Seesawing between the aggressively mainstream and the defiantly indie, Steven Soderbergh has produced his most lo-fi movie yet, says Derek O'Connor

CONSIDER the case of Steven Soderbergh, still arguably the most prolific and eclectic film-maker working in American cinema today. Since his unforgettable feature debut in 1989 with Sex, Lies and Videotape - which inadvertently kicked off the new wave of indie cinema best defined as the Miramax generation - Soderbergh has averaged a feature a year, bagging a Best Director Oscar en route in 2000 for Traffic.

From superior genre fare like Out of Sight, Erin Brockovich and Ocean's Eleven to misfires like his Solaris remake and, well, Ocean's Twelve, he continues to mix it up with panache, acting as his own cinematographer and editor, tipping the hat to cinema's illustrious past while constantly seeking to explore its future. Why, if he slows down for a minute, he might even finally deliver his masterpiece.

"I have the best job in the world," Soderberg says. "Why wouldn't you be busy? I really can't imagine why, if you were in a position to have a lot of people say yes, you wouldn't get a lot of people to say yes. I'm 42, I feel like I haven't done my best work, and I'm young enough to have the energy to work a lot.

"I'm experienced enough now to be in a position where, if I push myself, I could make something that's really, really good. And, in your forties, you gotta get on it. Sure, I could see a time where I'll just stop, but for now, I guess I still feel like I'm really just getting started."

Bubble is Soderbergh's latest exercise in envelope pushing; it's the first of six low-budget digital features he has agreed to create for a new company, HDNet Films, which aims to reinvent conventional film distribution as we know it. This is the first feature by a major film-maker to be simultaneously released ( in the US, at least) to cinemas, on DVD and the internet. It's also Soderbergh's most pared down and urgent work in yonks, a sparse, 70-minute tale of a doomed love triangle in small-town Ohio, acted by a remarkable cast comprised of non-professionals drawn from the local community.

"I knew that I wanted to get out of town," he says. "I watch a lot of true crime stuff on TV, and a lot of those stories always take place in towns that you don't see. I brought Coleman Hough [who penned Soderbergh's unloved Hollywood satire Full Frontal] on board, and Coleman's the one who found the doll factory."

There are three doll factories of any size left in the US. Two of them can be found in Belpre, Ohio, the town chosen by Soderbergh to shoot Bubble. Belpre resident Debbie Doebereiner, who gives a remarkable performance as a middle-aged, blue-collar spinster with a motherly crush on a younger employee (Dustin James Ashley), is in real life the general manager of the local branch of Kentucky Fried Chicken. The casting director discovered her while waiting in line at the KFC's drive-through window. A meeting with Soderbergh was arranged, and the film-maker cast her on the spot.

"Debbie comes into us," he says, "and we're all blown away. We give her the part, and nobody at KFC believes her. She has to ask them for four weeks' leave so she can go and do this movie, and they think she's psychotic. The guy who got the most flak, however, was Decker Moody, who plays the police detective, who I think is spectacular. Poor guy . . . "

Moody, it transpires, is an actual police detective in nearby West Virginia. "The guys at work were just relentless," says Soderbergh. "They wouldn't stop teasing him. They still can't believe it - it's a classic case of 'Just how smart can these Hollywood people be if they're putting you in their movie?' But wow, he was incredible. I could just watch him for hours."

Bereft of the self-conscious stylistic tics that occasionally hamper Soderbergh's lesser works, Bubble evokes the unselfconscious feel of native folk art. The film is scored to a series of guitar pieces by Ohio's alt.poet laureate, Guided By Voices rocker Robert Pollard. Soderberg intends to return to this six-film cycle between larger studio projects.

"We're sticking with non-actors, different locations, stories set all around the country, so that it will be, hopefully, sort of a quilt of movies that are Americana in one way or another. Are people like this underrepresented in movies because nobody wants to see them, or because there haven't been enough made to generate interest for people to want to see them? It's a chicken-and-egg question. If more movies like this are made, will people whose lives are like that go 'Oh, I really enjoyed that'. Or do they say 'I don't want to see that, I get that at home'? I don't know. I guess we're gonna find out."

Bubble has already angered America's Association of Theatre Owners, who have compared the HDNet model as a "death threat" to their business - something Soderbergh readily dismisses.

"At this point, I don't think we should be trying to control how people experience art, whether they want to see it on a cinema screen or a computer screen or a T-shirt. I think if you've got something interesting, it really doesn't matter how they're seeing it. I'm not precious in that way."

As to when his next digital project will see the light of day, well . . . Steven Soderbergh is a busy man. He's putting the finishing touches to a second World War romance, The Good German, his fifth time directing George Clooney, his partner in soon-to-be-defunct production company Section Eight. (The duo are behind current Clooney double-whammy Good Night, and Good Luck and Syriana.)

In his downtime, the director is currently (a) doing press for Bubble; (b) shooting scenes in New York for his forthcoming Che Guevara biopic starring Traffic Oscar-winner Benicio Del Toro ("It's a different film to The Motorcycle Diaries; our movie is about Cuba and Bolivia, basically - this is a war movie"); and (c) prepping Ocean's Thirteen - aka another handy little number to keep one's bankability going. Soderbergh still remembers those wilderness years, post-Videotape, when a succession of projects died unloved at the box-office before the sublime Out of Sight put him back on the moviemaking map. Not that it's just about the money, mind.

"I love making them," he says of the Ocean's movies. "Both the second one and this one were generated by me saying I want to do another one. Nobody asked - certainly nobody's asking for this one. I get to play; as a director I get to do things with those movies that I can't do anywhere else, so they're a lot of fun for me."

Ocean's Thirteen will, he assures us, once again reunite the entire cast of the first two - a scheduling nightmare - and be better than the last one.

"It's difficult to find material that is commercial, really commercial, that doesn't make you feel bad in the mornings. So these are great opportunities for me. It's about balance. I want to be able to move in whatever direction I want, and part of that is that every once in a while you've got to make a movie that somebody's heard of."

Bubble is screening at the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival on February 26th