Steven Soderbergh Has a Secret Ingredient
Steven Soderbergh’s work ethic is so legendary that there’s a joke about it: “In the time it took me to say this, he made another movie.”
Since his feature-filmmaking debut 36 years ago with sex, lies and videotape, Soderbergh has has worked on 33 movies and eight TV series as a director and another 41 as a producer and been one of a handful of directors in Oscars history to be nominated for Best Picture and Director in the same calendar year (in 2001, for Erin Brockovich and Traffic; the latter won in both categories). This year is already shaping up to be a productivity all-timer. He’s released two films as director in seven weeks: the ghost story Presence, which opened in January, and Black Bag, an espionage drama about two married spies (Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender) that opened Friday. When I asked him a week ago what movie would be next, he said, “We just wrapped one on Thursday.” That would be The Christophers, “a dark comedy about the estranged children of a once-famous artist who hire a forger to complete his unfinished works so they can be discovered and sold after his death.” He hopes to premiere it this fall.
Soderbergh is also remarkable for his creative restlessness. In every project where he’s a hands-on filmmaker, he tries to create not just another IMDB credit but a challenge. He loves unconventional casting (he built Full Frontal around porn star Sasha Grey, Haywire around mixed martial artist Gina Carano, and Bubble around a group of Ohio factory workers) and lives to subvert genre expectations (Presence is a ghost story told from the point of view of a ghost, while Black Bag is a dialogue-driven spy thriller with almost no violence, focusing on a marriage). He was one of the earliest A-list filmmakers to embrace video over film (Full Frontal was his first, shot with a low-resolution “prosumer” camera) and he’s been a high-profile beta tester for new digital cameras ever since (his 2008 biopic Che was the first feature shot with Apple’s Red One camera, which immediately became an industry standard). Sometimes Soderbergh sets very tight parameters for production, mainly because he’s curious to see the result: every scene in Presence is done in one take, while his 2003 HBO political series K Street consists of 10 episodes that were conceived, shot, edited, and premiered within seven-day spans.
And although Soderbergh is not opposed to using multiple cameras to shoot a scene, especially ones with stunts or lots of performers, he prefers to work solo, operating his own camera (usually handheld) and trying to see how much information he can pack into a shot without needing to cut to something else, because he likes being close to the actors and doesn’t want to make extra work for his editor (Steven Soderbergh). “My default mode is to try to ask myself, how few shots can I do this in?” he says. “It’s a process of distillation.”
In one of the other times that we’ve talked, you said that for you, the pleasures of filmmaking were “in the process.” What are the process pleasures of Black Bag?
It was great to come off something like Presence, in which the editing is restricted to stringing together single shots with a little bit of black in between, and return to a more editorially complex, montage-friendly story — and, in this case, sequences that required a really granular approach to the shots and the editing: two dinner-table scenes.
I was going to ask you about those. I’ve heard that any scene with a lot of characters around a table is a logistical nightmare to shoot, and you have two long ones.
I was saying to somebody the other day, no screenwriting class or book would advise you to put two 12-page dinner-table scenes in your script — and more than that! — so that you kind of end up thinking about them as the action sequences of the film. Which they are: I really had to think of them like that. And that meant they needed the same kind of visual attention and thought that you would give to a traditional action sequence. I thought that there had to be a way to keep this interesting for the audience and develop strategies visually so that there could be an escalation in each scene that matched the gear shifts indicated in the text, but not in a way that was distracting or annoying to the audience. The goal was to create versions of those dinner-table scenes that — contrary to what is typical when you talk about ten-to-12-page dialogue scenes — would make people immediately go, Can I watch that scene again? Right now?
Your first feature, sex, lies and videotape had a number of very important scenes unfolding around tables. And, like Black Bag, it was focused on relationships and sexual honesty.
You can absolutely draw a thematic line from that first film to this film. I’m still interested in people in rooms, talking. I’m still convinced this is where events begin. Big events, small events: two people in a room is usually how they start, and so I’m endlessly fascinated by it and not scared of it.
There was a project at one point that was notoriously unmade, and remains notoriously unmade, that was pretty much a person in a hotel room for the whole movie. I was speaking to the actor that was involved in developing it. He said, “Are you worried that the whole movie is just set in this hotel suite with this one character?” I said, “It’s not a problem for me.” I didn’t get the job, but the thing never got made, so … [Shrugs.] Well!
And of course you’ve done a filmed stage monologue, Spalding Gray’s Gray’s Anatomy, which was essentially that sort of movie.
Yes. It’s all in the process. How do you shoot it, you know? And while you’re trying to come up with ways to keep it from being predictable visually as you shoot it, you also have to be secure in the text and in the actors, because at the end of the day, if the script is good and you cast it properly, it should work, so you don’t want to overdo it and start creating visual tricks because you’re insecure that people are going to get bored. Right?
Speaking of text: I wanted to talk to you about your collaborations with screenwriter David Koepp, with whom you’ve done four features. Like you, he seems to enjoy working in every genre. This one seems like a throwback to other films he’s been involved in, notably the first Mission: Impossible, though of course that was a very different kind of spy movie. Whose idea was Black Bag?
It was David’s idea. He’d been noodling with this idea for a while, and we’d been talking about it for a while: making something like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. I kept harping on it and prodding him for years to essentially write his own version of that play. And I think what he ended up doing was adding that notion to something he was already working on. Finally, during Presence, David said, “I think I have that time, and I think I figured it out, and now I’m going to sit down and really write this.” We would keep in touch. In one of our conversations, I said, “How’s it going?” And David said, “It’s going great! I wrote a 12-page dinner scene today.” And I said, “Well, God help the person who’s got to direct that.” And then, three months later, I was that person — and there were two dinner-table scenes!
Before this interview I rewatched your 1996 experimental feature Schizopolis. In that movie, there are three principal actors, each of whom plays two characters. One of the actors is you. It’s your only lead performance. You’ve got doppelgängers all over the place in that movie, and tons of deception, and it reminded me that deception in your work is intertwined with performance and/or acting, whether the project is Black Bag, sex, lies and videotape, Schizopolis, Out of Sight, The Girlfriend Experience, The Informant! or even Ocean’s 12, in which Julia Roberts’s character impersonates Julia Roberts.
[Laughs.] Right.
All of that made me think back to another one of our conversations, where you talked about what an important developmental milestone it was to become your own cinematographer, as well as camera operator, and dive into scenes with the cast. So I wonder: Isn’t every Steven Soderbergh movie Schizopolis? Like, you’re still acting, but you’re acting behind the camera, with the camera, through the camera? And is it possible that you’re sort of performing a heist movie, an espionage movie, a ghost story?
Yeah, absolutely. What you just said makes me think of two things. One is the fact that most conflict has its source in some form of betrayal, whether it’s an interpersonal betrayal, an ideological betrayal. The drama begins when some understanding is fractured: an understanding between two people or two companies, or between an institution and a person within an institution. There’s been some contract, whether spoken or unspoken, and it’s been violated, and this is what is creating the drama. And so betrayal, to me, is a real core for a story, a foundation for almost any conflict that you can imagine.
The other thing you’ve made me think of is the performative aspect of our lives — the fact that we all indulge, I think, in presenting a version of ourselves to the world that we want to align with our idea of ourselves. When you combine that with the ultimate and very frustrating unknowability of another person — the fact that, try as you might, and as much time as you may spend with someone, another person is ultimately unknowable to you — it’s a really scary prospect, at least if you’re invested in any serious way.
I do know this: The first family that lived in a cave, when they saw the second family that lived in a cave, started discussing why the other family’s cave was bigger.
But at the same time, I think it’s very necessary for each of us to retain a part of ourselves that is just for ourselves and believe that there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. I mean, of course there are bad versions of that, but I also want aspects of my life that are mine, something that’s just my own. I respect that in other people. For instance, there’s no scenario in which I would ever snoop through my wife’s laptop, phone, journal, or what have you. I would never in a million years do that. I want her to have something that belongs to her, that she doesn’t have to share with me. I don’t have a big belief in that kind of privacy where you have to share everything.
You just made me think of the classic moment in The Limey when Luis Guzmán and Terence Stamp are at the party at Peter Fonda’s mansion, standing on a pool that extends out into a canyon like a precipice, and Stamp says, “What are we standing on?” and Guzmán says, “Trust.”
Exactly, yeah! Trust. Trust is important and necessary to have in order to maintain some kind of order to our lives, and in our society. But the bottom line is people lie. There’s a line from the movie version of Graham Greene’s Fallen Idol where the kid asks Ralph Richardson why people lie, and he says, “Well, it’s because they want something and they think telling the truth won’t get it for them.” This is all around us!
Even in a pandemic thriller like Contagion, trust is integral to the story, not just at an institutional level, but a personal one: If you think you might have a contagious disease, you’re supposed to tell somebody.
Yeah, yeah — and that’s exactly what happened to a friend of mine recently. It’s still happening, I think, with COVID, even though it’s now been kind of integrated into our lives five years after the start of the pandemic. I still know people who are having these debates with themselves and with other people now: Do I have to tell somebody whether I feel sick? I think most people now, when they start to feel something that feels like it might be COVID, are not immediately running out and getting COVID tests.
Right. A lot of them are telling themselves, Oh, it’s probably just a cold because confirming it’s COVID means they’d have to miss work and lose money.
I think that’s right. It’s a human thing, unfortunately. The development of language allowed that sort of deception to flourish. Before humans could talk, I think it was a lot harder to pull off a lie. Once we started talking, language was the fuel that let us really start making shit up.
You’ve just made me envision a movie about cave people trying to lie to each other without language. What would that look like?
I don’t know, but I do know this: The first family that lived in a cave, when they saw the second family that lived in a cave, started discussing why the other family’s cave was bigger.
I’m very interested in the fact that we’re still unable to pinpoint the exact time when the part of our brain that creates and processes language came about, and why it came about. Was it a random mutation? Was it diet related, because we started eating different things? We still don’t know exactly when this phase transition took place. I read somewhere that at some point, a couple hundred thousand years ago, a version of us emerged that’s more or less what we think of as “ourselves” now. I’m talking about the versions of humanoid creatures that would eventually turn into Homo sapiens: At one point it was determined, by tracing DNA back, that this group consisted of about 3,000 people. It’s ridiculous how small that number is. Three thousand people! That’s how close we came to not being able to have this Zoom call.
Human civilization was a rounding error?
Oh, completely. It’s wild to think that we came that close to not being us. But I wonder, you know, is there another version of a renaissance in our thinking, in our behavior, to be had? Or is this it? We kind of tapped out in terms of our ability to improve ourselves and stop killing each other at an increasingly rapid clip. We clearly indulge, and have always indulged, in a fantasy that a new piece of technology is going to save us or provide a moment of transcendence, and it never works out that way. What ends up happening is we very rapidly figure out the worst possible use for a new piece of technology. Bad ideas scale faster than good ideas.
Severus, the top-secret device that drives the action in Black Bag, is a perfect example of what you’re talking about.
Yes. And it’s also kind of the MacGuffin of the movie — a Trojan horse for David to explore what he really wanted to explore, which is what happens if you are in a relationship in which part of the construct is a “Get Out of Jail Free” card that you can wield at any moment.
Right. The idea that in espionage, there are unsavory but officially sanctioned things, including having sex with a target to make your cover story convincing, that you can’t tell your partner about, and they have to be okay with it, and they also have to trust that when you engage in that kind of activity you’re “working,” as opposed to stepping out on your partner.
And how does that arrangement work? Can it work? Also interesting: There’s a successful marriage in this milieu, George and Kathryn. That fact is annoying to other people in their world, to such an extent that the happy couple becomes a target for being framed. I thought that it was fascinating that people in this world could be activated by their envy of that kind of relationship and moved to do some really unsavory things in order to sabotage it.
Back to the idea of a betrayal as the inciting incident of a story: In the very first scene, George’s colleague Meachum (“played by Gustaf Skarsgård“) warns George that his wife might be part of a group of traitorous moles within the agency. This piece of information is delivered in a nightclub, a Dionysian space where the whole point is to lose your inhibitions.
Oh, absolutely. I liked that idea. But the movie used to open differently. It used to open with George and Meachum on a bench near the Thames. It was a more traditional “spies meet on a bench” scene. But by the time we got to the wrap party for the shoot, I was already pitching David a different version of that opening scene that would feel a little less genteel, and that would also play directly to the theme of the movie: What if George has to go fish this guy out of a club where he shouldn’t be hanging out in order to get this information that he needs about a possible mole within the agency? And David immediately sparked to that. He said, “Oh, that makes much more sense. It’s more interesting visually, and it does play right to the core of the movie, which is that this guy [Meachum] is really taking advantage of the lacuna that they’ve all agreed exists in these relationships.”
A new opening like that is the result of being able to see scenes, and the movie itself, very, very quickly, either while we’re shooting or shortly after we finish shooting, so that I can immediately put into play anything that needs to be redone or any new material that needs to be shot. We were recalibrating and reshooting things while we were shooting. We ended up doing two days of additional photography — spread out over a couple months, because of actors’ schedules — to really go after story -clarification points, because in a movie like this, the way in which you release information to the audience is everything. You’ve got to maintain this balance where they’re kind of reaching for it and it feels like they can grab it, but they can’t quite. If it’s too far away and feel like they can’t reach it at all, they get frustrated and tap out. And if they’re ahead of you, that’s a disaster, right?
So there were a couple scenes that we went back and sort of reworked to either add some information that we thought was critical at that point or remove a piece of information that we felt was tipping our hand too early. It was only through screening the film for people, whether it’s for friends or at two test screenings with strangers, that you can figure this stuff out, because it’s really hard to predict what information will land and what won’t.
Luckily, you as a storyteller have your own “Get Out of Jail Free” card, which is: If the audience can see where the movie is going in a general sense, it’s okay, as long as they can’t predict the exact path.
Yeah — it’s got to be that combination of surprising and inevitable, right? It has to make sense, but they shouldn’t be able to fully predict what’s going to happen or how. This is something that David’s very good at.
Since we’re talking about your collaboration with David Koepp, I wanted to jump over to Presence. That film also has a direct connection with Schizopolis in that you’re the lead actor. Only this time, we never see your face or hear your voice. How are the choices you make in a unique situation like Presence different from the choices you would make when you’re shooting something that is, I guess you would say, third person, such as Black Bag?
I’m used to having, obviously, a fairly intimate relationship with my cast, because it’s me operating the camera. But Presence was next level in terms of my physical relationship to them. It was real choreography. I was aware of the fact that the audience’s ability to understand what’s happening is built upon the choices that the presence makes, as far as what to look at and when. That’s how we’re learning what it wants. That’s one of the two questions you’re asking yourself while you’re watching the film: Who is it, and what does it want? And I’m trying to keep giving you some answers to those questions by what I’m choosing to look at and what I’m choosing to emphasize.
That was a really fun challenge that was new to me as a director. I had a level of performance anxiety as the director and the camera operator that I’d never had before, because, given the professional skill set of the cast, if there was a take that was no good, it was because I made a mistake, not them. And that would happen, especially on some of the longer takes. The most common mistake was me predicting or anticipating movement on the part of an actor in a way that, if you didn’t actually know they were going to make that move, you would have reacted differently. I’m specifically talking about the lag time in a pan when an actor moves from one place to another. There were a couple takes that I ruined because your natural instincts as a camera operator are to anticipate a movement and try to keep the composition perfect.
And be in the right spot before it happens?
Yeah. And there were times where I went, “Fuck — I forgot that I gotta build in the lag that comes with not knowing what’s happening.” That was a common occurrence.
And I guess that’s just acting, right?
Exactly. But it was a new sensation for me. And then there was also the fear of falling on those stairs, which were very serious stairs! But it was exhilarating in the sense that there was no Plan B. My belief that it would work was based on the fact that I knew every other approach would have been worse — that there was no other way to put this idea across; that it has to be this way.
You once told me that a continuous, first-person viewpoint, which drives virtual reality experiences and a lot of videogames, is at cross-purposes with the idea of visual storytelling, because you need to understand how a character is reacting to events. How did you justify the continuous first-person in Presence, then?
When I see first person [filming techniques], in which we’re aware that this perspective is supposed to represent a human being in the corporeal world that is seeing all this stuff, I feel like there’s a primal desire to see a reverse angle and look into the eyes of the character who’s experiencing the story. That’s a very strong impulse, and it’s why, whenever I watch material that’s done in that fashion, after a certain point I start to disengage, because I don’t feel connected to the lead character or characters who are experiencing the events. I felt that problem would be mitigated in Presence because this was a character who wasn’t visible to us, and that meant there was nothing to cut to. You didn’t have the desire to see a reverse angle of the character’s face, because you knew there was nothing there.
That’s still a big departure for you. You’ve got some very effective first person shots in your movies, but they never go unanswered by reverse shots of the character who’s doing the looking. In The Limey, which is about time and memory, you always give us closeups of Terence Stamp’s character so that we can see how he feels about whatever he’s remembering. You gave up that option in Presence.
And that’s why the movie is as brief as it is. David and I talked about this: there were only so many variations to this gimmick before you’ve got to let people know what’s happening. We really felt like if you added stuff to make it any longer, you would’ve had to start adding elements that would have felt inorganic.
In a different way, the same was true for Black Bag. It’s a fairly short film — dense, but short. David and I talked about that, because in order for the movie to be any more complex, you’ve got to start adding another layer of plot, maybe some more characters. And neither of us felt like that was necessary or correct to do. David’s script came in at 106 pages.
That’s short for a feature-film script today. Your feature films tend to be short. Isn’t Traffic the longest, unless you count Che, which is really two films?
Exactly: Traffic is the longest. It’s hard for me to imagine, at this point, making a movie that’s more than two hours long. I like the idea that if somebody wants to watch something I directed for a second time, there’ll never be the impediment of, “Oh, but it’s long!” Sometimes my wife and I have that conversation: If it’s a certain hour of the night and we think about watching something, we’re like, “Yeah, but it’s, like, two hours and 17 minutes. We’re not going to make it.” I would rather my work be on a list of movies that are, like, 96 minutes. I am increasingly attracted to things that are distilled.
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