'Indie cred? I need to make things that people go see'

Steven Soderbergh speaks to Adam White about weathering the box-office disappointment of his new film Black Bag’, his love of genre movies, and his fears for Hollywood’s future

- Adam White

“I don’t think audiences are even aware of who I am,” Steven Soderbergh tells me, with nary a hint of self-deprecation. And perhaps he’s right. Soderbergh has been making feature films for more than 35 years, and very famous ones at that, but it’s debatable whether the average person on the street could pick him out of a line-up.

Many of the directors he came up alongside – Spike Lee, Quentin Tarantino, David Fincher, the Coen brothers – are now brands unto themselves. Soderbergh, with his slippery CV full of pop culture touchstones, strange tangents and admirable failures, is more of a question mark. Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Magic Mike, Ocean’s Eleven, Out of Sight? You know ’em. The man behind them? Likely not.

Since 1989’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape made him the youngest solo filmmaker to win the Palme D’or at the Cannes Film Festival (he was, to your probable horror, just 26), he has danced between roles in and outside of Hollywood. He’s been an Oscar darling (Traffic and Erin Brockovich both earned Best Picture nods in 2001, with Soderbergh taking home the Best Director prize for the former), a renegade experimentalist (Mosaic, a seven-hour murder mystery starring Sharon Stone, was released as an interactive mobile app in 2017), and cinema’s shortest lived retiree (he flashily announced in 2013 that the Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra would be his final film – he’s since directed 11 more.)

But despite rebelling against expectations throughout his career, he’s also a realist. “Practically speaking,” the 62-year-old says, “if you make a lot of movies that people don’t go see, you don’t get to make a lot of movies. And right now I really need to think about what kinds of movies I’ll make going forward. I’m not interested in continually working on things where, if it comes up in conversation, people go… ‘oh, did that come out?’”