Steven Soderbergh: Interviews, Revised and Updated

Conversations With Filmmakers Series

by Anthony Kaufman (Editor)

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 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.

Genres: Film

256 pages, ebook

First published May 1, 2015

Reviews

[RND · Rating 4 out of 5]

As par for the course with this series, some repetition is in order, but a mind as exacting as Soderbergh's is perfect for this series. His ideas about the language and craft of filmmaking, as well as macro ideas about the industry and society in general are interesting and instructive. Even when his films aren't entirely successful, they're always at least interesting as experiments. Never boring. It's also great that he's not got much of an ego, can be very honest with what are considered his failures and failings and limitations. Anyway, so yeah, just reading about his thinking process while shooting some of the sequences in his films the way he did (and there's a lot of these) is worth the price of admission.