In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

249 Mark Gallagher: I have a bunch of questions about art and authorship and filmmaking. I have a big question to start off, but if you don’t mind me asking a more basic one to begin with—is this a workday for you, in effect? Steven Soderbergh: Yeah. MG: So can you tell me what you’ve been doing today? SS: Interviews. [And] I did some editing this morning on a short documentary that I’m making about a film called End of the Road, which came out in 1970, and which Warner Bros. has remastered and is going to release this fall. And I agreed to make something about it for them to put on the DVD to help drive sales. So that’s a project I’ve been working on for the last four months. MG: And what have you been doing with that? Do you mean getting ready a voice recording, or actually shooting? SS: I shot interviews with everybody that’s still around that was involved with the film, so I’m just cutting now. I have a portable drive that I carry with me everywhere so I can cut on the plane or whatever. MG: Is that a Wim Wenders film, End of the Road? SS: No, it’s based on the John Barth novel. MG: Yeah, OK. They made a film of that? SS: Yeah, they did. It’s become sort of a cult film. It’s not available, and it’s pretty interesting. Gordon Willis’s first feature as a director of photography, Stacy Keach, James Earl Jones, co-written and co-produced by Terry Southern. It’s an interesting movie. MG: And Warners released it back in the day? Appendix Interview with Steven Soderbergh New York City, Saturday, July 23, 2011 250 Another Steven Soderbergh Experience SS: No, Allied Artists released it, and Warners obviously picked it up in some kind of yard sale. I’ve been bugging them about it for years, so now it’s happening. MG: I’m curious about that kind of leveraging. You wanted them to release it, and did you say [to Warners] you would do some ancillary thing? SS: Yeah, I said if you guys do this, I’ll create a special piece of material to go with it, to help sell it. MG: OK. Is that something you’ve done in the past? I know you’ve done a lot of these DVD supplements, been involved in commentary tracks. Is that something you’ve done with a particular mind toward getting things out there? SS: Not in this way. I’ve never gone to somebody and tried to force them to restore or re-release a movie that I thought should be out there. And as such, I felt some obligation to sweeten the pot a little bit. But honestly, the film itself is intriguing enough that I wanted to know more about it, and this was a great way to do that. And it’s been really interesting because the descriptions of the experience on the part of the people making the film have really brought home the idea that movies, and the act of making movies, don’t matter the way they used to. MG: Based on having conversations with the people who were involved in the production, you get that sense? What is the language they’re using to talk about cinema that is different than what you find today? SS: I don’t know that anybody would necessarily say that that’s what they said in the interviews directly. What’s clear to me is that in cultural terms, the experience for them of making this movie, which has a lot on its mind, was viewed as both special and at the same time a necessary part of living in this culture. There was a sense of artistic duty, in a way, to use your energy to make something that meant something, and that they, in this case, were successful in creating a really unique environment. And I really was struck by that. Certainly I try to create an environment that’s conducive to good solutions. But this sounded like a really special circumstance the way everybody was talking about it. And it made me realize, wow, in the late ’60s and the early ’70s in America, movies meant something in cultural terms. People were looking to movies for not necessarily answers but for clues, at least, about what...

Share