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
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'm not going to spend two years of my life on something that I'm not excited about.
I actually didn't find out about a lot of music until I was older. Some people have been listening to the Beatles their whole lives; I didn't discover them until I was 18 years old.
I feel I need to really think about whether there's a way to use what skill I have to address things that outrage me, like the 13 year old girl getting stoned to death. Because I don't think making a movie is going to help that, or change that.
I grew up mostly in the South, and there's definitely something about the South that's different from the North. When people ask me where I'm from, I say Louisiana. I spent more years there than anywhere else.
I think that it's fear. The musicians themselves don't seem to know enough about why they're in the positions they're in, so they're afraid to lose those positions. If you're 22 years old and you can't believe you're even in the position to have a career making music, the first thing you're going to think is: Maintain. Don't lose it. And that's precisely what causes you to lose everything.
Warner Bros. has talked about going out with low-cost DVDs simultaneously in China because piracy is so huge there. It will be a while before bigger movies go out in all formats; in five years, everything will.
Well, it's 15 years since Sex, Lies And Videotape, and if you hang around long enough you're having the same arguments with just a new set of people every few years and it gets boring.
Is it inappropriate for the director of 'Ocean's Twelve' to go to Belpre, Ohio?
Reality shows are all the rage on TV at the moment ... but that's not reality, it's just another aesthetic form of fiction.
The technology is there. Consumers now want choice, and they should have it. At the very least, let's find out -- instead of speculating -- what it's going to mean in the long run and in the larger picture.
At the most basic level, it's a lot of free publicity.
I don't think we should be trying to control how people experience art. They can see it on a screen or on a T-shirt. If you've got something that's interesting, it just really doesn't matter how they're seeing it.
I was at the Laundromat every Sunday, the one over across the (Belpre) bridge. I'd go to the Laundromat and then I'd have the chicken club at Wendy's.