Steven Soderbergh
Steven Soderbergh
Steven Andrew Soderberghis an American film producer, director, screenwriter, cinematographer and editor. His indie drama Sex, Lies, and Videotapewon the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and became a worldwide commercial success, making the then-26-year-old Soderbergh the youngest director to win the festival's top award. Film critic Roger Ebert dubbed Soderbergh the "poster boy of the Sundance generation"...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth14 January 1963
CountryUnited States of America
In nature, if a cell gets too big, it divides. You can't come up with a set of rules that's going to work for 350 million people. You're just not.
It takes one asshole to ruin the whole thing. That's it. One. The problem with the world is one asshole comes up with a really bad idea and now we're all taking our shoes off at the airport.
The key is, how do you feel with the one asshole? They cannot be talked to. That's why they are assholes.
All human interaction, you can break it down to incentives. All relationships, at some level, are transactional. They're fascinated with incentives.
You're being mean to someone who's helping you. What is that? Everyone knows who the assholes are, and I avoid them.
I'm a grinder. I'll beat you because I will not sleep.
If you're a painter and you want people to know who you are and recognize your work, you've got to build some long-term value.
I was lucky that I was getting exposed to a lot of different kinds of films, and I was liking them all. So it seemed logical to me that you could - as in the style of the studio directors of the 30s and 40s - jump from one genre to the next, with the same satisfaction.
I'm a big believer that if there's something you really want to do, don't walk away because of the deal.
I think the feeling that we're going to work together again usually starts to come up before the first project's even done. The Black Keys and I have already talked about starting on something new.
I have no shame in making music that maybe, if you listen to it long enough, you'll realize you've heard this or that part of it before. I'm still very excited by an amazingly written song, so that's really the thing that I work on when I make records with people.
I suppose I could try to be some avant-garde artist if I wanted to, but that doesn't interest me as much.
Whenever you experiment with something, it's very easy to take the emotion out of it. And going back and forth between wanting to be respected artistically and wanting to move people is its own challenge.
A big part of making an album is that you want to have enough material - you want to have enough stuff for people to hear and know that it represents you. So it does sometimes turn into a situation where you're saying to the person you're working with, "Well, what do you want?" But then there are other times when I work with people and they'll turn to me and say, "How do you want to do this?" And that's actually when I work best.