Steven Soder­bergh: ​‘There’s no new oxy­gen in this system’

It’s been four years since Steven Soder­bergh announced his retire­ment from film­mak­ing, slam­ming the door on his way out with an impas­sioned cri de coeur on the state of the indus­try at the San Fran­cis­co Film Fes­ti­val. In the event, it turned out to be more of a work­ing-vaca­tion, what with his 2013 TV movie, Behind the Can­de­labra, and two sea­sons of The Knick released in the inter­im. Now he’s back on the big screen with Logan Lucky, one of his best films to date, bring­ing with it a new fight against the sys­tem with the film’s exper­i­men­tal dis­tri­b­u­tion mod­el. We sat down for a long chat with Amer­i­can cinema’s most rest­less worka­holic, the orig­i­nal Sun­dance Kid.

LWLies: You’ve spo­ken a lot recent­ly about your new dis­tri­b­u­tion mod­el. It’s still ear­ly days, of course, but what are your thoughts after Logan Lucky’s open­ing week­end in the US?

Soder­bergh: It’s been inter­est­ing. As I’ve been try­ing to describe to peo­ple, you can’t use the stu­dio met­ric to judge how the film per­formed because it just doesn’t apply at all. We were in prof­it as soon as the movie opened. We have a cou­ple of weeks of playa­bil­i­ty left to see what the final result is gonna be, where there aren’t real­ly any big releas­es that are going up against it. I’m curi­ous, giv­en the strength of the reviews and the exit polls, to see what’s going to hap­pen and whether or not word-of-mouth will push us down­field a lit­tle fur­ther. What we haven’t been able to deter­mine, and it’s the biggest ques­tion mark, is why what we thought would be the core audi­ence for this movie – the rur­al, south­ern audi­ence – didn’t show up. In fact, West Vir­ginia was near to the bot­tom of all the states for our box office. I can’t fig­ure out why that is. We tar­get­ed this audi­ence very direct­ly and repeat­ed­ly, and they did not show up. We can’t fig­ure out why. I don’t know if there’s just a deep sus­pi­cion of what they per­ceive to be a Hol­ly­wood movie try­ing to por­tray their lifestyle. It’s very strange.

It seems like it’s real­ly hard these days to get eyes in front of a movie for grown-ups. There’s a real­ly per­va­sive sense of cul­tur­al infan­til­ism in com­mer­cial cin­e­ma. Do you think audi­ences are to blame for that, or is it the studios?

It’s a good ques­tion and a dif­fi­cult thing to unpack, because for decades now I’ve had con­ver­sa­tions with the Nation­al Asso­ci­a­tion of The­ater Own­ers – the NATO that actu­al­ly does things – and the MPAA in which, anec­do­tal­ly, they’ve repeat­ed­ly said, ​‘We’re get­ting com­plaints from peo­ple about the fact that you don’t make enough fam­i­ly-ori­ent­ed movies, there’s too much bad lan­guage, there’s too much sex…’ The vio­lence they don’t have as much of a prob­lem with, obvi­ous­ly. This is some­thing that’s been a refrain that I’ve been lis­ten­ing to since I start­ed mak­ing movies. So, if we’re to take that as true, then the per­for­mance of Logan Lucky is inex­plic­a­ble, because this is a movie that’s got three swear words in it, it’s got no guns, nobody dies, there’s no sex, the only vio­lence in it is intend­ed as a dis­trac­tion, as part of the plot. This would appear to be every­thing that those peo­ple are say­ing that they’re not get­ting enough of, and yet they didn’t show up. So you won­der, is this just anoth­er exam­ple of Amer­i­ca say­ing one thing and doing anoth­er? Of say­ing our val­ues are X but our val­ues are actu­al­ly Y? I real­ly don’t know what’s hap­pen­ing here.

Could it not just come down to a ques­tion of aware­ness for those people?

Here’s the thing: our cam­paign was not focussed on big city audi­ences. We went after the audi­ence that isn’t court­ed so much, that’s sort of in the mid­dle of the coun­try. We real­ly ignored New York and LA, we just decid­ed that’s not our audi­ence, in our minds. And yet, over the week­end, 25 out of the top 30 gross­ing screens were in New York and LA, because those crowds are review-dri­ven and they read the reviews and they went. It’s all part of this larg­er exper­i­ment, we’ll see how the next cou­ple of weeks play out. Like I said, there was no ver­sion of this in which we lose, ever, it was just a mat­ter of how big can we win? We’ll see what hap­pens. I’ve got some­thing else in the hol­ster that I’m gonna put through this same mod­el, and we’ll see what hap­pens on that one.

This is Unsane, the one you don’t real­ly want to talk about yet?

Yeah, it’s the film that sup­pos­ed­ly doesn’t exist.

When you were talk­ing to Richard Lester about Sex, Lies, and Video­tape for your book, you put the suc­cess of that film down to audi­ences not hav­ing any alter­na­tives at the time. That inter­view was in 1996, and you said to him else­where that you didn’t think things had ever been as bad as they were then. How do you think the cur­rent cli­mate com­pares to then?

It’s hard to say where this is all gonna go. I mean, four years ago I was say­ing that it didn’t seem sus­tain­able to me, and yet here we are. Right when you feel like maybe it’s crest­ed, some oth­er giant spec­ta­cle opens and makes enough mon­ey that every­one breathes a sigh of relief and goes back to fig­ur­ing out what the next spec­ta­cle is. I don’t think there’s any sce­nario in which stu­dios go back to mak­ing the kinds of movies that I wan­na make. Y’know, adult-dri­ven, non-spec­ta­cles that are orig­i­nal screen­plays and don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly have fran­chise potential.

You had a pret­ty good run at that with Sec­tion Eight though, right? Ocean’s Eleven, Solaris, The Good Ger­man… you even smug­gled through a decon­struc­tive mas­ter­piece with Ocean’s Twelve.

Well, that’s as close to a super­hero com­ic book movie as I can get. I just think their mod­el is built on these kinds of movies. There’ll always be an excep­tion, whether it’s a cou­ple of slots at the end of year that they give to seri­ous movies to try and get some awards, or if David Finch­er wants to make Gone Girl, yeah, they’re gonna do that. But it’s real­ly not the space they want to be in. And that’s fine, they should do what they wan­na do, and they should do what they’re good at. I just think that for some film­mak­ers, that’s not a very con­ducive atmos­phere to mak­ing things.

When the stu­dios crashed in the ​’60s, you couldn’t hide the scale of some of these dis­as­ters. When Dar­ling Lili failed, they lost every pen­ny. There was no ancil­lary life for a movie, they just lost their shirts. Now, with these put-deals and ver­ti­cal inte­gra­tion with­in the com­pa­ny, you can kind of mask the scale of the dis­as­ter. You don’t get pun­ished for your mis­takes the way you used to back then. There have been a cou­ple of films in the last year to 18 months that are $200m write-downs! It used to be peo­ple would get fired for that, and now they don’t, so there’s no turnover in ide­ol­o­gy at these stu­dios. Nobody’s going any­where, nobody gets pun­ished for mak­ing a mis­take on that scale. And I think that’s part of the prob­lem, there’s no new oxy­gen in this system.

There’s a sad moment at the end of the mak­ing of Che, where you’re being inter­viewed and you ask your­self if it was all worth it, putting so much effort into mak­ing some­thing seri­ous on that scale, giv­en the film’s com­mer­cial recep­tion. Do you still feel the same way?

It cer­tain­ly cured me of my desire to make any­thing that seri­ous again, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. It doesn’t mean that I’ve stopped tak­ing the job seri­ous­ly, I guess I just think that genre has become a bet­ter vehi­cle to express some things that I’m inter­est­ed in than dra­ma. Since Che, all of the projects that I’ve worked on you could put down as genre films of one type or anoth­er. I just feel more free, I guess, when I’m not hav­ing to wor­ry about whether this is impor­tant or seri­ous, or land­ing a cer­tain way.

Logan Lucky is seri­ous, though, polit­i­cal­ly at least. Not just its eco­nom­ic con­cerns, but in terms of its human­ism, it’s just so gen­er­ous. That feels as impor­tant today as any­thing more super­fi­cial­ly ​‘seri­ous’ or dramatic.

And that’s what I liked about the script, that it took its time with the char­ac­ters and they all had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to upend the stereo­type that was laid out to set the table. All come­dies are built on stereo­types, and the trick is to flip them at a cer­tain point, so that by the end of the movie you feel dif­fer­ent­ly about the char­ac­ters than you did at the begin­ning. But cer­tain­ly, this movie had a sort of under­tow that the Ocean’s movies don’t real­ly have. For me those were fan­ta­sy films, and Logan Lucky is much more earth-bound. There’s no real equiv­a­lent in the Ocean’s movies of Jimmy’s rela­tion­ship with his daugh­ter. The pol­i­tics didn’t real­ly need to be dis­cussed overt­ly, because these peo­ple know, ​‘It doesn’t mat­ter who the pres­i­dent is, whether it’s a demo­c­rat or a repub­li­can, nobody is gonna help us. We’re for­got­ten. Nobody cares.’ And it’s true, so you didn’t real­ly need to say it.

What’s strange is that the script was writ­ten in fall 2014 and we shot it late sum­mer 2016, and none of us could imag­ine the land­scape that we’d be in in 2017. For a while I thought it was real­ly inter­est­ing that West Vir­ginia and coal min­ers are now part of a pub­lic con­ver­sa­tion that wasn’t tak­ing place when the film was writ­ten. It’s an exam­ple of things cir­cling that then land, and that’s what artists are good at, tak­ing things that are in the air that isn’t quite cen­tral and then dis­till­ing it and putting it out for peo­ple right when it’s in the pub­lic con­scious­ness. Whether or not it turned out to be almost too top­i­cal remains to be seen. I’m also curi­ous to see what hap­pens out­side of the US. When one of our for­eign dis­trib­u­tors saw the film, they were kind of alarmed. They’d read the script, obvi­ous­ly, but in the mak­ing of the film, I’d real­ly kind of dou­bled-down on the cul­tur­al speci­fici­ty and they were a lit­tle freaked out. They said, ​‘It’s just so Amer­i­can!’ I said, ​‘I don’t know what to tell you, that’s my job, to make the thing spe­cif­ic.’ It took a while to calm them down.

You wrote some­thing inter­est­ing on your blog, that ​“Edit­ing is in a weird place right now. Tech­nol­o­gy has opened a door for a lot of over-edit­ing on a micro-lev­el, and while you would think the abil­i­ty to get an assem­bly cut faster would allow for a longer peri­od of judg­ing the entire piece as a whole, edit­ing on a macro-lev­el has nev­er been worse.”

That speed in being able to get a ver­sion of the movie togeth­er lets you sit back and not look at it for a cou­ple of weeks, so that I can judge it on a macro lev­el and see if there are any big moves that need to be made struc­tural­ly, or if there are any big lifts that need to take place. I still think that’s true. I see movies now that are just mis­shapen, like nobody stepped back from this thing and went, ​‘This thing is 20 min­utes too long, it’s got no ebb and flow, or press and release.’ It’s real­ly frus­trat­ing and I don’t know why it’s so endem­ic right now. Obvi­ous­ly, I love all of this new tech­nol­o­gy and the fact that you can iter­ate so quick­ly to fig­ure out if you’re doing it right or not, and then if you’re not to be able to solve it so quick­ly. I wish I’d had it when I start­ed is all I can say. When I think that on Sex, Lies and Kaf­ka and King of the Hill, I lit­er­al­ly didn’t start edit­ing until after we fin­ished shoot­ing, it makes me sick.

Are you return­ing to stuff the next day that you cut the night before?

Oh, absolute­ly. On The Knick, there was a scene I was hav­ing prob­lems with. I start­ed shoot­ing and realised that I don’t have an idea, I haven’t fig­ured out how to do it. So I sent every­body home and cut every­thing I had up to that point, and then I realised what I need­ed to do. I called my pro­duc­er, Greg Jacobs, who was also my AD, and said, ​‘Get this per­former on set for 8.30’. We turned up and it took an hour. The idea of hav­ing to wait a cou­ple of days to fig­ure it out is… irre­spon­si­ble! This is not my money.

You seem to have a real­ly good work­ing rela­tion­ship with writ­ers, and you talk in the Lester book about how you like to have them on set if pos­si­ble, so there’s anoth­er cre­ative voice to bounce things off. As some­one who usu­al­ly shoots and cuts their films too, do you not miss hav­ing oth­er voic­es in those areas?

Not late­ly. I think it would be pret­ty hard for me to work with anoth­er direc­tor of pho­tog­ra­phy at this point. Stephen Mir­rione is a very good edi­tor, and I can imag­ine a sce­nario, on a cer­tain kind of project, where I would ask him to come edit. But late­ly I think I’ve fall­en into this rhythm because of the over­lap­ping nature of the projects, that it’s just eas­i­er for me to con­tin­ue doing it myself. Plus, it’s some­thing I enjoy, so it’s not a bur­den, it’s a reward. I’ve always val­ued the writer and have always made sure they’re as inti­mate­ly involved as they wan­na be. On The Good Ger­man, when I asked Paul Attana­sio if he want­ed to be on set, he said he couldn’t imag­ine any­thing more bor­ing. I like hav­ing writ­ers there just in case I want to change some­thing. I may have a sug­ges­tion about what needs to be done, but I’m not real­ly com­fort­able chang­ing it with­out mak­ing sure that it’s con­sis­tent with every­thing else that was written.

What I realised, and part of that was tak­ing place when I was writ­ing that book, was that I wasn’t a writer. I had writ­ten, but I wasn’t a writer. Just as some peo­ple have direct­ed but that doesn’t make them direc­tors. My career just got a lot bet­ter. The movies got bet­ter, I was hav­ing more fun. It’s a real trap that young film­mak­ers fall into, the sort of Woody Allen trap, that they want to be known as writer/​directors and they only want to direct their own scripts. I just think that’s unnec­es­sar­i­ly limiting.

And yet when you did decide to write anoth­er script your­self, you took on Solaris, of all things. That’s pret­ty ambi­tious for some­one who doesn’t con­sid­er them­selves a writer.

Well, I would argue that the prob­lems with that movie that I nev­er solved could’ve been solved if I brought in one of my writer friends. There are issues that I have with that movie that are script issues, and it was my fault that I couldn’t, in that moment, just step out­side of it and say, ​‘I should just call some­body that I’ve worked with, just for a week, to come and help me with this one sec­tion that I’m real­ly strug­gling with.’ I mean, why wouldn’t you do that?

I think it’s one of your best films. I’d take it over the Tarkovsky.

Oh man, you don’t wan­na print that…

They are very different.

One thing I gave up try­ing to explain to peo­ple was that I’m not remak­ing the Tarkovsky film, I’m adapt­ing the book. There are so many ver­sions of Solaris to be made out of that book. He sets up so many fas­ci­nat­ing ideas, and I was just fol­low­ing one branch in a cer­tain direc­tion, while the Tarkovsky film was going off in anoth­er direc­tion that allowed him to indulge his pre­oc­cu­pa­tions. There are things in it that I think are as good as any­thing I’ve done. There are sec­tions in it and pieces in it that are, for lack of a bet­ter term, pure cin­e­ma, that I’m real­ly hap­py with. It’s a miss for me because it’s got a sec­ond act prob­lem that I nev­er fig­ured out, and so it’s a frus­trat­ing mem­o­ry. I also think in ret­ro­spect that I should’ve made it for cheap. We didn’t spend a giant amount of mon­ey, I think it was $45m, but I should’ve made it for 10 or 15 in exist­ing loca­tions. If I’d made it for that much mon­ey it would’ve had a shot at being successful.

Anoth­er prob­lem that I didn’t realise until after, was that any movie with a sui­cide as a cen­tral plot ele­ment is gonna have a real tough time with an audi­ence, because the audi­ence breaks into two groups: peo­ple who’ve been close to some­one who’s com­mit­ted sui­cide, who then have no desire to re-expe­ri­ence that in a movie, and peo­ple who haven’t, who don’t under­stand what that feels like. I thought I was mak­ing a piece about some­one tran­scend­ing grief, but it turned out most peo­ple thought I was mak­ing a movie about a sui­cide. It had a lot of issues.

Clooney is so great in it. Lots of actors talk about how fast you move when you’re shoot­ing. Do you ever come into con­flict, espe­cial­ly on such a per­for­mance-dri­ven film as that, where your shoot­ing pace is out of whack with what the actor feels they need?

That’s a very spe­cif­ic kind of film and a very spe­cif­ic kind of per­for­mance that prob­a­bly wouldn’t ben­e­fit from being rushed. That being the case, I wouldn’t rush it. I wouldn’t leave until I felt we’d got what was nec­es­sary there. But y’know, I haven’t real­ly made any­thing like that since. I don’t think you could talk to any of the actors I’ve worked with and have them describe their expe­ri­ence as being rushed. They’d say I’m quick, but it’s all in aid of keep­ing the ener­gy and momen­tum alive, and not let­ting it frit­ter away by tak­ing time away from the per­for­mances. Because the per­for­mance is always my pri­or­i­ty. Most of what I’ve read about actors’ expe­ri­ences work­ing with me, they seem to find it real­ly invig­o­rat­ing. They come to set, it’s lit and ready to go, we block, we rehearse, we go right into shoot­ing, and we don’t stop until the scene is fin­ished. So they get to be inside of it from the moment they reach the set until the scene’s done, and they real­ly like that. It’s almost like a filmed play. It used to destroy me on a set when we’d just be get­ting to the good stuff and then, ​‘Okay, turn­ing around!’ Every­body would go away, back to their trail­er, it would just make me insane, because then you’ve got­ta get all that ener­gy back up again.

So who do you show your ear­ly cuts to for a sec­ond opinion?

It’s friends. Oth­er film­mak­ers, writ­ers, some of whom I have to take a real­ly deep breath before I invite them to the screen­ing because I know it’s gonna be tough. But that’s okay, I know they want me to win, I know they’re root­ing for me, but there are a cou­ple of them that can be pret­ty tough.

What was the best note you got on Logan Lucky?

There were two con­sen­sus notes that came out of both the friends’ screen­ing and the test screen­ing that we did in Texas. One was less artic­u­lat­ed by peo­ple but was some­thing that I felt, which was that I want­ed to con­tin­ue to deep­en the rela­tion­ship between Jim­my and his daugh­ter. So we came up with some addi­tion­al mate­r­i­al for the two of them. The oth­er was we need­ed one more lay­er of com­pli­ca­tion in the heist, so we came up with one more thread that hap­pens through­out, to make it seem less easy and that some­thing could go wrong. So that was it, we wrote a cou­ple of pages and went back and did two days of shoot­ing to fix that. We did anoth­er screen­ing in Ten­nessee which is almost iden­ti­cal to what you’ve seen.

Do you still take a look at ear­ly cuts for friends?

Sure.

Didn’t you do a fast cut of Her for Spike Jonze?

Yeah! That was fun.

Did he take many of your cuts?

Well, there were two big moves that I made, and Spike took one of them. It’s sad, Eric, his edi­tor, died just this week. Spike called me and said, ​‘I’m just stuck. I need fresh eyes on this.’ I said to send me a flash dri­ve that I can load into the Avid, and I spent the week­end mess­ing around and sent it right back to him.

You cut like an hour out, right?

There was a lot. I was pret­ty aggres­sive about it. Spike said, ​‘Yeah, Eric and I had to lay down after we watched it, but then we got back up…’ Like I said, I made two big moves and he was like, ​‘One of those absolute­ly works.’ I see a lot of stuff that my friends make, but there are a cou­ple of peo­ple who will send me some­thing and say, ​‘Take a week­end to mess around with this.’ They just wan­na see what I’ll do.

Speak­ing of edit­ing, on Out of Sight and lat­er Erin Brock­ovich you worked with the leg­end, Anne Coates.

Yeah!

She’s in her nineties now, and still going strong. That must have been a masterclass.

I love Anne. She has the thing that you want, which is a com­plete­ly open mind. She has no pre­con­ceived notion of what it should be, she responds sole­ly to the footage that she’s look­ing at, the con­ver­sa­tions that you’re hav­ing with her. There was no idea that she wouldn’t pur­sue in her attempt to make the thing what it should be. Every day, we’d work togeth­er, and then I would leave and she would stay and keep going. Then I’d come back in the next day and she’d be like, ​‘Oh, I took anoth­er pass at this.’ She just wouldn’t give up. I had a great time with her, and those are, with­out ques­tion, two of the ones that peo­ple con­sid­er right at the top of my films. She was a big part of that. I mean, she cut Mur­der on the Ori­ent Express, which is one of my favourite films.

Does work­ing with some­one like that make you braver in your choices?

Well, it’s just the text­book exam­ple of the good aspect of hav­ing an edi­tor, of hav­ing anoth­er per­son there. She’s as good as we all think she is.

You’ve spo­ken before about pan­ic-edit­ing on King of Hill. Is it fair to say you don’t love that film as much as some of your others?

No. It’s too pret­ty. Elliot [Davis] is a DP that I real­ly enjoyed work­ing with and I learned a lot from him, and it’s a beau­ti­ful look­ing film. Ulti­mate­ly, too beau­ti­ful. Maybe it should have been a lit­tle rougher in its style.

But that con­trasts with its melan­choly, it kind of sug­ars the pill.

Look, I do mis­re­mem­ber things, I can’t remem­ber the last time I saw it, so I may be not as down on it as I seem to be. That whole peri­od, that I write about in the book, was a cru­cial part of my devel­op­ment. Those movies from Sex, Lies to Out of Sight was me real­ly try­ing to fig­ure out what kind of film­mak­er I was and what kind of film­mak­er I want­ed to be. Where did I fit? These were all ques­tions that I was try­ing to answer. They were all nec­es­sary projects, regard­less of their out­come or regard­less of how I feel about them. I need­ed all of them to get to Out of Sight, which is clear­ly a water­shed project for me, career-wise.

You famous­ly re-cut Heaven’s Gate for your web­site, and then did a ver­sion of Raiders of the Lost Ark, where you put it in black-and-white and cut the sound­track to draw atten­tion to the stag­ing. You’ve spo­ken a lot about Spiel­berg, and how you see him as this 4D mas­ter. If you were to take any sequences from your own work that could serve sim­i­lar­ly instruc­tive pur­pose, what would they be?

Oh god. I don’t know because I nev­er feel that I’ve got­ten close to the peo­ple that have that gift. I mean, that sequence in Minor­i­ty Report, at the robot­ics plant, the stag­ing in that is fuck­ing ridicu­lous! It makes my head hurt how you would map that out shot by shot, or any num­ber of sequences in a Finch­er film. The mon­tage in Fight Club where he’s try­ing to retrace Tyler Durden’s steps? That’s sick! I wouldn’t even know where to start. I don’t think I could ever pick some­thing of mine and say here’s an exam­ple of stag­ing or mon­tage, when no mat­ter what I do, I don’t think I’ll ever get close to those peo­ple I see as savants when it comes to that stuff. If I can’t match them in that cat­e­go­ry, what I have to do is try to over-per­form in oth­er aspects, to at least try and com­pete in a total sense. I’m still learn­ing, I’m still watch­ing that stuff myself to try and decon­struct the thought process, to try and get inside of it. Fincher’s a friend of mine, and too good a friend for me to go, ​‘So David, what were you think­ing when…’ That’s too embarrassing.

You post­ed the list of every­thing you watched in 2016 on your blog, and I thought I could try and parse it for clues as to…

…what was coming?

Not what was com­ing but what you watched while you were prep­ping and shoot­ing Logan Lucky, to see if there were any influences…

Right.

It was a bit of a fool’s errand. You watched Ishirō Honda’s mush­room-mon­ster flick, Matan­go, twice.

I want­ed to remake that.

No fuck­ing way.

Yep!

Oh my god.

Haha. I couldn’t come to terms with the studio.

That Cin­e­maS­cope and the colour, it’s so per­fect for you.

Yeah, it was a movie I saw as a kid and it scared the shit out of me. I want­ed to remake it but I couldn’t fig­ure out a deal with Toho, so it didn’t happen.