Steven Soderbergh Interviews (Ed. Anthony Kaufman, 2015)

There are a lot of great books about filmmaking. This collection of interviews is one of my personal favourites. 

I first read the original edition of this book (published in 2002) during my postgrad at uni about a decade ago. It has stuck with me, and I used to like getting it out of the library to re-read it.

Soderbergh has had a fascinating career, with many highs and lows - through these interviews, you get a strong sense of Soderbergh's evolving sense of himself as a filmmaker, and the lessons he has learned from his past works.

The most striking thing about the interviews is how adept Soderbergh is describing his internal state, his thought process and his reflections on his work. 

There is a clarity of thought and lack of pretension to Soderbergh's delivery that is remarkable, compared with a lot of filmmakers. As he makes clear in these interviews, Soderbergh had the opportunity to be productive and tried to make as many different kinds of films as he could. This provides an ever-changing context for Soderbergh’s train of thought and evolving sense of self.

Reading the way Soderbergh breaks down how each project developed, and how feels about the finished product is fascinating because of how well he describes his processes. He becomes more assured in terms of his technique, but what also crystallises is how sure he is of what he is good at.  

Re-reading the updated edition brought home how influential Soderbergh's thinking has been on me. Not in terms of filmmaking, but in terms of life. Soderbergh is not afraid to evaluate himself and make change - that is hard thing to do at the best of times, and his self-critique comes off as unpretentious and revisionist.I think reading this book made me a fan of the man, at least in respect to how he works. 

The updated edition is great if - like me - you want to track how Soderbergh was doing post-Traffic. If there is one element the original edition has over this one, it is unintentional - the original interviews run from Soderbergh's breakout with sex, lies and videotape through the long fallow period of the nineties, with his slow climb to the A list by the turn of the century with the dual successes of Erin Brokovich and Traffic. There is a natural narrative arc to the first decade of Soderbergh's career, and provides a real sense of dramatic excitement as he bounces back from the creative funk of 1995's The Underneath.

However, while it lacks the natural sense of catharsis, this new edition does provide more slices of Soderbergh at more recent points in his career, culminating in a talk he gave in 2013 about the current state of cinema, its distribution and audience. What remains consistent is Soderbergh's engagement with the world around him - I left the book hungering for Soderbergh's current thoughts on the streaming wars, his work on the TV series The Knick and recent experiments like Mosaic.

Both an oral history and an exercise in self-reflection, it is a fine testament to one of our most eclectic filmmakers and a way of thinking about and developing your personal skills and talents. 

If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour. 

You can subscribe on iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts.