INTERVIEW BY STEVE POND, DGA
DGA | FALL 2014

STEVE POND: Many directors know from a very early age what they want to do with their life. How did you get into directing?
STEVEN SODERBERGH: I got the movie bug from my father, who was a huge fan. But it wasn’t until the summer of 1975, when I was 12 and saw JAWS for the first time, that I began to look at films differently. I came out of the theater and suddenly my relationship to movies had completely changed. I wanted to know what ‘directed by’ meant. And luckily, The Jaws Log was available to read, and I immediately got a copy of that and highlighted every time Steven Spielberg was mentioned. I carried this thing around because I started to realize, hey, this is something you can do. Ironically, watching that perfect piece of entertainment resulted in me never looking at movies as merely entertainment ever again.

POND: When you found out what ‘directed by’ meant, did you think it was a job within your grasp?
SODERBERGH: I wasn’t sure. It didn’t appear that way as someone who was growing up in a suburban subdivision with no connection whatsoever to the entertainment industry. I didn’t start thinking about how to pursue it until I got my hands on a camera and started making things. We had moved to Louisiana and my father signed me up for a course taught by LSU students for kids to learn how to make animation. I could draw pretty well but immediately realized animation bored me. So I just took the camera off the copy stand and started shooting stuff and editing. Then I started doing research about film programs in college and very quickly decided, that’s no good. I was making stuff in 11th grade that you wouldn’t be allowed to make until your third year of film school. So I decided that I would attempt to make some headway in the entertainment business by continuing to make short films and writing. I just thought writing a script and making a low-budget feature, that’s my only way in.

POND: Your first feature, sex, lies, and videotape, won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and really put you on the map—but if you didn’t get great performances from James Spader, Andie MacDowell, Laura San Giacomo, and Peter Gallagher, you wouldn’t have had a movie. As a first-time director, how did you handle working with the actors?
SODERBERGH: I had enough exposure to actors to feel comfortable with them, whether it was through the shorts that I made, or the people I knew who had connections to the drama department at LSU. And my instinctual understanding was they all need to be talked to differently. And so my primary job was to get enough of a sense of who they were so that I could understand how they wanted to be talked to. Some people want me to talk to them a lot. Some people want me to talk to them a lot about everything but the work. Some people don’t want to be talked to. You’re keying off what they’re presenting, and as it happened in that case, it was just a great group of people. We had 30 days to shoot that film. I’ve never been in less of a hurry in my life. I never felt rushed for an instant, and that’s the last time I’ve ever had that sensation. When I look back on it, it’s kind of weird how much time we had. It’s unthinkable. [Laughs] I mean, today I could make that movie in 10 days.

POND: In this period when you were becoming more active in the Guild, you made Out of Sight (1998) with George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez, and the business really embraced you.
SODERBERGH: That was a watershed project, obviously. If I failed creatively, I was going to be in a lot of trouble. I had made five movies in a row that nobody had seen, and I can only imagine there was some real question as to whether or not I was ever going to actually deliver on my potential. Casey Silver was running Universal, and I had made two films for him that had not made a nickel. But he still liked me and believed in me, and he said, ‘There’s an open assignment here, and I think you should pursue it. But let’s be clear: You’re going to have to wait for everybody in town to pass before you get in the room.’

I waited and then I went in and talked to George and to Jersey Films and described what I thought the tone of the film was. It was developed for Barry Sonnenfeld, and Barry had read it and said, ‘I don’t understand the tone of this.’ And when I read it, I felt like I did understand the tone. I said, ‘I think it’s a Hal Ashby movie, in terms of its tone and its balance of drama and humor.’ I thought of The Last Detail. And everybody seemed to agree with that, and that’s how it started moving forward. But that was the most self-imposed pressure that I’ve ever felt.

POND: You said people were asking, ‘Is this guy ever going to fulfill his potential?’ Were you thinking that, too?
SODERBERGH: Well, I just was wondering, where am I going to fit? I didn’t want to be art-house boy. I like specialty films, for lack of a better term, but I didn’t want to only do that because, in a weird sort of way, that’s too easy. It’s much harder to go make a studio movie with movie stars in which you have to be good and clear than it is to go make a little obscure independent movie that, if people don’t get it, you go, ‘Well, that’s your fault.’

I really wanted access to the other half of the business, and so I was very conscious that this better come off or I’m really going to have a tough time. The good news is that creatively people responded positively to the film to the extent that now it’s viewed as being a success, even though it wasn’t. But it did for me and for George what it needed to do. And that started a good run: The Limey (1999), Erin Brockovich, Traffic, and Ocean’s Eleven all in a row in a little over three years. I was feeling really good. I was seeing the ball really well.

POND: You were nominated for Oscars and DGA Awards for 2000 for both Traffic and Erin Brockovich, and won the Oscar for Traffic. It seems as if the latter film was the challenging one, juggling three narratives and three different shooting styles, whereas films like Erin and the Ocean’s movies were more straightforward.
SODERBERGH: Actually, Ocean’s was the hardest for me. Not even close. Traffic was not hard. I knew exactly what it was, and I never had a moment’s hesitation. The schedule was tight and there were a lot of locations and speaking parts, but it wasn’t hard. And Erin is probably the most pleasurable shoot I ever had. It was the kind of movie I hadn’t made before, and just sort of bearing witness to what [Julia Roberts] was doing every day was so much fun. For the first four weeks, we were all in this Holiday Inn in Barstow and I’d come back covered in dirt every day, just smiling.

But I had days of real agony on Ocean’s. It was a kind of shooting that I hadn’t really attempted before. I hadn’t built a whole film that needed a very designed, bravura visual approach. And I don’t like to storyboard, so I had days of telling [1st AD] Greg Jacobs, ‘Just send everybody away. I don’t know how to do this. I need to think about this.’ I think it’s Whistler, the painter, who talked about the labor required to eradicate all traces of labor. That’s the trick of those movies. I wanted them to have a baroque visual palette and style to burn, and yet be breezy. I didn’t want anybody to feel me sweating, even though I was sweating a lot.

POND: Is that how you typically solve problems? Send everybody away?
SODERBERGH: What I’ve learned in those situations is to slow everything down. You need to put yourself in that sort of pure space in which time doesn’t exist, money doesn’t exist, nobody’s waiting around, and it’s just a pure problem to be solved. It’s like a Jedi mind trick where you just convince yourself, I’ve got all the time and I can stay here as long as it takes until I figure it out. And once you’ve truly convinced yourself of that, you figure it out. And I’ve had that happen a couple of times.

POND: You’ve somehow managed to keep your career moving in spite of those peaks and valleys.
SODERBERGH: Reputation helps. Unless you’re somebody who can make one massive hit after another indefinitely, treating people well is a good way to remain employed. Of course there’s a chain of command, but that doesn’t mean there’s a chain of respect. I’ve only raised my voice once on a film set and it was because somebody showed up late two days in a row, which is not acceptable. I don’t know if I’ve ever even held a megaphone.

POND: Since Traffic, you’ve shot and edited almost all your movies yourself. Why?
SODERBERGH: I was trained in high school as a still photographer, and I shot most of my shorts myself. I was a gearhead. I loved equipment and all that stuff. It was, in essence, a way to return to how I began, and also a way to increase the intimacy between myself and the cast. To me, what I gain by being the cinematographer and the camera operator is worth the fact that I’m not Emmanuel Lubezki or Roger Deakins or Harris Savides. And with editing, in some cases I feel so clear about what I want and it’s so specific that it seems inefficient to spend time describing it instead of just doing it.

POND: You’ve obviously set yourself a task in some of your films: ‘I’m going to do this genre,’ or ‘I’m going to do a 1940s World War II movie and I’m going to use these rules,’ or ‘I’m going to set myself these constraints when I make this.’ What appeals to you about that?
SODERBERGH: I’m a big believer in limitations that force you to think laterally instead of vertically. Whenever I start to think about something, I think, What are the rules? What lenses am I using? What are the rules of movement? What are the cutting patterns? What am I allowed to do and what am I not allowed to do?

POND: You’ve moved from film, a director’s medium, to television. Yet you directed every episode of The Knick’s first season, and put your stamp on the series. Is the outlook for directors changing on television?
SODERBERGH: Our situation was atypical: There was a single director, and the show was scheduled, budgeted, and shot like a 10-hour movie. I’m hoping we’re going to see more situations where directors are involved earlier in conceiving and building the universe of a show, and that the idea of parachuting in a guest director to do an episode becomes less the norm than having a smaller, cohesive group of directors that essentially are part of the creative team and are working on the show the whole year. I think you get a better result that way.

POND: So that’s the director’s job, problem solving?
SODERBERGH: Yes, and it’s both terrifying and exhilarating. When you think about it, you go into a room and you say to somebody, ‘I see this, and I need you to give me this much money so that I can go make this thing that I see in my head.’ And then they do, occasionally, and it’s the best virtual game imaginable. You’re dealing with hundreds of people, dealing with time, money, environment, confidence, health issues. And it’s a great job, and a totally unique job. Malcolm Gladwell said that the characteristics of a great job are complexity, autonomy, and a direct connection between effort and result. That’s this job.