Steven Soderbergh
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Travel Companions: Steven Soderbergh on Cruise-Ship Shooting, Working with Deborah Eisenberg and Meryl Streep, and Let Them All Talk
In August 2019, when Steven Soderbergh shot Let Them All Talk, COVID-19 was not on his mind, except to the degree that his research on Contagion (2011) had convinced him that a pandemic similar to the one depicted in the film was inevitable. And yet, one of the most compelling aspects of the workaholic director’s latest feature (streaming this Fall on HBO Max) is that the eight-day Atlantic crossing on the Queen Mary 2, during which most of the movie is set, now can be read as a metaphor for the necessarily transformational journey from before to after COVID. In […]
by Amy Taubin on Oct 28, 2020 -
“Whatever I’m Working on Sort of Annihilates Everything That Came Before It”: Steven Soderbergh on the 20th Anniversary of Erin Brockovich
Twenty years ago this month, director Steven Soderbergh achieved what most filmmakers dream of but rarely experience when his Erin Brockovich proved to be that rarest of movies: an artistic success that was also a box-office smash embraced by critics. An aggressively linear drama following the structural gymnastics of The Limey, Erin Brockovich was nevertheless every bit as smart, adult, and distinctive as Soderbergh’s other recent work; combining the journalistic detail of All the President’s Men with the working-class character study of Norma Rae and the entertainment value of a 1940s Howard Hawks comedy, it proved that 1998’s Out of […]
by Jim Hemphill on Mar 12, 2020 -
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
