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February 23, 2007
Blood, gristle, tapestock and Steven: Soderbergh's double agentry
Steven Soderbergh is a double-agent between arthouse and multiplex, argues Ryan Gilbey in the Guardian. The blunt 44-year-old hyphenate had watched The Good German again the night before at the Berlin film festival in front of 2,000 viewers. "I became aware of just how extreme an experiment the film is... We were sitting there watching this ... weird ... movie. 
Not weird in a bad way, hopefully. But this strange process occurs as you watch it and go through different layers of feeling. My hope is that halfway through, the aesthetics fall away and you just deal with the narrative... What if Michael Curtiz had the freedoms in 1945 that I have today? If the Hays [C]ode hadn't existed, what would movies have been like?" Hit and miss, surely, as as Gilbey notes, "[if]f there's one director on the planet who can take bad notices on the chin, it's Soderbergh. When it became clear to him that no one [was going tos ee] The Good German, he was straight on the phone to Warner Bros advising the distributor to scrap the planned wide release, repackage the film for the arthouse, and hit the college towns. "I don't want to spend $15m chasing $2m," he shrugs." He's also "sick" of people talking about how "everything's great." "I like to hear about the blood and gristle of the creative process. I hate these fucking interviews where it's like there's sunshine shooting out of the director's mouth. So I try to be very careful about the syntax I employ. I don't want to suggest, 'We've done an amazing thing here'." Studio and Indie® are much the same to Soderbergh: "The rules are the same. Wherever you are in the industry, no one will encourage you to do anything other than what you've successfully done before." The important thing? "The important thing is not to panic."
Posted by Ray Pride at February 23, 2007 12:38 AM
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