A new movie from Steven Soderbergh means a new round of interviews with the man himself as he works the press circuit, which means at least a handful of indelible soundbites. His ardently independent spirit always yields a few choice quotes from each interview, and while he’s already ruled that the cloudy-looking fate of the cinema industry is in actuality secure, he’s not done dropping bombs.
In an interview with critic Amy Taubin for Filmmaker Magazine, Soderbergh made mention that he’s working on a sequel to his name-making hit Sex, Lies, and Videotape. He’s completed a script while holed up in his Tribeca office during these many months of quarantine, and better yet, he’s gotten Andie MacDowell and Laura San Giacomo on board to reprise their original roles.
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Soderbergh’s debut film first wowed audiences at Sundance, where the then-26-year-old won the Audience Award, and blew away the international press at Cannes, where he collected the Palme d’Or, making him the youngest ever to singlehandedly win the festival’s top prize. He was credited with jump-starting the ’90s indie-cinema revolution through his lo-fi, voyeuristic look into the sexual eccentricities of hapless wife Ann (MacDowell), her freewheeling sister Cynthia (San Giacomo), and the alluring Graham (James Spader, who won Cannes’ Best Actor prize).
The proposed sequel would rejoin the sisters 30 years after the events of the film, with one of them mother to a daughter of the approximate age they were back in 1989. Though Spader has yet to sign on for the gestating film, it stands to reason that his character would make an appearance as well, the years having worn on him as they have on his distaff costars.
It might sound beneath a talent of Soderbergh’s stature to start going back to old material for a sequel, but let’s not forget that he made an art out of refreshing and renewing a schematic on the Ocean’s 11 trilogy.
