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I never really believed in your retirement, in part because— Because I lie a lot. Well, because it never seemed like you believed in it.
There was some static or a dark cloud, something was bugging me, and I just needed some way of getting back to the feeling that I want to have when I go to work. But I think each project is different and needs to be looked at as an individual piece of art. Share This Story. SS: I certainly was trying to pick stuff that resonated with that period, but I also just felt like, "Well, I have to use a Steppenwolf song, because Peter was in one of the most famous movies ever made with all this Steppenwolf music in it, and you can't miss that opportunity. A: Another time I had a real sit-down with myself was during and shortly after making The Underneath. I spent a little time sort of researching the content platform thing and just decided that the amount of money really required to kick off a platform from scratch was way more than I thought when I started thinking about it.
But I think it's fair to ask: Why come back for Logan Lucky? A couple of reasons. Hidden in some of my public statements about why I was stepping away were some clues as to why I was stepping away. And one of them was my frustration with the distribution system. And so what essentially I was saying was, "Until something changes, this just isn't interesting to me, and it's not fun.
It's now possible to put a movie out in wide release with a fairly small number of people. So everything was starting to move to a point where essentially a version of self-distribution on a wide scale was becoming possible in a way that it had never been before. And then the script came in, and I was tasked—or asked—to help find a director, and I just I did a total Bud Selig on it. After a couple of weeks when I was asked, "So, who should we send this to?
Steven Soderbergh: Interviews, Revised and Updated (Conversations with Steven Soderbergh: Interviews (Conversations with Filmmakers Series) pages; Publisher: University Press of Mississippi; Revised, Updated edition (April 2, ). There is a newer edition of this item: Steven Soderbergh: Interviews, Revised and Updated (Conversations with Filmmakers (Paperback)) · Steven Soderbergh.
So it was timing. It's the kind of film that I like to make. It's the kind of film I like to watch. It was a cousin to one of the Ocean's films, but a very inbred cousin. And I just thought that would be fun. Logan Lucky has a light, comic tone—it doesn't seem like you came back to make some grand creative statement.
Well, let's put it this way. There was no scenario in which I was going to unretire and make a movie that wasn't fun. There just wasn't. I would not have thrown my credibility out the window by saying, "Oh, that thing I said, that was only half true" unless it was something that was fun. I would not have come out of retirement to do something "serious" or "important.
No way. As far as movies go, I'm hard-pressed to think of anything that I'm planning or developing that would qualify as serious or important. They're all either genre pieces, pure genre pieces, or they're comedies. The serious stuff, honestly, anything serious that I'm working on is TV stuff, which I just feel for me is a more comfortable place to explore serious stuff because you get more time.
Where did the idea to cast Adam Driver come from? Adam was someone that I was really, really intrigued by. He seems incapable of being uninteresting. You were an early Girls fan, right? I think what Lena Dunham did was a real achievement. She's really young, and this all happened to her very young. And I'm not an actor.
I'm not a performer. To what extent becoming known publically is a prison, I really get to set my own hours in terms of when I'm in prison and when I'm not.
When you're a performer, and especially when you're on television, you're just in prison all the time when you step outside, and it's really hard and it's not something that they can complain about because it seems disingenuous, but she had to weather a lot when she's trying to create this show, and I think she landed it really nicely and at the right time, but we're in that space now where if somebody—as Britney Spears said [ it was actually Taylor Swift ], "Haters gonna hate.
I haven't really been the focal point of it. I've been next to it, and it's not fun. As you said, Logan Lucky feels in many ways like a cousin to the Ocean's films. Any reluctance to play chicken with the films that you're probably most well known for? No, I didn't really think about it that way. Maybe because at a certain point, concurrently a real Ocean's film [ Ocean's 8, directed by Gary Ross, and produced by Soderbergh] was being made that I was a part of. I viewed them as being so different. And having seen the other one, they are very different.
Like I said, it's in the universe but is kind of in its own orbit, so I didn't really think about it. When something feels like it needs to happen now, you should pay attention to that. Because, look, I'm developing certain things—some of them are time-sensitive in a sort of zeitgeist sense, and some of them aren't.
Some of them need to be made as soon as possible, and some of them don't need to be made as soon as possible because they're about things that are less topical. Like, that would have been dangerous, and probably impossible. It also seems — starting all the way back to you taking over cinematography duties — like these decisions are often guided by how quickly you can get from your intuition as an artist to executing it.
Like, as soon as I feel it, I want to shoot it. I mean, really, really significant. But that, to me, is really going to be something, because now I can put the lens anywhere I want, and I have selective focus, and I can do all those things that I like to do. Like, this is fantastic technology. One last technical thing. To have to go back in frame by frame, in the DI suite, and even that stuff out, create power windows to deal with the sections of the frame that have changed density, that was fucking annoying and expensive.
And I talked to the Filmic Pro people, and they were like yeah, I know, they will not engage with us to figure out if this can be fixed. So, you know, that was — I have to say, that was the only time that I felt frustrated by that technology. And look, on the one hand-. Are the other aspects of production, especially from a cinematography standpoint largely the same.
Do you light similarly for the iPhone? Digital has, because of its sensitivity, has helped a lot, I think. Like, the way things look in the real world, you think you can do better than that? Soderbergh: Yeah, oh, yeah. Like, heavy diffusion, very, you know, kind of bright, with elevated black levels. You know, like, there was a cinematographer who shot a lot of those, David M. Walsh, and worked with Herbert Ross.
So, the person that is on screen, their eye line goes straight across. Those lists that you put out at the end of every year always astound me. I mean, I do this for a living, you know, so I caught up to you on movies per week, probably, because I just went to Sundance and killed, like, 25 movies. And so, I would say we average probably 10 hour [production days].
So then it takes about hour, hour-and-a-half, for me to get the footage. So wrap, eat, early dinner, then I have the footage. Part of it, too, is there are huge efficiencies that come along with having a crew that is common to most of the projects. And so, my comfort level in delegating is very high, you know, higher than it would have been for me working with a group of people for the first time. You know what I mean? I like things being a little bit rough.
It depends. So, when I hear the stories of-. Soderbergh: You cannot find two people with a more divergent approach, to land somewhere similar, which is, you know, trying to make something good. I was in a room with him once. But this was on a whole other level. It was nine pages a day for 73 days, but we very quickly fell into a rhythm that was not unpleasant at all.
Ultimately, the reason we were able to do it was nobody was second-guessing how we were doing it. If I determined that I could shoot a three-page scene in a single take, I could do that without anybody complaining. Which brings up another point: The editing patterns of television need to evolve.