Steven Soderbergh
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The Future of iPhone Filmmaking with FiLMiC Creator Neill Barham
Since Sean Baker’s Tangerine hit the scene as the first feature film shot on iPhone, more filmmakers have embraced mobile production as a viable filmmaking tool. Steven Soderbergh shot Unsane and High Flying Bird on an iPhone 8. Claude Lelouch shot over 30% of his latest film, The Best Years of a Life, on an iPhone and loved the experience so much that his next film (not yet released) was shot entirely on an iPhone. Behind all these iPhone-lensed features there has always been one go-to app: FiLMiC Pro. FiLMiC Pro unlocks professional-level control over the phone’s camera, including exposure, […]
by Joey Daoud on Oct 9, 2019 -
“I Think Everything is the Director’s Fault”: Steven Soderbergh on The Laundromat, LLCs and Systemic Corruption
Ever the productive workhorse, Steven Soderbergh has released two movies on Netflix this year. The first: High Flying Bird, a sharply scripted drama set behind the scenes at the NBA that follows a canny sport agent whose end game is to shift the financial power from white owners to black players, i.e. to seize the means (or balls) of production. The second: The Laundromat, a Big Short-style anthology film about the Panama Papers leak that explains the proliferation of offshore bank accounts and tax havens, specifically those provided by the firm Mossack Fonseca, and follows the victims of these global […]
by Vikram Murthi on Sep 19, 2019 -
Venice Film Festival 2019: Steven Soderbergh’s The Laundromat
Steven Soderbergh’s most persistently recurring subject is economic inequality, attacked from a number of angles: lone dispossessed protagonist vs. powerful corporation (Erin Brockovich), the ways in which minimum-wage employees are demeaned by employers (Bubble), capitalism as sex work against the backdrop of the last recession (The Girlfriend Experience), white collar crime (The Informant!), attacks on pharmaceutical companies (Side Effects) and private health insurance (Unsane), a general emphasis on stratification and the bottom rung of the ladder (Magic Mike and Logan Lucky, the proletarian Ocean’s Eleven, in which a heist doubles as praxis redistribution). Che speaks for itself, and this year there are two […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 1, 2019 -
“I Don’t Care If It Never Shows in a Theater”: Steven Soderbergh on sex, lies, and videotape, 4K HDR and the Studio System
Some films make a splash on their initial release and are largely forgotten just a few years later; others are ignored but rise in stature with the passage of time. Steven Soderbergh’s 1989 debut sex, lies, and videotape is one of those rare movies that was a phenomenon in its time and has only gotten better with age, a razor-sharp exploration of the ways in which we lie to each other and ourselves and an inquiry into what those lies say about our relationships, our desires, and our society as a whole. An extremely specific movie about a precise social […]
by Jim Hemphill on Jul 20, 2018 -
Unsane, The Woman in the Window, and Black Lightning: Jim Hemphill’s Weekend Blu-ray Picks
Steven Soderbergh’s Unsane, which was released theatrically earlier this year and is now available on Blu-ray and multiple streaming platforms, is yet another of the director’s fascinating experiments with narrative structure and genre, and another instance of Soderbergh responding to cultural shifts with astonishing speed. In this case, as opposed to the 2003 HBO series K Street or Soderbergh’s 2009 film The Girlfriend Experience, some of the relevance seems to be a bit accidental, as Unsane was in the works long before the downfall of Harvey Weinstein and the rise of the #MeToo movement. Yet there’s no denying that screenwriters […]
by Jim Hemphill on Jun 22, 2018 -
Win Tickets to Hear Steven Soderbergh and Sam Esmail at this Weekend’s Future of Storytelling Festival
A conversation with Steven Soderbergh and a screening of the season three premiere of Mr. Robot followed by a talk with creator Sam Esmail are just two highlights of the Future of Storytelling Festival, to be held this weekend, October 6 – 8, at the Snug Harbor Cultural Center in Staten Island, New York. In a discussion moderated by Elvis Mitchell, Soderbergh will talk about his overall career as well as Mosaic, the new interactive project he’s making with HBO. In addition to Esmail, there are comedy performances, music events, and panels on truth in the age of digital journalism […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 2, 2017 -
“Don’t Tell Me What I Already Know”: How Steven Soderbergh Reinvents the Art of Information-Giving
“Do we understand…” How many times have the filmmakers in our audience read those words within the body of studio notes? Do we understand his or her motivation? Do we understand the stakes? Do we understand the backstory? Because moments of information-dispensing rarely provide cinema’s most thrilling, mysterious, poetic moments, they are often realized by filmmakers in the most prosaic of ways. Dialogue in a scene covered with a pretty basic sequence of shots. Let’s just get through this, you can feel the directors — and screenwriters — saying. But, as this video essay by Writing with the Camera shows, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 12, 2016 -
Blood in the Snow
Blood Bath “Wait, what happened?” asks Sid Haig at the end of the entertaining but nonsensical 1966 AIP flick Blood Bath, and one can’t help but wonder if it’s intended as a wry bit of self-critique on the part of screenwriter-director Jack Hill. Hill was neither the first nor the last filmmaker to work on Blood Bath, which had a tortured production history even by producer Roger Corman’s standards — and that is really saying something given Corman’s predilection for reshoots, extensive dubbing, and retitling to transform and resell his pictures. Blood Bath began life as Operation Titian, a lackluster […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jul 25, 2016 -
Watch: Steven Soderbergh’s Music Video for DCTV’s “Histoire seule”
Steven Soderbergh continues being productive in new and unexpected directions with what’s technically (unless we’re blanking on something) his first short-form music video. (At the start of his career, he was nominated for a Grammy for Best Long-form Music Video for his work on the Yes concert video 9012 Live, some of which you can watch here.) The band is DCTV, headed by James Greer, a guitarist from one of the classic early lineups of Guided by Voices; recall that one of Soderbergh’s long-discussed, never-realized projects was Cleo!, a rock musical about Cleopatra with music by GBV mastermind Robert Pollard.
by Filmmaker Staff on Apr 12, 2016 -
Seeking Arrangements: Lodge Kerrigan, Amy Seimetz and Steven Soderbergh on The Girlfriend Experience
Shot in New York City during the 2008 financial crisis, Steven Soderbergh’s feature The Girlfriend Experience was a cool movie about a hot topic. Ostensibly about a “new” kind of prostitution, where escorts would simulate the casual intimacy of a real relationship, it starred real-life porn star Sasha Grey even as it contained virtually no sex. But what began as a look at how the Internet enabled a new kind of solo entrepreneur sex worker — “As we were making the film, I didn’t consider [prostitution] as a metaphor for anything,“ Soderbergh said then — wound up a trenchantly austere […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 20, 2016
