Steven Soderbergh’s directing career has swung between the wacky and the earnest, encompassing biopics, heists and whistleblowers – including his latest outing, which allows him to pretend he is working in the 1970s when film-makers could do whatever they pleased
WHAT, APART FROM being another alliterative Steven, does Steven Soderbergh have in common with Steven Seagal? Well, they are both – to draw on the title of an early film by the action star – impressively and stubbornly Hard to Kill. Soderbergh has been on the canvas several times, but, after a few deep breaths and wet sponges, the director always comes back swinging.
Many critics enjoyed his recent two-part biopic of Che Guevara. However, the bifurcated epic did not much trouble the box-office or the Oscar voters. His stock declined further this summer when he was sacked from a Brad Pitt film entitled Moneyball. Now 46, the director of hits such as Ocean's Elevenand Trafficcould have been forgiven for giving Hollywood the two fingers and retiring huffily to his ski-lodge.
“No. I am philosophical about these things,” he says. “The moment it became clear they weren’t happy, I started looking for something else to do. Look, it’s the business. These things are not cheap to make. People are scared. So I was annoyed. But I wasn’t surprised.”
Soderbergh returned to a script he had been toying with for a decade and – he’s Hard to Kill, you see – somehow delivered his most purely entertaining film since Ocean’s Eleven. The Informant! tells the story of a singular American anti-hero named Mark Whitacre. In the early 1990s, this eccentric fellow, a high-flying executive with conglomerate Archer Daniels Midland, set about exposing his company’s role in the price-fixing of an important feed additive. But, as FBI agents trawled through the hours of recordings he provided, they began to suspect that Whitacre was himself an embezzler. So it proved.
THE LYSINE PRICE-FIXINGconspiracy does not sound like the material for rollicking comedy. But that exclamation point at the end of The Informant!is there for a purpose. Assisted by an impressively unhinged lead performance from Matt Damon, Soderbergh made a zany, dizzyingly-paced farce from the dry conspiracy story.
"Sometimes you work stuff out by realising how something shouldn'tbe done," he says. "Scott Burns, the writer, and I just felt the straight version had been done before by Michael Mann in The Insider. And we started just after I'd done Erin Brockovich, which is another whistleblower movie. We suddenly realised that this approach would be different and once that occurred to us, it all fell into place so easily."
Soderbergh, a severe-looking man with serious spectacles, has always enjoyed shimmying from the cerebral to the wacky. In the mid-1990s, after the failure of his film on Franz Kafka, he responded by writing a book on Dick Lester, the Anglo-American director of the Beatles movies and of The Knack . . . and How to Get It. The Informant! feels like his most Lesteresque film. Look at the exclamation mark, for example.
"Yes, definitely. There is a tradition of fine films with exclamation [marks] such as Lester's Help!Those films have an energy and a breezy feel about them that we tried to draw from here. I still fantasise that I am working in the early 1970s when film-makers really could do whatever they wanted. When they had that freedom." Since Soderbergh stormed the Oscars in 2001 with directing nominations for both Trafficand Erin Brockovich(he won for the former), I imagine he has had that degree of freedom. Surely he can do pretty much what he wants. "I thought so too until I got fired this summer," he retorts, without any discernible traces of merriment.
Fair point. The cancellation of Moneyballmade for a very strange story. Varietymagazine reported that Sony Pictures pulled the plug just four days before the movie – a study of modern strategies in baseball – was set to start shooting. What was the studio's beef? "They just didn't like my approach, I guess," he says. "Since Erin Brockovich, I have felt that if you don't like my approach and I won't change my approach then you should fire me.
“In this case, they were not convinced I was making a commercial film and I really thought I was. It really was that simple. It was a subject I was fascinated by and I felt it was going to be my best film.”
He speaks in a resolute, stubborn tone and seems determined not to give in to anger.
MIND YOU, HEhas had some practice at dealing with setbacks. Some 20 years ago, Soderbergh, raised and educated in Louisiana, knocked together a low-budget film entitled Sex, Lies, and Videotape. This cool, wry relationship comedy became a surprise winner of the Palme d'Or at Cannes and helped launch a new wave of American independent cinema.
“When you start, you go through this biographical stage,” he says, when remembering that first film. “You think everything that happens to you is so fascinating it has to be memorialised. Then, hopefully, you learn and move on to stuff that’s not about you. I happened to hook up with people who were very talented on that film and they treated me as a peer. I got very lucky.”
For a while, it looked as if he was intent on squandering his opportunities. Kafkawas a conspicuous flop and is still forlornly awaiting reappraisal. His 1993 period piece King of the Hillreceived a few good reviews, but played to empty cinemas. It was not until 1998, when he directed George Clooney in the slick thriller Out of Sight, that he finally secured a spot near Hollywood's top table.
Clooney and Soderbergh, who share a production company, went on to collaborate on the hugely successful (though increasingly uninteresting) Ocean'sfilms and on odder pictures such as their remake of Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris.
Did he feel cast into the wilderness during the mid-1990s? "It was more complicated than that. But I tell you this: I wouldn't want to have had that run as a young film-maker today. I made five movies that nobody went to see and got away with it. You wouldn't get away with that today. But all those failures were a necessary part of my evolution." At one stage, he had a chance of directing Quiz Show, the film about corruption in 1950s American TV, but, following the usual industry shenanigans, the project ended up with Robert Redford.
“I kind of got of booted off that,” he says. “If I had made that and it had worked out okay, none of this other stuff would have happened. I might have got distracted from addressing the kind of film-maker I was becoming. Instead, I did decide to start over and that’s how I became this version of Steven Soderbergh.”
Or, you might say, "these versions of Steven Soderbergh". Over the past decade, Soderbergh has developed a reputation for balancing mainstream entertainments with more eccentric, less accessible movies. He makes an empty, classy heist movie such as Ocean's Eleven(or Twelveor Thirteen). Then he embarks on an enormous, austere study of Che Guevara. It looks as if he's doing one for the studio, followed by one for himself.
"That is a simplification, but it gets at something true," he says. "Studios too often make the mistake of betting on races rather than betting on horses. If a single entity had financed all my films, it would have made a decent profit. Moneyballwas an example. They should have stuck with the horse." When he says Hollywood bets on "races rather than horses" he means they gamble on genres and crazes rather than on individual talents? "Yes. For example, being in the Clint Eastwood business ultimately pays good money. Not all the individual films do well, but the career pays off. That's what Harvey Weinstein did with Quentin Tarantino. He stuck with the horse."
On reflection, The Informant!goes someway towards scuppering the theory that Soderbergh alternates art films with mainstream pictures.
A singular blend of broad comedy and intricate conspiracy thriller, the film defies any neat classification. Remembering Soderbergh’s dictum, it is difficult to imagine which of Hollywood’s “races” it should be entered into. Perhaps the marketing men could sell it as a commentary on the current corruption and incompetence in financial institutions.
“I didn’t want to make another one of those films about corporate malfeasance,” he says. “My interest is mainly about Whitacre. I don’t really care so much if people think about greed. I am interested in this man who was bipolar and who did such unusual things.”
He won’t get pushed into a box, this Steven Soderbergh. He does what he chooses. He stands for what he believes in. Mr Seagal would be proud.
The Informant! goes on general release next Friday
