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Paging Peter Andrews: Steven Soderbergh on Being His Own DP
Michael Fassbender and Steven Soderbergh on the set of Black Bag When Steven Soderbergh was 13 years old, his father enrolled him in an animation class taught by Louisiana State University students. Soderbergh could draw but quickly became bored with the tedious process of bringing those drawings to life. Instead, he pulled the film camera off the copy stand and began shooting whatever he pleased.
From the very beginning, Soderbergh had no interest in doing things as prescribed. Whether alternating between the commercial and the experimental, challenging traditional release conventions or embracing new technologies in a quest to expedite the filmmaking process, Soderbergh has spent his career upending the status quo.
That iconoclasm extends to his dual life as “Peter Andrews,” the pseudonym Soderbergh has used while serving as his own director of photography on every film he’s made since 2000’s Traffic. It’s a feat with almost no analogue in film history. He is back behind the camera for spy thriller Black Bag, centered on British intelligence officer Michael Fassbender as he’s tasked with ferreting out a traitor from a pool of colleagues that includes his wife (Cate Blanchett). With the movie in theaters on March 14th, Soderbergh spoke about his singular career as a multihyphenate.
Filmmaker: Before the animation class that set you on your path to becoming a filmmaker, you had this transformative viewing of Jaws with your dad in the summer of 1975. You came out of the theater wanting to know what “Directed By” meant. Was there a similar epiphany with any particular cinematographer?
Soderbergh: That would have happened during this period from 1976 to 1980, where I was going to high school on the LSU campus and spending all my free time with college film students. Luckily, LSU had a very well curated and robust screening program on the campus, and there was a two-screen repertory house just outside the gates of LSU as well. That enabled me to completely immerse myself in all kinds of movies. Immediately, I picked up on the fact that there was a certain way of shooting that I was attracted to and started to identify cinematographers, editors and composers I was sparked by. In particular, I was attracted to what David Watkin and Vittorio Storaro were doing. I tried to learn through experimentation how they were achieving the effects they were achieving.
Filmmaker: What did those experiments teach you?
Soderbergh: What I learned was that technological developments in film stocks that took place during the early and mid-1960s enabled cinematographers—really for the first time—to shoot in situations that either were purely available light or to create the appearance of available light with fewer lights. When you look at, for instance, the Bo Widerberg films from the late ’60s like Elvira Madigan and Ådalen 31, they are almost all available light movies, and they’re absolutely stunning to look at. Those had a big influence on me as well, with the principle being that the sources should be justified. You shouldn’t have light appearing somewhere that is not logical, and it’s just there because you want it to be there. To be a cinematographer who basically works from that basis is how I looked at it from the early, early days.
Filmmaker: You directed your first feature, sex, lies, and videotape, when you were just 26, but at that point you’d already been shooting your own shorts for 10 years. You’d also earned a Grammy nomination for your concert film for the band Yes. Was there any point when you were putting sex, lies, and videotape together that you considered shooting it yourself?
Soderbergh: If it had ended up being done [on a smaller] level, I probably would have seriously considered it. Once we got into what I felt was a fairly normal budget range that absolutely allowed for a professional [cinematographer], I dropped that and started interviewing and pursuing people. It wasn’t something at that point that I was thinking about. It was a gradual build-up of desire to control the momentum of the set, have a more intimate relationship with my actors and just have more fun. Despite hiring very good cinematographers, I was frustrated by the fact that I wasn’t able to dictate how quickly we were shooting, and that was making me crazy. So, I started my secret plan to take over that job. [laughs] Part of that plan was inundating my cinematographers with a lot of questions and really inserting myself into their process. When we were finishing Erin Brockovich, it became apparent that Traffic was going to be the next thing that I was doing, and [Erin Brockovich DP] Ed Lachman asked me, “Who’s going to shoot it?” I said, “I think I am.” He just smiled and said, “Yeah, I could see that coming.”
Filmmaker: Before Traffic, you had already begun operating the camera on The Limey, which Ed Lachman also shot. Did you view that as part of this plan to eventually shoot your films yourself?
Soderbergh: A little bit. I viewed operating as part and parcel with becoming the director of photography. As I was getting closer to the moment of taking over that job, I was operating more and more until, by the time we were doing Erin Brockovich, I was the principal operator and had a B-camera operator. So, it felt like, “I’m ready to do this.” I was always a gearhead. Lest we forget—because there are no credits on the movie—I was the director of photography on Schizopolis [before Traffic], even though I was appearing on camera and John Hardy, the producer, was operating a lot. I bought all the equipment that we used to shoot that film. I loaded every single magazine. I love film equipment. I love the way it feels. I like the way it smells. The idea of taking on that role was very comfortable and exciting, but it’s not something that anybody encourages, and it’s clear that, generally speaking, I’m not popular for doing it.
Filmmaker: Robert Rodriguez is the only one of your contemporaries I can think of who’s done something similar, and he began regularly performing both jobs not long after [you lensed] Traffic. Before that, Peter Hyams is the only American mainstream filmmaker I’m familiar with who spent a large portion of his career as a director/cinematographer hybrid.
Soderbergh: Peter Hyams was actually a key nodal point in all of this because he was a good DP. I had a conversation with him many years ago. He was about to go shoot a film on the Red camera and had a few questions about my experience with that. We commiserated over the fact that people don’t encourage that kind of double duty. In fact, the only two [cinematographers] that have ever really been encouraging about it are Ed Lachman and Dante Spinotti.
Filmmaker: The thing that always made me think that performing both jobs must be incredibly difficult is that all these great DPs who became directors—Nicolas Roeg, Barry Sonnenfeld, Ernest Dickerson, Freddie Francis—didn’t shoot their own films for any extended period of time once they made the switch.
Soderbergh: Well, I rely a great deal on my gaffer, and we’ve decided how we’re going to do everything during prep. I think proper cinematographers would be horrified to watch my process, to see how I make decisions and how much of an amateur I would appear to be to somebody whose sole job is to do that one thing. I literally make my lighting decisions based on the onboard seven-inch monitor that I’m using to operate that’s set at 40 percent backlight. Anybody who’s a pro would go, “You’re out of your mind.” I can’t even tell you the technical names of a lot of the lights that I request when I do request to bring a light off the truck, which isn’t very often. I’ll go, “I need something big and hard. Probably an 18K.” I will literally describe it in terms of the scale of the light I need, its quality in terms of softness or hardness, its color and where it should go. I know what I’m looking for, but the psychic real estate that another cinematographer would use on learning [the names of those lighting] tools that are available, I leave that all to my gaffer.
Filmmaker: Black Bag was shot in London, and there are only so many crew people you can take with you as distant hires. However, you brought back quite a few local key crew members from the London-shot Magic Mike’s Last Dance, including gaffer Michael McDermott. So, you didn’t have to start from scratch in terms of the shorthand you must need to both direct and shoot.
Soderbergh: My camera department, my gaffer, my key grip—which is also a very important position for me—were all from Magic Mike’s Last Dance. That was good because [putting a crew together] is like putting a band together. When you find a member that plays the same tune as you, you want to keep them. It enables me to really place my attention on the things that most require it. There was some famous Stanford businessperson whose name I can’t remember that said a great thing: “Only do the things that only you can do.” I’m a big believer in that, which is why my crew is so important, because I do delegate a lot. I give people a lot of freedom and responsibility so that I can be the concept person and think about philosophy and approach, as opposed to a lot of technical issues that I can just have somebody else come and brief me about.
Filmmaker: On the very first day of Traffic, there was an issue where some of the footage was unusable. What was going through your mind when that happened?
Soderbergh: It was inauspicious, I think is the word. [laughs] What we were doing for the San Diego portions of that film was flashing the negative. We’d done tests; we were all good to go. Then, we get a call from the lab after the first day: “It’s no good.” And we’re like, “What do you mean? What happened?” And they’re just like, “It’s no good.” We never found out exactly what the issue was, but we didn’t change any of our process. We went back the next day, redid that work and never had another problem.
Filmmaker: You mentioned Schizopolis before. In the interviews you did around that time, you talked about making that film as a way to regain the enthusiasm of the amateur. When you do something now like High Flying Bird, where you’re making a movie in 13 days on iPhones, does it serve a similar function for you?
Soderbergh: There is a difference in feeling on High Flying Bird, Bubble, The Girlfriend Experience or Unsane, where you have a lot fewer people and a sense of nobody watching. That’s a different feeling than if you’re in a more traditional mode and have a studio or financiers. It feels more like movie camp, but the bottom line is, moment to moment, when you’re actually on set, it’s still the same. You’re still trying to solve problems, still trying to figure out how you want to shoot something, still dealing with performance. They’re different in terms of a lot of externals, but in the white-hot center of directing, it’s the same.
Filmmaker: I’ve seen behind-the-scenes photos from things shot on the iPhone where there’s a giant cinema lens rigged to it and the phone is on an Oculus head. In the behind the scenes photos from High Flying Bird, you’ve got the iPhone on what looks like a $100 tripod that doesn’t even have spreaders. When you strip things down, you really strip them down.
Soderbergh: The capture device and how you approach using it can ripple out into the footprint of the camera department as a whole. If you add this piece of gear, then we’ve got to have that piece of gear. And if you have that, then we have to have two more pieces. I’ve seen that mushroom happen, and I’m very sensitive to it. On Presence, I didn’t want to shoot on the iPhone because I wanted to really be able to use depth of field to a much greater extent. That meant either something like the Red Komodo completely stripped down to just its body or something like a DSLR. As it turned out, the slight weight difference between the [Sony a9 III] with a lens on it and the Komodo with a lens on it was enough to dictate a slightly larger stabilization device [for the latter], which meant more difficulty getting into the spaces I needed to get into to get the shots that I wanted. I knew if I had a bigger camera and bigger stabilization device, everything would ripple out from that. I was really happy that the Sony and the small Ronin [gimbal] that we used worked well enough for me to get what I wanted.
My attitude about the iPhone is that I used it for two movies [Unsane and High Flying Bird] that really benefited from what you can do if you have a capture device that small that you can place anywhere in 10 seconds. You can literally Velcro it to a wall. That’s fantastic, and you should be taking advantage of that. If you’re using it to simply recreate a traditional look because it’s all you can afford, I would go get a Sony a9 or the equivalent Blackmagic or Panasonic instead because you can play with the depth more. It’s really wild how quickly the technology has advanced and how small the cameras have gotten. It’s shocking what you can generate imagewise for not a lot of money.
Filmmaker: Che was the first film you shot on the Red. You’d used digital before on Bubble and Full Frontal, but Che seems like a line of demarcation. Most of the projects you’d shot before that were 35mm on the Panavision Millennium with Panavision Primo lenses. After your two Che movies, you’ve primarily used the newest Red camera available.
Soderbergh: What [Red founder] Jim Jannard did was the definition of a landscape-changing development. When I first got a look at the [results from the] Red sensor, I felt like, “This is what we’ve all been waiting for.” We became the guinea pigs on Che. Peter Jackson had made a short, but nobody had made a full-length feature with it, much less two full-length features, so we were really learning a lot on the fly. There are a lot of mistakes in those movies that came from me still learning how digital sensors see light. Basically, you have to invert everything that you know. When you’re shooting on film, you’re always protecting the bottom end of the emulsion because that’s where it falls apart the most. When you’re shooting digital, it’s the exact opposite. You’ve got to protect the very top end because that’s where it falls apart. There’s a lot of stuff in Che where I didn’t protect the top end as much as I should have, and that’s my fault. [Digital] has a very, very robust toe at the bottom of the sensor, which is why I think I really sparked to it because that’s where I like to work. I like to shoot with available light, even at night, which is why this technology was really in my wheelhouse.
Filmmaker: Is there a scenario that could draw you back to film?
Soderbergh: It’s hard for me to imagine a situation where I would feel like celluloid would be the move. With what you can do now between things like LiveGrain and plug-ins, you could shoot a butterfly test and tell people, “That side is film, and that side is digital,” and there’s no fucking way they would be able to tell. You can recreate everything—the chromatics, grain structure. You can get any look that you want, and you’ve taken one massive variable out of the equation, which is the lab. I guess maybe Techniscope, two-perf 35mm black and white—some specific look that I could come up with where I’d go, “Let’s shoot that on film,” but for almost anything I can imagine [I’d prefer to shoot digital]. For me, the other massive gain is that I have all the footage an hour after I wrap, and I can start cutting [Soderbergh also serves as his own editor under the pseudonym Mary Ann Bernard]. There’s nothing more important to me than having an iteration of what we’re making as quickly as possible so that I can tell if we’re on target or if we need to redo something. It’s unthinkable to me now to wait two days to see something back.
Filmmaker: Do you still test other cameras? When something like the Venice 2 comes out—I would think the Rialto extension system and dual ISO would be in your wheelhouse—do you test it? Or do you just say, “I know Red. I trust Red. Whatever their latest camera is, that’s what I’m going with?”
Soderbergh: So far, that’s been the case. Now that Jim and [former Red president] Jarred Land are no longer [running] that company [after Red was acquired by Nikon], I’m probably going to start speed dating some other systems. I think on the next project I’m going to engage in a more robust testing process to see what else is out there. I was thrilled with what I got on Presence from the Sony camera. The curve of that sensor is really beautiful. I’m going to get them all out there and start to take it seriously. The new Alexa 265 sounds interesting—giant sensor, small body. I want to look at that.
Filmmaker: Let’s talk about the 12-minute scene that unfolds early in Black Bag when Michael Fassbender’s character tries to discover the traitor’s identity at a dinner party at his home. You mapped out all the coverage during a rehearsal day in prep using a director’s viewfinder app on your phone.
Soderbergh: First, I did it with stand-ins; then, I did a second session where I brought our cast in. I used Cadrage, where you can program in what camera you are going to be using and what specific lenses [and get an approximation of what the frame will look like]. It’s pretty great. I spent a few hours shooting frames of every conceivable composition that I could think of that belongs in this movie. I’m starting as wide as I can and just moving in. So, first, it’s tableaux. How many usable tableaux can I get out of this setup? Then, I’m moving in around the table. How many shots with six people in it can I get that are worth having? How many with four people? Then, three, two and one. Now I’ve broken the perimeter, and I’m inside the table [looking out at the actors]. How many usable compositions, whether they’re singles or doubles, can I get from within the table? I printed all those [frames] out on three by five cards, then took the script and started to build. Here are the compositions we’re using for the first two and a half minutes up until this line, which changes the temperature of the scene a little bit. Now I’m into this series of compositions. Then, there’s another [temperature] change, and we’re into these compositions. I’m trying to build it so that the audience can feel these changes happening, but they’re not really aware of them. In that first scene, I save for very last the slightly-above-eye-level big close-ups. So, I know what I’m working toward, and that’s how I did both the dinner scenes [that bookend the movie]. The second dinner table scene had different rules of composition and a completely different lighting scheme. In the first scene, we created these sources that I could put on the table—much more flattering, warmer and more intimate. Then, in the second scene, we used overhead light, much more interrogatory in its feeling and not as comfortable. Each of those dinner scenes took two days. I had all those printouts on set on a giant whiteboard, and we would just cross them out as we went through. So, I could say to the actors, “I only need you to do these two pages right now.”
Filmmaker: That location was a set?
Soderbergh: Yes.
Filmmaker: How do you apply your ethos of available, realistic and motivated lighting when you’re working on stage?
Soderbergh: Those are conversations you have with your production designer. I’ve worked with Phil Messina for over 20 years, and Phil knows there better be built-in lights on the set.
Filmmaker: As someone who likes to keep a sense of forward momentum, have LED lights been game changers for you?
Soderbergh: Oh, it’s so great. I really got to take advantage of it for the first time on The Knick. Even on those giant sets, the illumination from outside the set was all LED panels. Not only can you control the quality of the light very precisely, but what’s really great is when you want to come back and redo something—and I’m always going back and redoing things—it’s all stored on an iPad. You just go, “Scene 32,” hit a button and the whole thing zaps right back to exactly where it was. There’s no, “Hey, pull up that frame so I can see if that’s the same contrast ratio that I had before.” That’s a dream.
Filmmaker: Did you use on-camera filtration for Black Bag? The onscreen sources have a distinctive bloom to them.
Soderbergh: Yeah, I did. A lot of people don’t [use filtration], but I like to lay it down exactly the way I want it to look. There’s this plug-in called Scatter that is very good at recreating any diffusion effect that you could want. The problem is I want to see the dailies the way that it’s going to look [in the end], and it would drive me crazy to not be able to see it while I was editing. There was somebody on the executive side on Black Bag who actually said, “Is there any way to get rid of all that glowy stuff?” [laughs] And I was like, “No, I built that in.” That’s a holdover from the film days, but I don’t see any reason to abandon it.
Filmmaker: Magic Mike XXL is an anomaly in that it’s the only film you’ve shot but didn’t direct. How was that experience? Did you enjoy being able to concentrate on just that part of the job or was it frustrating to not have more control?
Soderbergh: I loved doing it. The movie was just not falling at a good time [for me to direct it], but I wanted to be a part of it. I just didn’t want to drive it. I loved being somebody else’s support system. I loved working for Greg Jacobs [Soderbergh’s longtime 1st AD and producer]. I had a blast. Whenever some performance or story question would come up, I could just drift off to the craft service table and let Greg handle it. [laughs]
Filmmaker: You also produce projects. Have you ever been tempted to hop onto one of those films as the DP?
Soderbergh: Oh, absolutely. It would have to come at the right time and be the right thing. There are some young filmmakers that I’ve worked with that I’d love to shoot for. Maybe that’ll be my segue into a soft retirement. I’m cheap and I’m fast. [laughs]
