September 22nd, 2011
He doesn’t name names, but his approach to movie economics is nearly unique among directors who work for wide audiences:
I think we should out people that are egregiously inefficient. There’s a lot of it. The studios… often their entire process is pretty inefficient, but there are a lot of filmmakers out there too that are just totally out of control, and I feel like “You are polluting the environment. You are making it harder for the rest of us. Because we all get tarred with that brush when you go out and you go wildly over-budget and wildly over-schedule, and are sort of flippant about it. Then the next person that walks in the door pays the price for that. It’s not cool.” . . .
So I look at it and I think, “Sixty million bucks is a lot of money.” And then I see a contemporary comedy shot in Los Angeles that cost more, and I can’t figure out why. So I’m always trying to balance the idea versus… especially after THE GOOD GERMAN. That was a frustrating experience just because I look back on that and… I misjudged the accessibility of that idea, or the level of interest in the idea of that movie, and I should have figured out a way to make it a lot cheaper. None of us got paid a lot of money; it all went into the art department. I look back on it and go “If the movie cost $32 million, I should have figured out a way to make it for $14 million.” I don’t know what that would have been or if it had been possible to do it the way that I imagined, but I clearly misjudged the commercial potential of that idea and I don’t like to…. it’s not that I don’t like to fail, I just don’t like to fail and then learn nothing. I feel like “Okay, I learned a lesson there. I’m not going to do that again.”
And [CONTAGION] frankly was born out of a process of my learning that lesson. Scott [Z. Burns] and I were about to go into meet with Michael Shamberg and Stacey Sher to close the deal to make a movie about Leni Riefenstahl. They had the Stephen Bach book, which is very good. Scott and I had a really, really interesting take on this, like a very radical interesting take on how to do this, and we were supposed to meet to talk about the pitch, like “Here’s what we are going to do.” And suddenly I go, “I don’t want to do this. Nobody is going to go see this.” I go, “We are going to spend twenty-eight million bucks and two years of our lives, and nobody is going to want to see this, not even our friends. I’m not going to do it. I’ve done that. I don’t want to do that again. I’m too old.” I literally said [to Burns], “What else have you got?” And he goes “I want to do an ultra-realistic pandemic film.” I said, “Let’s go pitch that instead,” and that’s what we did.
Then, as an added bonus, he talks about the benefits of structure:
In addition to the rules that we set up about the writing, when we started to shoot I had my rules about what I was doing with the camera and what I wasn’t doing with the camera. The whole movie is shot with two lenses, basically an 18mm and a 35mm. Very clean compositions, very symmetrical, very unobtrusive, nothing that calls attention to itself, camera can’t move unless an actor is moving… I really wanted the style to be really, really simple. Not boring, but simple. Clean. I wanted every shot, every cut, to have a reason – nothing extraneous, no waste at all. If you pulled one shot out, then the scene wouldn’t work as well, and if you added one shot you would make it also not work as well. I was trying to be really rigorous about it, and I’m happy with that. I feel like it’s as efficient in its own way as the virus is. It’s moving very clearly in a certain direction.
I like having restrictions. I like having rules of things that you can’t do, and I see a lot of movies in which somebody has never had that conversation with themselves. I look at them and I’m like “None of this is unified. You’re just doing shit that doesn’t even make sense on its own terms. You’re going from this lens to that lens, the camera is moving, it’s not moving, it’s a point of view, but then it’s not…” I just go, “This is just incoherent aesthetically. And it drives me insane because I feel this is stuff you can learn in an hour. I’ve given lectures about directing in which, in an hour, I lay all of this out for you if you need to know it.” So it drives me nuts. This has become like the best entry-level job in show business, directing a movie. It’s crazy.
Galley Friend J.E. would know more than me, but Soderbergh might be Hollywood’s last artistic conservative.
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These don’t strike me as conservative thoughts. They strike me as the thoughts of a filmmaker who’s trying not to betray how entitled he feels to other people’s money…with only minimal obeisance to the bottom line, except as it might impact his ability to get more money to make his next film. OMG, he entertained directing a movie about Hitler’s filmmaker long enough and hard enough to option her biography and then set up a meeting with his producers before going to the studio. (This was *after* The Good German!) But on the way into the meeting he suddenly realizes for the first time that no one will want to see it? Really? Only then? If so, WTF?! More likely, WTF is what Shamberg and Sher either told him or were told by the studio when they pitched it. So he pivots. But to what? Not to something he’s passionate about. No. According to his telling, he simply on the fly asks the screenwriter what else he’s got. “Well, I’ve got this Traffic meets 28 Days thing.” “Yeah, yeah, let’s do that. We’ll get big stars, like Damon, who I made a lot of money for with those Ocean’s movies. Oh, and then we’ll get Gwynnie Paltrow and kill her off early, like Janet Leigh in Psycho. It’ll be great. Pick up on the tenor of the times–all this fear out there. And we’ll do it all with other people’s money.” Just like he did his Che movies. Those cost $60 million of other people’s money, shot in Spanish so as not to evince “cultural imperialism”, and didn’t come close to earning out for its uh, “investors”–many of whom, on the indies and possibly also studio films, are civilians with big bucks who want to rub elbows with Hollywood. My guess is that the only thing conservative about SS is the way he invests his own money.
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Contagion: good first half, dull second half. Another month of work on the script probably could have fixed that.
Deano September 22, 2011 at 1:03 pm
Barry Sonnenfeld is another artistic conservative. During an interview about Men in Black, he said he doesn’t leave anything in that doesn’t advance the story. He said if he ever did a director’s cut, it would be shorter than the original.