Soderbergh Entrance

Image borrowed from Bing

Steven Andrew Soderbergh, born January 14, 1963, is an American film producer, screenwriter, cinematographer, editor, actor, and an Academy Award-winning film director. He is best known for directing commercial Hollywood films like Erin Brockovich, Traffic, and Ocean's Eleven, but he has also directed smaller less conventional and commercialized works such as Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Schizopolis, Bubble, and Che.

Soderbergh has made big-budget Hollywood films as well as art-house independent films; works with above-the-title movie stars and unknowns; directs adaptations and original material, both of which written by himself as well as other screenwriters. His versatility is also apparent with the genres which he chooses to film and his trades as a filmmaker behind the scenes. Traffic screenwriter and Syriana director Stephen Gaghan named Soderbergh "the Michael Jordan of filmmaking" for his ability to assume so many distinct roles in film production.

While Soderbergh is enamoured of dialogue, Soderbergh's incorporation of score and montage are equally prevalent in his story-telling. Even Soderbergh's light-hearted affairs, such as Out of Sight and Ocean's 11, contain scenes where images and score are the dominant story-telling mechanisms. Films such as Solaris and Traffic are heavily layered in scenes absent of dialogue altogether. Cliff Martinez, a frequent collaborator with Soderbergh, composes many of the scores that provide Soderbergh with the thematic and sonic landscapes into which he inserts his characters.

But while Soderbergh's subject matter is highly varied, many of his films feature as a central theme the exploration of the act or moral consequences of lying. For example, the protagonists in two early films, King of the Hill and Sex, Lies, and Videotape, are both pathological liars (one in training, one in recovery), while most of the characters in all three Oceans films are con artists. It is interesting to note that he directed Spalding Gray in Gray's Anatomy after King of the Hill, an actor who often commented that he was unable to "make anything up". Full Frontal is another film in this thread, where seemingly the fundamental dishonesty of the entire filmmaking process is exposed. More distantly, Soderbergh's interest in rhyming slang, as seen in The Limey and the Oceans films, may be seen as part of this theme, based on the conjectured origin of rhyming slang as a language game.

In his review of Full Frontal film critic Roger Ebert commented that, "Every once in a while, perhaps as an exercise in humility, Steven Soderbergh makes a truly inexplicable film... A film so amateurish that only the professionalism of some of the actors makes it watchable... It's the kind of film where you need the director telling you what he meant to do and what went wrong and how the actors screwed up and how there was no money for retakes, etc." About Soderbergh's film, The Good German and his emphasis on style over substance, film critic Richard Roeper commented that the film had to offer, "a lot of style. Not so much with the plot."

Soderbergh has, nonetheless, been dubbed a stylistic chameleon by Anne Thompson of Premiere Magazine. Drew Morton has extensively researched Soderbergh and has tied him to a modern movement much like the French New Wave.


A movie that costs only $1.6 million doesn't have to be a cultural event to turn a profit.
Steven Soderbergh

Another thing that really excites me: I'd like to do multiple versions of the same film.
Steven Soderbergh

But my sense in talking to people when I travel is that the film business is not that dissimilar from a lot of other businesses.
Steven Soderbergh

I don't consider myself to be particularly gifted in the way that other filmmakers are gifted.
Steven Soderbergh

I guess I didn't feel confident enough to be searching in a big public way. I was very content at the time to toil in obscurity on things that I thought might point me in certain directions or teach me certain things - not knowing what that would be.
Steven Soderbergh

I guess why the Ocean's films are hard for me is because on the one hand you have to make sure the performances are there, but on the other hand it's a film that demands, to my mind, a very layered and complex visual scheme. That takes a lot of time to figure out.
Steven Soderbergh

I had more fun making Traffic than either of the Ocean's films.
Steven Soderbergh

I just produced Criminal, this remake of Nine Queens, and one of the things that appealed to me about Nine Queens is that it was a performance piece, and that's the most fun.
Steven Soderbergh

I know why we can't have a frank discussion with our policymakers - if you're in the government or in law enforcement you cannot acknowledge that drugs are anything but inherently evil and morally wrong.
Steven Soderbergh

I like to make all kinds of movies. I'd do 'Ocean's Thirteen' with the right script.
Steven Soderbergh

I look at other filmmakers and see skills in them that I wish I had but I know that I don't. I feel like I have to work really hard to keep myself afloat, doing what I do. But I find it pleasurable.
Steven Soderbergh

I love caper films.
Steven Soderbergh

I think I'm good at amplifying an actor's strengths, and minimizing their weaknesses. And they all have strengths and weaknesses.
Steven Soderbergh

I'm in the process of working out an arrangement to make some very, very, very small films in the midst of all these films and maybe that will help. But you get tired of talking. You just want to do it.
Steven Soderbergh

I'm sure some people will say, 'Why do this?' And my response is, 'Why wouldn't you?' The film business in general is using a model that is outdated and, worse than that, inefficient.
Steven Soderbergh

I'm very comfortable with failure. I'm very comfortable being the guy who disappoints people.
Steven Soderbergh

In Full Frontal and K Street, I learned to take advantage of the mobility that digital provides.
Steven Soderbergh

It's pretty clear to me that working as a director for hire agrees with me. I like it. The films that have come out of that, I personally like better than the ones that didn't.
Steven Soderbergh

Lying is like alcoholism. You are always recovering.
Steven Soderbergh

Making a film that's supposed to be fun to watch is really hard - that's the weird irony of it.
Steven Soderbergh