Filmmaker Steven Soderbergh. STEVEN SODERBERGH:
HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT
By
Alex Simon
Editor’s Note: The following article appeared in the July 1998 issue of Venice Magazine.
Steven Soderbergh was born January 14, 1963 in Atlanta. Raised in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, he was still in high school when he enrolled in a film animation class at Louisiana State University, where his father was dean of the College of Education. Soon he began making film shorts with equipment he had borrowed from students at the university. After graduating high school early at 17, he decided to skip college and headed for Hollywood in a frustrated pursuit of a movie career. Back in Baton Rouge, he worked as a coin changer at an arcade and in his spare time made a humorous short called Rapid Eye Movement, about his Hollywood non-experience. Eventually, he landed a job at a video production house and enjoyed some success as the director of a music video for the rock group Yes, which was nominated for a Grammy. He began writing screenplays and directed a short called Winston, about sexual deception, which he later developed into his first feature Sex, Lies and Videotape, which was the hit of the 1989 Cannes Film Festival, winning the coveted Palm D'Or as Best Film, as well as the International Critics Prize and Best Actor for James Spader. It also earned an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay. Soderbergh followed this with Kafka in 1991, a surrealistic mystery/suspense film which combined fiction with elements of author Franz Kafka's life. He followed that with an adaptation of A.E. Hotchner's memoir King of the Hill in 1993, a heart-rending coming-of-age tale set in the depression-era midwest. Despite not fairing well at the box office, it remains one of the best-reviewed films of that year. 1995 brought The Underneath, Soderbergh's take on Raymond Chandler-esque mystery, set in present day Austin, Texas. 1997 saw two Soderbergh releases: Schizopolis, a low budget, experimental comedy in the spirit of Richard Lester and Buñuel, and Gray's Anatomy, a filmed version of Spalding Gray's comic monologue.
Soderbergh's latest is one of his best, and certainly his most commercial efforts yet. Out of Sight, from the novel by Elmore Leonard (Get Shorty), reunites Shorty screenwriter Scott Frank with the author and boasts an all-star cast featuring George Clooney, Jennifer Lopez, Ving Rhames, Don Cheadle, Albert Brooks and two huge stars (who will remain nameless) in very crucial cameo roles. Out of Sight is a treat for the brain, the eye, and the funnybone, a film which combines the best of 1970's American film grittiness and a 90's hipness that makes for one very refreshing celluloid cocktail. Universal opened the film wide on June 26. Odds are you'll want to check it out more than once. Steven Soderbergh sat down recently to discuss his latest film opus, as well as his past triumphs, tribulations and disappointments.
I'm a big Elmore Leonard fan and I thought you really captured his voice with Out of Sight, which isn't easy to do on film.
Steven Soderbergh: It's tricky. It's an odd tone. We had two things going for us: Scott Frank, who understands that tone, and we put together a cast that I made sure understood that tone.
Have you always been a fan of Leonard's work?
Yeah. I've read probably six or seven of his novels. I've seen almost all the movies that are based on his work. So I was very familiar with his work.
I was excited when I heard you were doing this film, because like Elmore Leonard's novels, most of your films have subject matters that seem very serious when you first hear about them, but they always seem to have undercurrents of humor. Even with Kafka, a writer whose work most people find to be completely bleak, but I've always found to be blackly hilarious, you seemed to find that same humor and absurdity.
I think Kafka's work is extremely funny in an absurdist way. With (the film), I think a lot of people took it much more seriously than we intended, dealing with that character and all, leaves you open to that. But we really saw it as a carnival ride.
The Underneath struck me as sort of an homage to a Raymond Chandler-type crime story, whereas Elmore Leonard definitely has a more modern take on the genre, more straightforward.
Well, ultimately (The Underneath) was kind of a mess. I didn't quite unlock it or figure it out. Some things about it are interesting, but others are...if there's a successful element to The Underneath it was finding a way to use color in the same way that noir films used to use black and white. That was the one part of the movie that worked. Everything else about the movie I can't defend. It was a failed experiment, but a good experiment to attempt. The results of that experiment were necessary in making (Out of Sight). They can't all be gems. It's a process.
I noticed you were very specific about the color palates in Out of Sight, depending on what city the scene took place in. Did you use a blue filter in most of it?
No. More often than not we shot with a half-85, which cools things off a bit. Then on some stuff we'd just pull the 85 completely, and let it go blue, then print it back. And what happens when you do that is there's a patina of coolness in the blacks. And that gives you a different feel than if you shot it with an 85 and then tried to tone it down, trying to get it to look like winter, for example. We did a lot of experiments, depending on how the light was that day. I love that look. It's very evocative. It's what I saw when I read it. It had that feel...It felt like a real 70's movie to me.
Another filmmaker that comes to mind when I watch a lot of your work is Antonioni, especially in your specific use of color.
I think a big problem with The Underneath was that I was in danger of becoming too much like Antonioni. I think he's terrific, but I think at some level, it's not an appropriate style for an American filmmaker because it runs so counter to our zeitgeist. I appreciate the rigor of that style of filmmaking, but what I felt Out of Sight needed was a combination of being that thorough, with a much more jagged energy and a much more rough style.
Out of Sight didn't feel "slick." I noticed you didn't use many dolly shots, did a lot of hand-held stuff, and a jarring editing style that was very effective.
Yeah, for this material I felt that if the movie smelled like Hollywood it would just fall apart.
You had a star-studded cast in this film right down to the smallest parts. How did you attract such a stellar group?
Well, Elmore Leonard's got a reputation for writing great parts, even great small parts. But in the case of the two cameos, we were really lucky. Both actors were intrigued by the idea of doing these small roles that were extremely important to the story in spite of their size, and also they did it as a favor. But, particularly in the last scene, if it weren't (this actor) it had to be someone who had an extremely powerful presence. Because you're talking about a guy who you have to establish in no time at all that he's "the dude." The break-out artist of all time, otherwise the last scene of the film wouldn't work--if that guy didn't have that power.
The other great thing was that everybody in the film underplayed, very naturalistic.
That's Leonard's style, too. The characters have no self-awareness at all, so if you cast an actor who comments on their performance while they're giving it, you're dead.
Talk to us about George Clooney, who I think is an incredibly underrated actor.
He absolutely is. He's in that weird spot, which I hope he won't be in much longer, where people are saying "He should be a movie star!" He makes four movies and they do okay, but they don't set the world on fire, and everybody blames him. I've always thought that the guy was ready to happen, and there was no question in my mind that this was that part for him.
How do you direct actors?
I try not to ask them how they like to work, I try to find out, and that's where rehearsals come in...I try to have a week to ten days of rehearsal, which is really for me, not for them. It's for me to watch them, and get a sense of how they like to be treated, how to communicate with them so that I don't have to figure it out on the set, where I'm not as patient. (All the actors) are different, so you have to treat them accordingly.
What sort of space do you like to rehearse in?
We just had an open space, sort of a holding room, over at Universal that was fairly good-sized. I'd bring in some props and tables and things, do a read-through for a while, then put it on its feet, do a little blocking.
Do you have a clear idea of how you're going do shoot beforehand? Do you storyboard at all?
No. Figuring out where to put the camera is usually the easy part. It's coming up with some way of staging the scene that's interesting, that's the hard part...the only thing I boarded on this movie, because we shot the whole sequence out of order, was I took stand-ins and moved them through the entire mansion sequence from beginning to end, and then with a still camera with a zoom lens, shot from every angle I could think of, then put those up on a big board. Every time we did a shot, I'd put a piece of red tape on that corresponding picture.
Hearing you talk, you seem to have a natural affinity for filmmaking. Did you always love movies growing up?
Oh yeah, I always loved movies, but I don't think...I think it's something I like to do and something I feel comfortable doing, but I don't think I have an innate ability for it. There's certain things I think I do well, but I see films by other people all the time where I say "Jesus Christ, I could never do that!" There are a lot films that just leave me in awe...Something like Titanic, you could put a gun to my head and say "Direct this." I'd say "Go ahead and pull the trigger," because I wouldn't know where to start. My mind just doesn't work that way. But, odds are that (James Cameron's) version of Sex, Lies...would be pretty strange. (laughs) But he's good at what he's good at. It takes a while to figure out what you're good at. Part of maturing I think is recognizing what you're good at and refining that and focusing on that, instead of spreading yourself out too thin and trying to be a jack-of-all-trades. And that takes a while to learn, because the ego part of you wants to say "I can play on anybody's court, anywhere, anytime." Instead of saying "Hey, you know what, I'm not very good on clay, I'm gonna stick to grass." And it's true.
Were your parents involved in the arts?
My dad was a college professor who drew a little bit, and he loved books, and he loved movies and he loved music. My mother when she was younger painted, but by the time I was growing up had stopped. It was certainly a household where I was encouraged to explore that stuff and supported endlessly by them.
Any siblings?
Yeah, I have three sisters and two brothers...I was the fifth.
You didn't go to a formal film school, so how did you develop yourself as a filmmaker?
Trial and error...I was hanging out with these LSU students when I was in high school who had access to some university film equipment and we were all sort of experimenting with this stuff. And some of the people I'm still working with. Paul Edford, my production sound mixer, was one of the members of that film class. It was a pretty unique group, all have gone on to do interesting things.
Did those early films that you all did get you attention early on?
Not really. They were just résumé pieces for me that I'd show to people for specific reasons.
I heard your first move to L.A. wasn't so pleasant.
Well, I came out here when I was 17, was here for a year and a half and I was getting some editing work for a TV show called Games People Play that got canceled. It was a dreadful show, but the segments that we got to do were interesting. They were filmed segments, which in the early 1980's was a new thing to do, shoot 16mm negative, transfer it to tape, and then post on tape. So, the show got canceled, I kept doing piddly jobs and figured, 'Well, I can starve a lot more comfortably back in Baton Rouge.' So I moved back, kept making shorts, kept writing and...writing is really what kept me going. I eventually wrote enough stuff to get an agent and get work, and with that money I financed a short film...and eventually did Sex, Lies.
How did you get the job for the Yes concert film?
I had been doing freelance work for Showtime and someone there recommended me to the band. They wanted to make a little "on the road" documentary, so I figured what the hell, I'll never see these people again, so I edited it into this sort of snarky, cheeky 30 minute film about life on the road with the band. They really responded to it, thought it was really fun. So they called me up and asked if I wanted to do the concert film. I said "Shit, yeah!" Here I was, 22, a pretty big thing to do...So I got an agent out of that and had been writing now non-stop for five years and had just started writing stuff that didn't completely suck.
How many did you have to write before they stopped completely sucking?
Probably one a year, from '80 to '85. Then in late '85, I wrote three back-to-back in like six months. I finally just crossed a line where something unlocked and I wrote these three...and that's when things started to open up. The first paying writing job I got was to re-write a one hour Disney TV movie that never got made.
Was there any one movie that really captured your imagination growing up and inspired you?
There were lots, tons. I'm editing a book of interviews right now that I did with Richard Lester. He was a huge influence, still is.
One of my favorite movies is Robin and Marian.
Great film. Look at this guy, talk about underrated and under-appreciated. He invents rock video with A Hard Day's Night and Help. The Knack, How I Won the War, Petulia which is a masterpiece, the Three Musketeers films which are hilarious and fun, Juggernaut, which is a great movie...Great filmmaker, with a wide range of films and genres.
I even liked Cuba, which got killed when it was released.
That's a fascinating movie. Flawed, but really the things that people disliked about it when it came out are what makes it interesting now, it's refusal to sort of play to the idea of a war-torn romance. An absolute refusal to be sentimental or easy about anything. Brooke Adams' character was really fascinating. Here's a woman who says "Look, I don't know what little fantasy you've got in your head, but don't play it out on me, because I'm not that." And this guy (Sean Connery) who wrestling with the fact that the kind of guy he is is obsolete now...It's a really interesting movie.
Why did Lester stop making films?
It was a combination of things triggered by the death of (actor) Roy Kinnear during the making of Return of the Musketeers. Lester was absolutely devastated by that and hasn't made a feature since. But he's an incredibly bright, kind, funny man. For my money, I wish he was still directing movies because I think he's still got movies in him.
So many great directors from that era that inspired your generation seemed to have just vanished. What happened do you think?
Well, as we know from reading the Peter Biskind book (Easy Riders, Raging Bulls), a lot of them just self-destructed. It was their own damn fault for the most part. Part of it was the business changing, but the lion's share of it was them. They just went out of their heads...I watched a lot of 70's films preparing for Out of Sight: all of William Friedkin's films, all the early Hal Ashby films. It was a great time.
Let's talk about King of the Hill, which reminded me of some of the best of Truffaut and Louis Malle.
They were definitely in our minds, especially The 400 Blows...Everything about that movie went flawlessly during the shooting. Then once it was done, everything went wrong. We finished the movie, took it to Cannes, got our heads handed to us. They fuckin' hated it. Hated it! Just a disaster. Not good long lead reviews, very mixed. Then we're coming out in August of that year on the heels of ten movies with children protagonists. Ten! Then the daily reviews come out and they're as good as I've ever gotten, but by then it was too late. It was a disaster.
I think it will be one of the films that you're remembered for.
It's the movie that people always bring up to me the most as their favorite of mine. As a classical piece of American narrative, that's about as good a film as I know how to make. But what happened afterward doesn't affect my memory of making the film, which was a great experience.
Let's go backwards and talk about Sex, Lies. Walk us through winning the Cannes Film Festival.
Well, the great thing about it is that it's a surprise. You don't take out ads to win the Palm D'Or. We screened very early in the festival, within the first couple of days, and notoriously that's not a good spot. But, the film went down well, we did our press, and then we went home, back to L.A. A couple people said that I might have a shot at the Camera D'Or, for best first film, and that they'd let me know. Then I got a call from Mike Watts, who was running Virgin at the time, and he said "I think you better get on a plane. I think you're gonna win the Camera D'Or and it's worth coming over for." So I got on a plane on Sunday, get off Monday afternoon and get handed the International Critics Prize, which I would've come back for anyway! So I thought, 'Wow, that's great.' They rush me into the ceremony. Then I see Spike Lee and say "What's going on?" And he says he didn't get anything for Do the Right Thing. I couldn't believe it. It's a great movie and should've won something. So we sit down, then James Spader wins for best actor. And nobody's there but me, so I run up and accept for him...Somebody grabs me as I walk offstage and says they need to get me back to my seat. Sits me down in my seat as Wim Wenders is speaking, I don't think in English, about the Palm D'Or winner, saying it's a film by a young filmmaker, this is all being translated for me...and I'm thinking okay, could it be Mystery Train, could it be Do the Right Thing...and he says "Sex, Lies and Videotape." And immediately it's like you leave your body and watch yourself trip and stumble over people as you go on-stage. And at that point, I know I stood at the podium and said "Well, I guess it's all downhill from here," and I have no idea what I said after that. It's all a complete blank. I know that I was taken and put on live French television immediately afterwards, next to Denys Arcand and Bertrand Blier, neither of whom looked very happy, and I gave this interview, got up in a daze and walked out of the building, and left the Palm D'Or under my seat! (laughs) And as I was walking out the door, somebody says to me "Uh, do you think you want to take the award with you?" (laughs) It's more amazing to me in retrospect than it was at the time. It was almost like someone hitting you with a wand and saying "You're John Lennon for three hours," with that kind of attention focused on you. Having been back to Cannes a couple times since and watching from the outside, I think 'Man, that must've been nuts!'
Many people credit Sex, Lies with jump-starting the independent film business in this country.
They key word there is 'business.' If Sex, Lies had made half a million bucks, we wouldn't even be having this conversation. It made money, and as we know if something makes money, people are suddenly interested. As far as its cultural impact, it comes down to just that: money.
Do you have any advice for first-time directors?
Don't wait for permission. There is a long list of reasons you can give yourself not to start: "I don't have enough money." "I have some but I need a little more." "I don't know anyone." There are gonna be so many people who will tell you 'no,' don't add yourself to that list. Whether you do it or not, nobody gives a shit. The only person who gives a shit at the end of the day is you, and you can't worry about how it will look, or anything, you've just gotta go. You've gotta go. The rest of what happens to you will rest on the film itself, which is how it should be. But I always tell people, people are their own worst enemy. We know that. They key is to remove yourself from the enemy list.
