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
Some filmmakers, you know, have their style and then they kind of go looking for the movie. I'm not like that. I don't have one style that I want to take from movie to movie.
My father, who was the one who really got me hooked on movies, liked all kinds of films, and I saw all kinds of films at a very young age.
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.
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.
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.
Truth and facts have to trump partisanship. There has to be something that's true regardless of what your angle is on it.
The best set was probably 'Bloody Sunday.' We had no money for extras and gambled on months of outreach to persuade the people of Derry to turn out and march for us on one single afternoon. And they did. In their tens of thousands. Seeing them march, their patience and their dignity and their commitment, I knew the movie would have a quality of truth.
There's a difference between failures and things that are bad.
There is sadness of when you're watching someone enjoy something that you think is substandard. The ineffable sadness when someone is happy and something is not as good as it should be.
Nobody's talking about movies the way they're talking about their favorite TV shows.
When we look at what's going on in the world and we see the immense level of conflict that seems to always be happening - you can always trace it back to competing narratives.
My working life is me doing what I want to do. This is that. I've made movies that people don't go to see.
Every time you make something that somebody likes, your impulse is to remind them that if you hadn't made some of these other things that they hated, you wouldn't have been able to make the thing that they liked.
Everything is the director's fault - you can quote me on that. There are no excuses.