Alumni Interview: Steven Soderbergh - Complete Transcript

On September 17, 2008 at NYC's IFC Center, Slamdance invited alumni filmmaker Steven Soderbergh to screen the film he had premiered at our festival seven years prior: Schizopolis. After viewing with a rowdy mob of film enthusiasts and lost tourists, Soderbergh entertained some questions from journalist Anthony Kaufman. This is the full transcript of this exclusive Q&A.

Photograph Courtesy of Farhad Parsa

Steven Soderbergh: …And it was while I was making the Underneath that, um, I felt something was going, that I was not going in the direction that I should be going in. I didn’t know what to do about it. It was kind of a strange experience for me making The Underneath, because here I was doing the job first (laughter), here I was doing the thing that I love to do so much, which is make a movie, but I wasn’t happy with the movie that I was making at the time; I didn’t think it was going to be very good… and, um, I thought about stopping, because I didn’t know for a while like halfway through shooting The Underneath I really thought about stopping because I just wasn’t enjoying it and I couldn’t figure out how to get out of this, this mood I was in. And, I realized what I needed to do was start over. Literally. To go back to Baton Rouge, reconnect with some of the people that I had grown up with and made films with growing up. A lot of them were still working with me, but I started planning the idea of this, or planning the idea of how to make another movie like it. And that sort of got me through the process of finishing The Underneath. And I started writing. And so, strangely enough, I made a deal with Universal Home Video for 300 grand or something, and that’s how we made the movie, I went out and bought some equipment, some very old aeroplex equipment, uh, including a blimp. This thing that was 70 pounds, we could put the camera inside it, it’s kind of beautiful, as an objet d’art, it’s something you have to move, it’s a drag, but I bought all this gear for 15 grand and I bought all the short ends and we started shooting. I only ended up in it because I knew this shoot would probably, sorta be sporadic and go on for a while and I didn’t know anybody that I could ask really to be in the movie for free and basically be on call for nine months. So that’s how that came about. And it’s something that continues, it was a dead nation that continues to reverberate. It really was my second first film, and I’ve read that the attitude that I had making it is something that I still reference now; whenever I’m in a situation and feeling a little locked up or sort of second-guessing myself I immediately go back to this sort of mindset of, “Well, if you were making Schizopolis, what would you do?” Meaning, if you had the freedom to do whatever you wanted, what would you do? And so it’s been—you might not think so, but it’s influenced, literally, everything I’ve made since. Thank you for coming. (laughter)

Anthony Kaufman: There were inspirations for Schizopolis…?

Steven Soderbergh: Well part of the process, yeah, of making the film was doing this book on Richard Lester, for a favor, because one of the things that I thought about, one of the filmmakers that I realized was a huge influence on me was Richard Lester who is best known for making the Beatles films, but he had a very diverse career, many skills and a lot of different genres, not just comedies but he did thrillers, he made—I just watched Juggernaut the other night which is a really good thriller. He made Petulia, which is just an amazing, very, very adult drama. And so I was inspired by him not only by the energy he brought to his work, he worked very, very fast, he was legendary for how fast he worked. But he also, he made all kinds of films. So while I was doing Schizopolis, I was working on this book with him and that was a real inspiration as well, and it was right after the book was finished that I got out of sight and things started to shift a little bit.

Anthony Kaufman: Was this the first feature that you also shot?

Steven Soderbergh: Yeah, this would have been the first thing that I acted as DP on…I had shot my short films, but…

Anthony Kaufman: And that’s been something that you continued as well...?

Steven Soderbergh: Yeah, this obviously. We made this movie with five people. We drove around in two cars…we would just drive around and say “let’s go over there!” and pull the cars over and take the stuff out and start shooting, which is a great way to make a movie if you can.

Anthony Kaufman: Yeah, Elmo is played by…

Steven Soderbergh: David Jensen, yeah, who, again, was a childhood friend of mine and is an actor and a grip and was sort of the casting director on this as well. Our editor is here tonight, Sarah Flack (applause) yeah, Sarah actually worked in the production department on Kafka, and so we knew each other a little bit…it was probably strange We’re friends now. I’m sure that was a very odd way to get to know me, cutting us, but it was, as I said it was a lot of trial and error, I changed the film a bit. Can you imagine? We screened this film in Cannes, ah…

Anthony Kaufman: Where you were a celebrity...?

Steven Soderbergh: Yeah, sometimes. I mean, I wasn’t, ah, for a very brief period of time I got to experience both ends of Cannes. It was after Sex, Lies and Videotape we took King of the Hill there and it was really hated. To the point where I remember the day of our festival screening, they do this thing, it’s sort of like a report card, you get to see how many circles or stars a movie got, you know that screened the night before. I remember the day of our screening looking a film that had screened the night before, thinking, “wow that went over badly”, and our scores were way worse the next day, so, and literally people were canceling interviews to jump onto doing interviews with filmmakers whose movies had gone over better. It just goes around like that. I was fine with it.

Anthony Kaufman: And how Schizopolis was received in Cannes?

Steven Soderbergh: Well, there were some walk-outs, but remember, Gilles Jacob, you’ve got to give him credit, he took this thing…they said it’s going to be a surprise film, they didn’t tell anybody what it was, people had no idea what they were going to see, they would walk into a festival screening, and they’d see that. (laughter) So after that, what I did was I added the sort of, the bookend thing, which was inspired by – have you ever seen this intro that Cecil B. DeMille does for The Ten Commandments? It is the most self-aggrandizing thing you’ve ever seen in your life. This guy comes out in front of a huge red curtain, and basically, for ten minutes, tells you how important this movie is. And literally, like, how you haven’t lived the life unless you’ve seen this thing. And I just thought, that’s amazing. We have to do that.

Anthony Kaufman: Like the turning of the….

Steven Soderbergh: Oh, the turret, the airplanes, yeah that’s a good effect.

Anthony Kaufman: So I think the first time I saw it I was about 10 or 11 years ago when it came out and, at the time, I didn’t know that your ex-wife, who plays the wife in the film. This time I knew that and I actually think the film was a lot more poignant…amidst all the absurdity I was actually kind of touched. I don’t know how many people knew that fact…

Steven Soderbergh: Or care…

Anthony Kaufman: Right, for me, I felt like it was even more personal, but what was the whole rationale behind casting your own ex-wife?

Steven Soderbergh: Yeah, it was brutal. Part of the reason, was of course, free talent and somebody that would say yes. There was sort of, I guess, an idea that this might be somehow cathartic. (laughter) You look at those scenes, you can imagine, what this was like. It was really intense. Good, good for the movie. But it was weird, and it was intense, it was really emotionally intense. Not only because of the material, a lot of it was this abstract recreation of scenes that had happened and the people standing around in the group, people that she knew, and there was absolutely no pretense I had any authority at all in this situation so it was…a filmmaker friend of mine was just aghast that I had gone and done this. When he saw the movie he said, “You are out of your mind.” He had gone through a divorce and was just like; it’s unthinkable that I would drag my ex-wife through something like that. But it seemed like the hardest way to do it and the right way to do it…so I don’t know. At the time it didn’t feel like there was a choice.

Anthony Kaufman: And creatively, it seems like it was sort of cathartic, because of where you’ve gone since then, and the fact that you do sight the film continually as an inspiration for others that you’ve done.

Steven Soderbergh: Oh, yeah.

Anthony Kaufman: And there is of course a lot of themes and issues that we do see in this film with Terry Halberg and structures…playing with time. Can you talk about your interest in really screwing with chronology? It comes off even Che, it’s like it’s chronological, but there are, it’s viprocated, there’s nothing that’s the same way...

Steven Soderbergh: Yeah, I think Che is very central to this. I mean it’s something that film does that’s sort of unique enough. I’ve read William S. Burroughs books that are pretty non linear and similar to this, but it’s something that film does so well and so easily. This sort of collapsing and expansion of time, this restructuring and ability to juxtapose and create meaning out of repetition is just so much fun. You have to be careful I think when you do it. For instance, I’m not whining, but there were some dark days there when I really thought, “We’re not going to figure this out.” Well, there was a semi-universe that really didn’t work, and yet we hadn’t sort of unlocked the grammar of what would ultimately be the version that we ended up with. It was scary. But when you can sort of find the algorhythm you can get at things that you can’t get at any other way. Which is a sort of sensation of how your mind works. As we walk around we are sort of simultaneously assessing our lives in three ways. In the present, we’re walking down the street, we’re thinking about something that probably happened yesterday or six months ago, and then we’re thinking about where we’re going to be in 20 minutes and film has a wonderful ability to create that sensation. And so when there’s the opportunity to do it I like to try and do that.

Anthony Kaufman: And then hopefully…

Steven Soderbergh: Yeah, the language thing.

Anthony Kaufman: I’d forgotten about that.

Steven Soderbergh: Well, again, it’s about ultimately what the movie’s about, the sort of breakdown of communication in this marriage. I was trying to think of every way that I could portray that. Because ultimately I think, and I said this to my daughter who is 17 now, and who is in the film, I had someone really get angry at me about that, a friend of mine, how could you put your daughter in this, this is really exploitative, I was like, it’s me and her mother. Oh, it gets worse, I go to visit her at school. I’m meeting her boyfriend and her boyfriend’s parents for the first time. She lives on a dorm. Her boyfriend’s father is the dorm supervisor. I walk in, I’m meeting this guy. On the counter of the kitchen is a copy of the DVD of Schizopolis. (laughter) They’re not together anymore. But what I did say, is if you want to know what somebody is like, just turn the sound off, and analyze what they do and then you will know what you are dealing with. I do think that obviously language can be a wonderful way to clarify but more often than not I think it is used to obfuscate. It sort of follows my theory…I have a sort of corollary theory about movies, which is a movie should absolutely work with the sound off; you should be able to watch a movie with no sound and absolutely understand what is going on. That’s cinema to me. And so I’m always disappointed when I see something where I feel like the filmmaker is not thinking in those terms.

Anthony Kaufman: Maybe we should take some questions…

Steven Soderbergh: Yeah, please.

Anthony Kaufman: (rephrasing a question from someone in the audience) The question is about your insights, where does it come from with the way people communicate, similar to Sex, Lies and Videotape?

Steven Soderbergh: You know, I guess, here’s what life is to me: something happens to me and I tell somebody about it, something happens to somebody else and they tell me about it. That seems to be it. (laughter) I guess I’m interested in that. I guess I’m interested in the stories that we tell about ourselves or to ourselves or the stories that we hear and what they mean. Can they be accurate, ever? And if so, under what circumstances and, if not, why? I guess that’s just always been, I’ve always thought that way, even as a kid. And it’s taken me a while to expand that idea and apply it to larger canvases because I’ve always wanted to try new things and sort of push myself if possible. But the core, even of those larger projects, has always been about that, has always been about that sort of interaction that sort of personal interaction.

(Another question is taken)

Steven Soderbergh: (repeating the question from someone in the audience: How should I be treated as a director?

Anthony Kaufman: (referring to the questioner) This is a bitter production assistant here.

Steven Soderbergh: A self-professed bitter production assistant.

Anthony Kaufman: (amidst laughter) Right, how do you feel at any other time?

Steven Soderbergh: Well, I said this in the preface of Sex, Lies and Videotape, which I know you’ve all read, which is I believe in a chain of command but I don’t believe in a chain of respect. And so it really distresses me to hear about bad behavior. This is what stuns me about it, I mean all we do all day is tell stories about what happened to us and I’m just stunned that people go around behaving badly and that there is just no justification to this. I think there isn’t in a literal sense, but I think there is in a karmic sense. I’ve had conversations with friends of mine who are very talented who I know are absolute terrors on the film set. And I’ve said, what are you doing? The minute you start making stuff that nobody wants to see people are going to be so happy that they don’t have to deal with you. Even just on a self-serving level, what are you doing? You know, why? I’ve made nineteen feature films, I’ve directed six hours of television. I’ve never raised my voice once. It doesn’t have to be an atmosphere in which people are being demeaned or belittled. I just don’t feel you get the best out of people by doing that. They just lock up. They’re not going to help you after they feel like you’ve been a jerk. I don’t get it. But that’s, maybe that’s just the way I was raised, or its the people that I hooked up with when I was very young that sort of mentored me were cool and so I learned that’s the way you be. There’s somebody who has to make decisions here, but it doesn’t have to turn into a power trip. I don’t know. It sounds like you’ve had some really terrible experiences.

Anthony Kaufman: Yes, uh, yes, with the beard (asking for a question from audience member “Stanley Kubrick”:

Stanley Kubrick: This is kind of a broad question. I was curious if you might be able to comment on sort of the arc of your career in the sense that in a film like this and I would say few other films there seems to be a tendency to sort of try to turn the camera around or pull the camera out and there’s a sort of a commentary on Hollywood or on filmmaking with Full Frontal, even in the second Oceans with Julia Roberts. I just sort of wondered sort of what that commentary is alluding to in terms of your disposition about making films. It seems like, without any disrespect, I love your filmmaking, your filmmaking in some respect has gotten sort of more commercial, something like the Ocean films, more sort of blockbuster oriented, and I know Full Frontal has a mixed perception that a lot of films have… (laughter) If you still feel like there is room to make a film like this, a Full Frontal that is off kilter that is ….

Steven Soderbergh: Oh sure, Bubble is that. I’m starting a movie here in three weeks, and it’s the second in a series of six films that I’m making for 2929 and HD Net that are all low budget that are really, frankly designed for me to be able to sort of experiment a little bit. Um, I guess the sort of self-reflexive aspects that you are talking about come from a kind of interest in the unspoken contract that exists between the filmmaker and audience, because I do think there is one, and so every once in a while I find myself kind of drawn to the fine print and wondering what’s allowed. And again, had friends of mine really, really take me to task for the last shot in Full Frontal. They were really angry. And my sort of explanation of why that was—and I have to say, the only thing to say in my defense was, it was something that I did in the moment of doing the shot. It was not planned. I was shooting the shot of Enrico and Mary going to the plane, going their seat, and literally, I don’t know how to describe it other than I just felt pushed. I just started backing up. And that became the shot, and it was not planned. It was organic in the sense that what I was trying to get at in Full Frontal was this belief that there is one aesthetic that is more real than another aesthetic. And in fact, they are both very, very consciously designed, and to me neither one is more or less real than the other. This was sort of a way of forcing people to confront that. That may not be something they want to be confronted with when they paid ten dollars to see a movie. But at the moment it was interesting to me. That’s something that cost, $1.9 million and made, around the world, I don’t know, $17 or $18, it turned out to be a very profitable film, as sort of loathed as it was. We had an idea that I wish we had done now. Maybe we’ll do it on something else. We were going to take like all the really ugly reviews and run big ads where we just reprinted the whole terrible review. And I’m sure I will have the opportunity to do it again. (laughter) Again, it’s a dangerous thing to get into, when you remind people that they are watching a movie you do risk pulling them out of it to such an extent that they can’t get back in. I think it’s a little… and believe me, Warner Bros. was very, very, very nervous about the Julia thing in Oceans 12. That’s a movie that cost $119 million to make and I’m saying, like, look! It’s been done, in His Girl Friday, in 1940, Cary Grant makes this reference where somebody says what does the guy look like that’s waiting out front, you know, that actor, Ralph Bellamy,

Anthony Kaufman: Marilyn Monroe?

Steven Soderbergh: Yeah, exactly, Some Like It Hot, you know, you’ve got Tony Curtis, doing the Cary Grant impression and the film is set in a period before Cary Grant was even known by anybody. You know, I felt like I can cite these references, not very persuasively, but you are sort of playing with something that could blow up in your face. But at the end of the day, in that situation I felt, these movies are sort of designed to be not serious. That’s why I liked doing them. I thought, this is a world in which we can get away with it, if we do it properly. But it’s tricky.

Anthony Kaufman: Whatever happened to the Schizopolis sequel, by the way? It was written, right?

Steven Soderbergh: Yeah, no. I don’t know. We have a title, we’re going to call it Son of Schizopolis. Fletcher Munson, who knows where he is now.

Anthony Kaufman: Another burning question, yes:

Audience Member: My brother just finished working with you on Che, Roberto Santana,

Steven Soderbergh: I know Roberto very well.

Brother Santana: And he would report to me weekly, daily, what a wonderful joy it was to work with you.

Steven Soderbergh: Oh that’s nice. Well, he was great. And that was a tough shoot.

Brother Santana: What drew you to that material?

Steven Soderbergh: You know, I don’t – It was literally one of those things that I said yes to without even knowing why initially and it was an eight year process getting that going. And I’ve learned not to really analyze why. I mean I realized later what the movie was about, very late, actually. In post, actually. (laughter) But that’s okay because I say no to things and I say yes to things without thinking about why I’m saying no or saying yes. You either read something and it’s there in your head and you see it or you don’t. And what I realized Che was about to me, because it has to be about me, was that in every moment, whether it is in a private level or in a community level or a global level, the question that we are grappling with is, do I engage or do I disengage? Do I extend myself and become a participant or do I step back and remain an observer? And there can be a variety of reasons for why you do or why you don’t. And I fluctuate in my own life in terms of my level of engagement or my level of disengagement. With the understanding that disengagement is easier. Che is someone who at a certain point in his life decided to engage in such a complete way and never wavered. I realized that that was what I was fascinated by. The politics of it was sort of secondary to me and there were things I agreed with him about and things I don’t agree with him about. There is certainly no place for a person like me in the society he was trying to build. Literally. So I realize I was just fascinated by his ability to sustain this over such a long period of time under such extreme circumstances. You cannot find anyone who ever saw him express any doubt about his level of engagement. What he was doing, it’s kind of, it’s not normal and I realized that literally, in April of this year, I realized that’s what this is about. That’s what drew me to him eight years ago.

Anthony Kaufman: One more. It’s got to be a good one.

Audience Member: Hi, first I appreciate being here, but…

Steven Soderbergh: “But,” That word “But.”

Audience Member: I know, that word. I’m curious as someone who is on the other side of their career trying to make films and get out there on a spiritual sense and get their voice heard and wondered, you know, there’s a million people who want to do that. For you, how did you get to the other side of it? Was it more of a spiritual journey or somehow like a determination within your profession? That really there’s so much that people tell me as I do all these different things, yeah I’ll persevere through life but what is that one thing that you might have taken away?

Steven Soderbergh: Well, the sort of sad fact is that luck plays an enormous factor in life. It just does. You know. I mean, this is another thing I said to my daughter. If you are looking for fair, you shouldn’t have been born. I honestly, I’ve been really lucky. I had strange luck. Very strange, like crazy, off the chart luck. The one person I knew turned out to be years later the one person I needed to know. It’s just weird stuff. Separate from that I was dedicated in teaching myself about this. I still watch a film a day. Sometimes more. So how many years since I started making films at 13. I’m still trying to learn more about what I’m doing, either by watching something great that I’ve seen before and I’m trying to break down why it’s great. I have a theory that within something that’s really great is the double helix that can teach you how to make something great, if you can just break it down enough. And then I try and watch new stuff and then sometimes watching bad stuff is really helpful, because it is as important to know what not to do as it is to know what to do. So the aspects of just teaching yourself the craft, your voice and whatever soul you’ve got and however that expresses itself is a variable that is specific to you and can’t be really taught, and you can’t make people get it. And so my attitude was, I just like doing this. I’ll gonna make this stuff. And now the technology exists that you can make stuff and make pretty good stuff for not a lot of money and you can get it out there. But as I was just talking to (Slamdance’s) Paul (Rachman) during the screening, I said, we’re at the point where a lot of people are going to have to redefine what success means in this business. There is a way to make stuff and there is a way to get it made, the sort of paradigm of making a movie, going to a festival and having a breakout situation I think is going to start going away.

Audience Member: Is it more like, ‘cause you send your resume and go word by word and get a job here and there, and say I know this job will get you this opportunity and that opportunity and you learn so much, and willingly. However, is there a certain idea of, okay I should get my film into festivals, or this job which will help me get this network, or is it an aspect all of that?

Steven Soderbergh: Yeah, it’s all of that. Like I said it’s not linear. That’s the problem. There really isn’t a sort of direct cause and effect. The only thing you have to make sure you do is keep making stuff. I was always making stuff. One of the better short films I made took me two years and cost me $2,000. And this was in ’82, and I was working as a coin attendant in a video arcade. But I was good. Because I just had this whole thing, that at some point, if I just keep doing this I am going to bump into somebody and they’re going to say, what do you got? And at that point I felt like, great, if I get there, they say what do you got to show me, and I show them and I don’t get to the next level, that’s my fault. That’s not their fault. But the point is to try and figure out at least how to get to that place where somebody says show me something you have done. You know, a fantastic rejection letter from Lucas Film.