Steven Soderbergh interview: Explaining his approach to A.I., The Christophers, and movies.
No one makes movies like Steven Soderbergh. A director who works as his own cinematographer and editor—the latter two under the pseudonyms Peter Andrews and Mary Ann Bernard—he has so streamlined the filmmaking process that he’s been known to send out a rough cut of the completed feature by the end of the last shooting day. That process has allowed him to move faster than any major working director, releasing two movies, Presence and Black Box, in theaters in the past year alone, and premiering a third, The Christophers, which is just hitting cinemas now. A ghost story, a sexy spy thriller, and a seriocomic two-hander about the art world, the three films are wildly different, but they share a spirit of freewheeling experimentation and the feeling that, 37 years after Sex, Lies, and Videotape made a splash at Sundance, the 63-year-old director is still as in love with the process as ever.
He might not, therefore, seem the most likely person to make a movie about a washed-up, embittered art-world legend who hasn’t put brush to canvas in decades. But through the character of Julian Sklar (Ian McKellen) and his new assistant Lori (Michaela Coel), Soderbergh and his frequent screenwriter Ed Solomon throw into relief a set of lively debates about the way the marketplace electrifies and distorts the experience of art, and what if anything remains when the economic stimulus is removed. The title refers to several sets of paintings, all of Julian’s mysterious former lover, two of them released at the height of his fame and now selling for millions apiece, and a third that sits in his attic, unfinished, as his health fails and he spends his days monetizing what’s left of his once storied name. Lori is a painter herself, as well as a conservationist, neither of which prevents her from having to run a food truck to pay the rent, but she’s also an accomplished forger, which is why Julian’s children hire her for a clandestine mission: insinuate herself into Julian’s life, complete the final set of Christophers in secret, and wait for the old man to die so his kids can sell the newly discovered canvases and make themselves rich.
Most of The Christophers takes place in Julian’s twin town houses, as Julian and Lori spar over his inflated reputation, her failed career, and the chances each of them have in a world where art barely even qualifies as a commodity. Despite the movie’s relatively cloistered setting, McKellen and Coel’s verbal jousting makes for one of Soderbergh’s keenest, purest entertainments in years. And because Soderbergh has in recent years taken on the role of unofficial industry sage, it felt like a good moment to check in for one of his legendary interviews, where he discourses at length (famously never less than 45 minutes) about the state of the art form and the business it uneasily coexists with. So, earlier this week, we sat down at a Tribeca hotel to discuss art, A.I., and whether there’s still a place for movies for grown-ups—or if grown-ups even want them. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Sam Adams: At the end of every year, you post a daily log of your media consumption—the books you read, movies you watched, and so on. But you don’t include visits to museums or galleries, even though at one point you intended to give up filmmaking and become a painter. How much do you keep up with the art form?
Steven Soderbergh: Not at all. It’s embarrassing and indefensible that I don’t spend more time in museums and galleries, because I always find them incredibly inspirational and feel happy that such spaces exist. I think it says something about art that the spaces that contain it are, I find, a combination of calming and inspiring. I think it speaks to its power or its effect on us. Being in a space filled with art, the default mode is to feel pretty positive, to feel good. I should get some more hits of that.
Ed Solomon wrote the leads in The Christophers for Ian McKellen and Michaela Coel without them knowing, almost as if you cast them in the parts in advance. Why did you see them as these characters?
I think it’s a combination of pure intuition and attraction, with certain practical considerations. You have two characters who need to be of a certain age, at a certain stage in their lives. You’re looking for sort of maximum contrast, just in terms of vibe. So I can’t say that I thought about it very long at all. I probably thought of Ian first, because you need somebody who speaks and acts in a very specific kind of performative way and is a man in London in his 80s. It’s not a long list of people. Michaela’s somebody who, like everybody else in the world, I was obsessed with after seeing her last show. So she went into a mental list of fascinating people to work with someday. And the image of the two of them in the same frame just seemed really interesting. If somebody just saw an image, they’d be like, “What’s going on there?”
There’s been some criticism aimed at The Drama that the movie doesn’t take the race of Zendaya’s character into account, and while it feels undeniable that race would inflect the relationship between Julian, a white male legend who has been “canceled” for an unspecified transgression, and Lori, a young Black painter who’s still struggling to get her art seen, The Christophers doesn’t explicitly reference that element. What kinds of conversations, if any, did you have with your lead actors about that dynamic?
It seemed like it was kind of all or nothing, like either make that part of the point or don’t at all. And the fact is, you could have switched them. He could be a person of color, and she could be white. It was about issues that are kind of human, in the sense that they literally apply to everyone. They define themselves first and foremost as an artist. Now, secondarily, they may start using adjectives to fill out that idea, but it’s a movie about two artists.
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That’s interesting, because for me it’s very present in the interactions between them. Julian is a cruel and thoughtless person in general, but it’s sharper when he seems so oblivious to what Lori might have gone through.
I guess I felt that way too. It goes without saying that in equivalent terms, he, as a white man, has had and would’ve had more opportunities and access than she has and has had. We know that.
And he feels, not unjustifiably, that he’s been through his own struggles as well. As he says to her, “I was bisexual when it actually cost you something.” Although things obviously worked out quite well for him eventually.
Emotionally, let’s put it this way: His situation is entirely self-generated. He made choices that led him here. His inability to own that is why he’s alone and why he can’t work.
So much of this movie is about authorship: whose name goes on a work of art, and whether and why it matters. Even the Cameos Julian records for fans are worth more when he “signs” them by drawing his signature in the air. You do so many jobs on your sets—you direct, you’re the cinematographer and the camera operator, you even edit the day’s footage on the ride home—that the movies are yours in a way that few other directors could claim. And I’m wondering, partly because the internet is up in arms about it, how that maps onto your experience with generative A.I. You’ve been talking about using it for years, but we’re going to get the first glimpse at the result next month, when your documentary John Lennon: The Last Interview premieres at Cannes. When you create an image with A.I., does it still feel like it’s yours?
Yeah. It just turned out to be the thing that I needed to solve a very serious problem. I have a 91-minute piece of audio. I am, for 90 percent of it, able to use archival imagery to support that audio, but for some very crucial sections that are John and Yoko speaking philosophically about some serious issues, I needed imagery that wasn’t real and yet was very specifically designed to sort of enhance what they’re saying. So for me, this is just the right tool at the right time for me to solve this problem in a way that was not prohibitive. It’s a documentary. We don’t have a lot of money here. And some years ago, I really would’ve been stuck because the only way to get what I ended up getting would’ve been to go through a very expensive and labor-intensive visual effects process that I couldn’t have afforded. It would’ve been impossible, and I wouldn’t have had the schedule.
My attitude is: Everybody has various, very emotional responses to this whole issue. I don’t find it in the creative context to be the existential threat that it is in the real world, in that every time you use it, you’re draining a lake to cool off the server farm. Those are very serious issues. In the creative context, it is simply, to me, a tool and will eventually find its place.
It’s interesting that the most recent Writers Guild agreement, released this week, protects writers from having credit taken away from them for A.I.-generated products but also establishes their right to use A.I. as a tool. It’s not the blanket anti-A.I. stance some might expect.
“The most important issue facing the industry right now is the issue of getting people to leave the house and go to the movies.”
I mean, look, to me, its limitations are obvious and insurmountable. And at the end of the day, you’ve got to ask yourself, would you take travel advice from somebody who has never left their home? It’s ultimately reductive and based on things that have already happened, and it always will be. Its ability to iterate quickly is helpful in very specific contexts, but it can’t finish anything. There’s no universe in which I would hand something over that I hadn’t really touched a lot. It’s very obvious in a way, and my whole thing is trying to avoid the obvious. It’s hard for me, again, just in a creative context, to get too activated about it, given some of the other issues that the industry is facing. The most important issue facing the industry right now is the issue of getting people to leave the house and go to the movies. How do we get people back in the habit of going to the movies? And even more so to see all kinds of movies. The fantasy, spectacle, super-event-type things are one thing. It’s great when Sinners or Weapons blows up. The trick is, can we get people in numbers to go see anything else?
You talked a good deal about how disappointing Black Bag’s box office was, because you viewed it in part as kind of a pilot program for: Can we get adults to see midbudget movies again? Can I make a $50 million—
Forty-four.
—a $44 million movie and get people to buy $44 million in tickets? And the movie didn’t do badly, but it didn’t do that.
No, I mean, look—they told me, “We’ll get out ultimately.” And I said, “I hope you’re not lying to me,” because I was frustrated and I don’t like losing people money. I talked to [Focus Features Chairman] Peter Kujawski on the Monday after, and he goes, “This will have a long life, and we’ll get out.” And I said, “I hope you’re right.” But it just becomes one more data point for me and for other people in the business as they try to figure out what they should make. It would seem to support the idea that midrange-budgeted movies for grown-ups are not a growing enterprise. But it’s also hard, or ill-advised, perhaps, to use that as an example of anything other than itself. For all I know, a different midrange-budgeted movie aimed at grown-ups could have blown up, and then we’d be going, “See, it’s back.”
The system works!
Right. So it’s hard to know what to take from it.
Maybe 10 years ago, friends my age would tell me they hadn’t been out to a movie in a long time, and they would be almost shamefaced about it. But at a certain point, they just stopped apologizing. They don’t go out to the movies anymore, and they’re fine with that.
I get it. It’s a big ask. But I feel that the reward is so worth it, if only from a kind of mental health standpoint. I think there’s something of value in the experience of being in that theater and just looking at one thing.
This may also be trying to draw a conclusion from too few data points, but Black Bag and The Christophers feel to me like the most pure entertainments you’d made in a while—movies I could recommend to anyone without even telling them who the director was. Are you trying to make movies for a larger audience? You were even close to making a Star Wars movie with Adam Driver last year.
Well, I would argue that everything since Che has been a genre piece of some form. Because genre, I think, is just the most efficient delivery system for any idea that you have. And I think anybody who makes stuff wants it seen by as many people as possible. So if or when I can find things that I love, that I think I can execute well, that have the potential to reach a wide audience as opposed to being designed not to, I’m excited by that. Those are hard to find, actually. In the case of Star Wars, [you had] 100 percent awareness, 100 percent “want to see”—and I was excited about it. I knew how to do it. It’s hard to check all of those boxes. But I’m still looking. I’ve got things I’m trying to get going that I feel are both interesting and have the potential, whether conceptually in terms of what they’re about, or because of their scale, to be event-sized and hook people and create enough FOMO to get them out of the house.
One of the questions that comes up explicitly in The Christophers is: Is art about a relationship between the artist and their audience, or is it simply about the artist’s individual vision—as Julian puts it, “a man in the room”? Movies might be inherently a relationship medium.
There’s nothing that says it can’t be both. You know what I mean? It’s complicated, and it shifts for the artist, I think. I think I’m more conscious of the audience now than when I started.
Do you ever test-screen your movies?
“The hardest thing in the world is to be good and clear, because sometimes in order to be clear, you become obvious. And when you’re obvious, you’re not good.”
Certain movies. It depends. There are certain movies where there’s literally just no point. We didn’t test this. We tested Black Bag three times, and that was extremely helpful and led to strategic reshoots after each one, because what information was released and when and by whom was critical to the audience being at the exact right stage of trying to reach it without being able to predict it, but not getting so frustrated they tapped out. There was no other way to calibrate that other than showing it and having people go, “I didn’t understand the connection between these two things.” The hardest thing in the world is to be good and clear, because sometimes in order to be clear, you become obvious. And when you’re obvious, you’re not good. So that is a lifelong sort of process, figuring out on each project, given its intentions and its demands, how to make it good and clear. Being obscure is easy. It’s easy to make something that is elliptical and sort of difficult to grasp and sort of fob it off on being artistic, and if you don’t understand it, that’s your problem. But there are certain things I won’t do just to get a reaction out of an audience. I don’t pander to them. But I want to be fair.
It’s interesting to me that in The Christophers, Julian, who hasn’t painted in years, finds his way back to enjoying the act of creation through a much more physical approach: getting up on his feet, throwing stuff at the canvas like an action painter. There’s a little bit of an analogy to your evolution there, the way you stepped into operating the camera because you wanted to be closer to the scene rather than observing it from a monitor.
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I became the primary operator on Erin Brockovich, but it really started on Traffic, where I was the operator and the director of photography. I just jumped in. That was absolutely out of a desire to exert more control over the momentum of what was happening on set and to have a more intimate relationship with the performers. I’m not Roger Deakins or Emmanuel Lubezki, and I never will be. I don’t think I’m bad. I know what I want, and I know how I like things to look, and I know how to get that. Those people are on another level, but I’ll trade not having them for what I get in terms of the experience, and the experience for the actors of me being in it with them.
The cinematographer’s impulse is to sort of touch everything and make it look beautiful and make it look like a movie. And it took me a while to be like, “Don’t do that.” I feel—I can’t prove it—that the audience has a different reaction to something that doesn’t look “lit,” that it feels more real to them. In Black Bag, that pub where they all meet before they go to the house, we went and scouted it, and the lights were on, and I just started laughing because I’m like, “This is hideous. Don’t change a thing.”
