Steven Soderbergh Used To Make Movies Like This......But Now He Does It Like This

The director on the high-speed production of High Flying Bird.

- Brian Raftery

It was a late-winter afternoon in 2018, and Steven Soderbergh was premiering his newest movie aboard a Manhattan-bound Amtrak train. Earlier that day, in Philadelphia, the director had finished production on the basket ball-business drama High Flying Bird, about a quietly insurrectional sports agent, played by André Holland, who is trying to outmaneuver the NBA during a lockout. Now he and Holland were zipping back to New York, watching portions of a rough version of the movie that Soderbergh had finished editing just hours after filming wrapped. The 56-year-old filmmaker is famously efficient: On his Cinemax series, The Knick—on which he served as director, cinematographer, and editor—he cut footage together while being driven back from the set. But on High Flying Bird, Soderbergh was able to shoot and complete a first edit on an entire 90-minute film in just a few weeks. “We moved fast on The Knick,” says series co-star Holland. “We moved even faster on High Flying Bird. If anything, there was an intensified energy to his approach.”

A year after High Flying Bird’s marathon shoot, Soderbergh—dressed in corduroy pants and a blazer, plus a T-shirt he produced featuring a license-plate number from The French Connection—is in Los Angeles, working in the Hollywood offices of his friend David Fincher, director of Gone Girl. There’s a Fincher-face Pez dispenser sitting nearby and a bar of Fight Club soap. The two have been close since the early 1990s; Fincher even sent Soderbergh a rough cut of Gone Girl, asking for feedback. (“We always show each other stuff,” Soderbergh says.) Over a weekend, Soderbergh edited his own cut of the film and sent it back.