Steven Soderbergh Is Back to Destroy Hollywood

For 25 years, Steven Soderbergh was a master of manipulating the Hollywood system to his creative advantage, until he quit in disgust over what it had become and struck out on his own. Now he’s back to teach other filmmakers how to make films for the next 25—and blow up the system for good.
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Soderbergh, flanked by two of Logan Lucky’s partners in meticulously plotted crime, Adam Driver (left) and Daniel Craig.

One of the last times Steven Soderbergh spoke in public about making movies, in 2013, he talked about how much he no longer enjoyed making them. “I’m going to attempt to show how a certain kind of rodent might be smarter than a studio when it comes to picking projects,” he said in a speech at the San Francisco International Film Festival. Around then, he told people, not for the first time, that he planned to retire. He’d spend the rest of his time on this earth painting, reading, watching movies, and importing a Bolivian liquor, Singani 63, that he’d been introduced to on the set of Che.

Four years later, his animosity toward Hollywood remains—though these days, he’s using it for more creative ends. He sits in a room in his Tribeca offices, next to a half-finished collage that takes up an entire tabletop. A baleful, goateed Robert De Niro, mid-scene in Heat, glares up from the poster board. Maybe a year ago, Soderbergh took nearly every book he had about movies and began destroying them, cutting out the pictures and pasting them here. “I had read them all,” he says, shrugging. “I don’t know. I just decided it’s time.” The collage is his type of work: pop, brightly colored, unsentimental, precise. Unconcerned with what came before and what is yet to come. He is at peace with destruction and re-invention, in part because he’s experienced both so many times.

At 26, Soderbergh was a sensation, the second-youngest ever Palme d’Or winner at Cannes, for Sex, Lies, and Videotape. He promptly made five increasingly abstruse movies, which failed commercially and sometimes, by his own standards, creatively. Then, in 1997, he was offered Out of Sight. That film—romantic, languorous, pulpy, and alive—was followed by 1999’s gritty, single-minded crime thriller The Limey. Together, they started one of the most remarkable and freewheeling creative runs in modern Hollywood history. In 2001, he was nominated for best director twice at the Academy Awards, for Traffic and Erin Brockovich. (He won for Traffic.) His next film was Ocean’s Eleven. The film’s total ubiquity on cable television and airplane seatbacks has at once certified and obscured how clever and innovative it is; every shot is both exactingly precise and full of mad joy. It’s also one of the best movies ever made about celebrity—about the weird unique camaraderie that beautiful people who perform for others have, and how fun that camaraderie can be to experience, vicariously, for the rest of us.

Eddie Guy

In the past decade, he made a two-part biopic about Che Guevara; more or less single-handedly established Channing Tatum as a movie star with Magic Mike; and helped Michael Douglas win an Emmy and a Golden Globe for playing Liberace in Behind the Candelabra. “I’m a big believer in volume,” Soderbergh says, grinning. “If I made three times as many movies as Stanley Kubrick, that must mean I’m three times as good.”

Then, around May 2013, he really did retire. It lasted about three months, until someone sent him another script he liked; by that fall, he was working on The Knick, for Cinemax. “So this period of reflection and re-orientation just never happened at all,” he says now. “But you know, that’s fine. The Knick got me re-energized.” For a while, he thought maybe it was just movies that he’d retired from. But then that also ended fast.

This month, Soderbergh will release his first film in four years, Logan Lucky, about two hard-pressed West Virginia brothers (played by Channing Tatum and Adam Driver) who decide to rob the Charlotte Motor Speedway. In some ways the film is familiar territory for Soderbergh. It’s a heist film, like the Ocean’s series. It’s kinetic and comic and about people struggling to get by, in the same way Magic Mike was. Tatum plays a construction worker who can’t find a job on account of a pre-existing condition; Driver plays a veteran with one arm and a transcendently plodding southern accent. Soderbergh describes it as “a cousin to one of the Ocean’s films, but a very inbred cousin.” The film is also an answer to questions he’s been grappling with his whole career: What if you could make a movie that cut out studios entirely, allowing the filmmaker to do as he or she pleased? What if infamously shady studio accounting could be reduced to something as simple as a password-protected website, where everyone involved with the film—from the producers to the costume designer to Adam Driver—could simply log on and see how much money the film had made, and what percentage of that money was theirs?

Logan Lucky is an experiment,” Soderbergh says. “The problem that I think needs to be addressed is: What has happened to movies for grown-ups made by people who are still interested in the idea of cinema?” In other words: What happened to the kind of films that Steven Soderbergh has spent the past three decades making?

As he talks, he sits perched on a stool, still in the way that people who are good at concentrating often are. You do not interview Soderbergh, precisely; you prompt him, and out come fully formed sentences, which line up neatly into fully formed paragraphs. He has a movie director’s way of being in control, of guiding you even when your ostensible job is to guide him. After a while you just surrender.


GQ: I read that principal photography on Logan Lucky began on August 24 and you were watching a finished version of it on October 12. Is that real? That doesn’t seem possible.

Steven Soderbergh: I had a cut of the movie the night we wrapped.

That’s insane.
That’s a result of technology allowing for extreme efficiencies of process. I love the fact that the gap now between something that I’m imagining and seeing it is shrinking. It’s basically now shrunk to a level that I don’t know how much more it can shrink. Within an hour of wrapping on a typical day, I have the footage on my laptop and can start cutting.

A lot of people get very misty-eyed about celluloid. When I think of the time that’s wasted in sending it back to the lab and having it developed and brought back, it would make me insane. I love getting my hands on the stuff immediately. That doesn’t work for everybody. It just works for me.

I never really believed in your retirement, in part because—
Because I lie a lot.

Well, because it never seemed like you believed in it. But why come back for this particular film?
A couple of reasons. It’s the kind of film that I like to make. It’s the kind of film I like to watch. And self-distribution on a wide scale is becoming possible in a way that it never was before. And then I was tasked—or asked—to help find a director for [the Logan Lucky] script. After a couple of weeks, I said, “I really can’t stand the idea of somebody else getting to do this.” So I drafted myself.

Logan Lucky has a light, comic tone—it doesn’t seem like you came back to make some grand creative statement.
Well, let’s put it this way: There was no scenario in which I was going to un-retire and make a movie that wasn’t fun. I would not have come out of retirement to do something “serious” or “important.” No way.


Soderbergh’s comeback film, Logan Lucky, is a red-state spin on the Ocean’s series: a heist at Charlotte Motor Speedway.

Claudette Barius

There’s something compulsive about Soderbergh, a compulsion that tends to spill into his films in subtle but illuminating ways: As different as each one is, what connects them is people solving complex problems, or attempting to process vast amounts of information, and doing so with grace and humor. Some of his later films, especially, almost seem like challenges to himself: a full-length thriller with very little dialogue, starring an MMA fighter in the lead role (Haywire), or a film about the business of sex, starring a porn actress (The Girlfriend Experience). A common criticism of Soderbergh’s films is that they’re cool to the touch; they trace dizzying, virtuoso arcs around the surface of objects, people, emotions. But I’ve always thought that was the point: Like Soderbergh himself, they’re perpetual-motion machines. He makes work about momentum with momentum. Because he is so easily bored, he might be the least boring filmmaker alive.

Now, sitting in his office in May, he ticks off all his various projects he’s working on simultaneously. In a week, the Logan Lucky trailer will come out. The week after that, he’ll start production on a new film, with The Crown’s Claire Foy and Juno Temple, called Unsane. It’s a horror movie; he plans to shoot it in ten days, no more. “I just want to do it, sell it, and have it drop and that’s it.” This fall will see the release of a new HBO project, Mosaican interactive, “branching narrative” app, followed by a linear reprise of the same story on television, starring Sharon Stone. Scott Z. Burns, who wrote The Informant! and Contagion and Side Effects for Soderbergh, is working on a new script about the Panama Papers that Soderbergh hopes to direct. He and Lem Dobbs, who wrote The Limey, are working on a new TV show together. It’s enough to ask—

I’m going to pose a question from your 1999 book, Getting Away with It, that you asked yourself at the time: “Why am I so attracted to this romantic idea of the guy who can do five things at once and do them all well?”
I think what I was probably talking about is a certain kind of proficiency that is very compelling. There’s something really fun about watching people really good at something. I’m sort of falling prey to that image, whether it’s real or not, of casual proficiency. Part of the appeal is that it seems effortless, or at least that the person seems unstressed by whatever obstacle they’re trying to overcome.

I wonder if that’s the true subject of your films, too, that casual confidence.
Well, certainly, the Ocean’s movies specifically are an ode to professionalism and camaraderie. That’s what appealed to me about those movies. What was fun about doing Logan Lucky [in which the criminals are decidedly not professional] was it kind of attacked both of those ideas. Like, “What does professionalism mean in this context, when they have no idea what they’re doing?” It’s the inversion of an Ocean’s movie.

You always have seemed like a very practical person, even though your mother was a parapsychologist.
But my father was sort of the quintessential definition of an academic and a workaholic. It’s really disconcerting sometimes to go home and see that I have, not unlike my father, taken over the dining room table and turned it into an office. That sort of imprinted on me that if you’re awake, you can be doing something.

You got your start at age 22, writing spec scripts in Baton Rouge, which eventually got you to Hollywood. How did you find L.A. when you finally got there?
I was either in the editing room, or I was going to see a movie. And I didn’t really then, and I don’t know, have any interest in the social aspects of the business. I do not have FOMO when it comes to that kind of stuff because all I can think of when I go to any event like that is “I can be working right now. I could be two hours better at something. Instead, I’m here.”

Do you think a filmmaker just starting out now could have the kind of career you’ve had?
You aren’t allowed to make the kind of mistakes that I made anymore. You’re not allowed to go and make five movies in a row that nobody saw and survive. You’re done.

A lot of filmmakers would never have even attempted five.
There are people who sit around thinking, “Well, that project is not worthy of my attention.” And I just don’t think like that at all.

Someone like Quentin Tarantino, he’s numbering his films. The idea is to make a perfect ten and ride off into the sunset.
Yeah, but look, it works for Quentin. Quentin is Quentin. The issue to me has never been Quentin. The issue is all the people who want to be Quentin. That’s the problem.

I’m 35. For someone my age, there is a whole generation of filmmakers, including you, who come out with a new movie and it’s an event. I don’t really feel like there’s been a coherent generation after you guys, and I wonder why.
I think you’re right, but I think that’s a function of the business. We were emerging at the tail end of the ’80s, which was the worst period for cinema in American history because the movie-brat generation [meaning Francis Ford Coppola, Brian De Palma, William Friedkin, and Martin Scorsese, among others—the bearded, libertine directors who were reared on Hollywood’s golden age] for the most part self-destructed in the late ’70s, and for a decade, the studios took the movie business back. And so a lot of us were very consciously trying to steal it from them again. So you had a sort of sense that you were not alone, that there were a lot of other filmmakers trying to do exactly what you were doing, even though you didn’t know them. You don’t have either of those things now.


Julia Roberts won her Oscar for Soderbergh’s Erin Brockovich, then re-teamed with him on Ocean’s Eleven.

AF archive / Alamy Stock Photo

On the final day that we meet, in an office down the hall from his art studio, he’s wearing a T-shirt sold on his website that says A MIKE NICHOLS FILM—a tribute to Soderbergh’s longtime friend and mentor. “I had a dream last night that we were talking and couldn’t hear each other,” he tells me. In the dream, he says, the two of us were drowned out by phantom construction sounds. Soderbergh is constitutionally impatient with obstacles. New York City noise is one example—he lives down here now, in Tribeca, he says, after fleeing an apartment in Chelsea several years ago, partly because of actual construction noise from a building site next door: “Our walls cracked, our doors wouldn’t shut.”

A bigger obstacle that, for a while at least, drove Soderbergh crazy: the way Hollywood makes and markets films now. Major studios, he says, spend too much money ineffectually marketing movies—millions of dollars that they expect to be repaid before anyone else involved, including the artists themselves, get their share. To the extent that Soderbergh ever retired from directing movies, it was because he found the conditions of making them simply too dumb to continue tolerating. But he is a problem solver, first and foremost, and with Logan Lucky he thinks he’s found his solution.

It’s simple, he says. You sell the foreign rights ahead of time in order to finance the cost of producing the film. Then you sell “everything except the movie showing up in a movie theater”—like HBO, Netflix, VOD, television rights, airplane replays—to pay for advertising and prints of the movie. And, voilà, independence. By doing it his way, Soderbergh and his creative partners get nearly half the box office money directly from the theaters.

We should talk about what you’re doing with the financing of Logan Lucky and why it’s so radical.
There’s no intermediary. The money is not passing through anybody’s hands. All these people who work for scale to make this film will literally be able to go online with a password and look at this account as the money is delivered from the theaters. So it’s complete transparency. The question is: Can we put a movie out in 3,000 theaters, and spend half of what a studio would spend to do it, and succeed?

Having fake-retired once, do you think you’d ever actually retire?
I don’t know. I’m trying to imagine what it would be like. Because even when I was going to go off and paint, in theory I would have still been making things, so to not make something would be really hard.

I wonder where that compulsion comes from, to make things.
I’m 54 and my dad died at 69, so let’s just say it’s conceivable I have 15 years to go—I want to make sure that I fill them up with stuff.

Do you feel like you’re racing against something?
I know I’m on the back half, if not more. There’s definitely a more aggressive assessment of what is worth your time. There’s some things I want to do. And I want to make sure I get them done.

How often do you leave New York? Is your travel schedule as aggressive as always?
Well, the only thing lately has been Singani stuff. So I went to Pittsburgh. Then I had to go to Chicago. Then I went up to Rochester.

I think people will be amazed to hear that you’re like, “I don’t travel for film that much, but I travel for my—”
For my booze. Yeah.

That seems like a very apt note to end on.
I can give you some to take with you if you want.

Um…
You should take our booklet for sure.

Zach Baron is GQ’s staff writer.


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