Hired Gun - Steven Soderbergh - Interview

Film Comment, Jan, 2001 by Gavin Smith

He used to be everybody's favorite indie maverick. Now he's Hollywood's favorite ... Steven Soderbergh follows up his box-office smash Erin Brockovich with Traffic, an epic multi-character docudrama about the war on drugs.

"The Further Adventures of the Luckiest Bastard You Ever Saw." That's the subtitle to filmmaker Steven Soderbergh's new book Getting Away With It (Faber & Faber), and it sums up a career that stands on its head Fitzgerald's line about there being no second acts in American lives.

The book consists of Soderbergh's interview with director Richard Lester on his life as a filmmaker, oddly interspersed with the younger director's own journal entries from 1996 and 1997, the "wilderness years" of his career. This was the interval between the unveiling of Schizopolis and the start of production on Out of Sight. Soderbergh had stalled as an independent filmmaker and had yet to establish himself as Hollywood's smartest, most unassuming in-demand director for hire.

Soderbergh hit the ground running in 1989 with sex, lies, and videotape, which met with delirious acclaim at both Sundance and Cannes, and effectively marked the kickoff of the Nineties independent film boom. The world appeared to be his oyster. But over the course of three more films, each one intriguing, idiosyncratic, and accomplished, each one a box-office no-show, he receded further and further from the limelight. Soderbergh seemed to have taken on a strange role: American cinema's most interesting underachiever. Finally, he went into self-imposed exile, chucked the baggage of a career that no longer added up, and assembled a small crew of friends to make the determinedly, defiantly unclassifiable Schizopolis, featuring himself in the lead role. This satire of the inauthenticity and sexual intrigue of middle-class suburban life and corporate culture (partly parodying the likewise Baton Rouge-set sex, lies, and videotape) represented a personal breakthrough. Soderbergh had suddenly decided to stop making sense, and even if some of its comic conceits seem strained, there's a giddy feeling of breakdown and liberation in Schizopolis.

It was Soderbergh's degree zero, and the beginning of his creative reinvention. A year later, he was hired to direct Out of Sight, his first studio picture and a critic's fave. While it wasn't quite a financial success, this sexy, self-assured Elmore Leonard adaptation clinched Soderbergh's role as a kind of up-to-the-minute Don Siegel. He quickly followed up less than a year later with the low-budget independent succes d'estime The Limey.

Buffering one film with another, he cemented his new-found A-list status with Erin Brockovich. As fully realized as Out of Sight, this populist crowd-pleaser exemplified Soderbergh's ability to make himself at home while playing by Hollywood's rules, accommodating and maximizing a top movie star's potential but also creating a film of genuine integrity. (Brockovich's unemphatic insistence on the economic struggles of ordinary working people is a perfect instance of Soderbergh's essentially sympathetic sensibility.) At the same time, his streamlined, independent-style "run-and-gun" approach to production (working fast and loose, staying mobile, shooting with two handheld cameras, using available light) offers a persuasive alternative to the lumbering inefficiency of Hollywood's customary practice. Soderbergh's films are light on their feet but they never succumb to fbrced energy: he's equally at home with the structural and stylistic risk-taking of The Limey -- with its memory-fractured time lines a la Point Blank, which can be traced back to his 1995 film The Underneath -- or for that matter his Richard Lester book.

Featuring multiple narratives and harsh, bracingly deglamorized visual textures, his new film, Traffic, is constructed in the latter mode. Based on Traffik, a five-part 1989 British TV miniseries, the film's complex storyline links together the drug war's front lines, home front, and halls of policy-making, and follows three protagonists. In the first plot strand a Mexican state cop (Benicio Del Toro) and his partner (Jacob Vargas) are drawn into a feud between two powerful drug cartels. In the second, a newly appointed Washington drug czar (Michael Douglas) is simultaneously confronted with the enormity of the task facing him and the fact that his teenage daughter (Erika Christensen) has become a junkie. In the third story, the wife (Catherine Zeta-Jones) of an arrested San Diego drug smuggler (Steven Bauer) is forced to take charge of her husband's multimillion-dollar business and out-wit the cops in charge of the case (Don Cheadle and Luis Guzman). Pushing the run-and-gun approach to new extremes, Soderbergh served as his own DP, and jokes that Traffic is a $49 million Dogma film. The film's directness and matter-of-fact approach to character and situation bring new life to perhaps over-familiar material, grounding it in recognizable human events and exchanges: a group of Cincinnati private-school kids experimenting with drugs; Catherine Zeta-Jones chatting with friends at a San Diego golf club; Michael Douglas gradually segueing from cautious confidence to weary, rattled defeat; Benicio Del Toro's soulful, self-contained cop quietly watching a Little League baseball game, somewhere between hope and regret.