Everything Is Storytelling

Hollywood director Steven Soderbergh is trying to turn an obscure Bolivian spirit into a hot company. Step one, he says: Tell its tale.

- Joe Keohane

Most people know Steven Soderbergh as the legendary director of the Ocean’s Eleven franchise, Erin Brockovich, Magic Mike, and more recently, The Knick. Few know that he’s also the first American to import singani: an obscure, grape-based Bolivian liquor dating back some 500 years. Soderbergh fell in love with singani during a film shoot, and he spent six years securing a license to distribute it—an effort complicated by the fact that the U.S. government had no existing category for the stuff. The tenacity paid off. His product, called Singani 63, is now in nearly 1,000 establishments in 22 key markets. And to keep growing, Soderbergh says, he’ll use the same skills he learned from making films: storytelling, collaboration, and a willingness to be wrong.

You’ve been a director for a long time. Has it influenced the way you run the company?

I don’t believe that just because you’ve been successful in this one area means you can transfer that into another area. What I do believe is that you can transfer an approach to problem- solving. The first step being that you need to pull your ego out of the equation so that you can see clearly what you’re dealing with—to surround yourself with good people and ask all the questions that need to be asked: What does the good version look like? What have other people done? What do we want to take from what other people have done? What do we want to discard from what other people have done?