was in a bar, and within a radius of about two feet there were three different women I was sleeping with. Another six months of this behavior—this went on for the better part of a year—and I would have been, bare minimum, alcoholic and, you know, going on from there, mentally screwed