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
I just find it annoying that in these sequences [ of the fight scenes], traditionally, there's music trying to pump you up. I don't like that, personally, as an audience member. This just reflects my taste.
People like Chris Nolan are shooting isolated sequences in IMAX. Those cameras are the size of a Volkswagen.
My first three movies, I didn't start editing until we were finished shooting. That's unthinkable to me now.
I always have a plan, but then I'm always ready to throw the plan out, and everyone's ready to make a radical left turn if necessary.
I've tried to get better about weighing what I think the accessibility of an idea is against the cost of executing it. I've tried to be smarter about that, because if you're not smart about that, you're going to be unemployed. But I'm still mystified about what works for people. And I'm not talking about my movies, I'm talking in general. I'm mystified by the stuff that doesn't work. I'm mystified by what's going on in the critical side, too.
I stopped reading reviews about my own movies. I read stuff about other people's movies.
It's a weird thing to say, but it would appear to me axiomatic that if you understood fully what I was doing and appreciated it, you would like it.
You should never assume anything coming from a critical standpoint. You should go into everything assuming you're going to get crushed.
My experience over the years with working with people who are not actors or not trained actors is that you have to get to know them well enough to see what they have that's translatable onto the screen. So you're constantly calibrating to play to their strengths. And the key is to never ask them to do things that are beyond their abilities or are really far away from who they are at their core.
[I watch] Fincher, Spielberg, Cameron, McTiernan. Just people who are good at staging action. I like to know where I am. I don't like the kind of cutting where you don't know where you are.
We feel in many cases we're going to get a better response to some of our movies in Europe, or outside of the United States, than in the United States.
The key is, if you're not monkeying around with the script, then everything usually goes pretty well.
Reality shows are all the rage on TV at the moment, but that's not reality, it's just another aesthetic form of fiction.
When you're sent something and read it, either you can see it while you read it, or you can't.