The Philosophy of Steven Soderbergh

Introduction

1 INTRODUCTION R. Barton Palmer and Steven M. Sanders Not Orson Welles Redivivus Orson Welles was twenty-six when, having given himself a crash course in filmmaking, he directed and starred in Citizen Kane (1941). If its peculiar artistry and penetrating dissection of American culture went underappreciated at the time, the film has long since been recognized as one of the masterpieces of the national cinema. Steven Soderbergh was the same age when his initial directorial effort, sex, lies, and videotape (1989), for which he also wrote the script, received, among other accolades, the coveted Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Even at twenty years remove, Soderbergh’s first film arguably remains the most influential independent film ever made. Because it is in many ways a minimalist production, however, it seems unlikely to rival Citizen Kane in the pantheon of greatest American movies. But, much as Citizen Kane did for Welles, slv established Soderbergh as a wunderkind whose writing and directing talents were already fully formed. Also like Welles, Soderbergh seemed in no need of a lengthy apprenticeship in the business. Both directors instead began their careers at the top, a mixed blessing that in each case created expectations that, as subsequent events have proved, were difficult to fulfill. But there the comparison between Welles and Soderbergh, made by many during the height of slv’s popularity, begins to break down. Unlike Citizen Kane, slv aroused no controversy within the industry; its politics were interpersonal, not national, and its stylizations were subtle, not ostentatious , suiting a limited budget form of cinema more dependent on talk than spectacle. Following the commercial/independent (or, in the now popular expression, Indiewood) model established earlier in the decade by filmmakers such as the Coen brothers and Jim Jarmusch, slv combines an intelligible, essentially melodramatic narrative with art house themes. The 2 R. Barton Palmer and Steven M. Sanders film is especially marked by a deeply probing approach to complex character that uncovers at least partly unfathomable motivations, the result, in large part, of Soderbergh’s enthusiasm for the international art cinema of the postwar era in general and for French New Wave director Jean-Pierre Melville in particular. The film’s critical and commercial success, moreover, meant that Soderbergh was not an enfant terrible who would bear watching and close handling. He was instead established as a major player in the expanding commercial/independent sector of American filmmaking (slv was not, as is commonly thought, a true independent film since it received preproduction financing from Point 406, the home video and independent production unit of Columbia Pictures). Perhaps more important, the release of slv inaugurated a distinct and enduring phase in New Hollywood filmmaking. Its distribution by then fledgling Miramax established that company as a force to be reckoned with, while Soderbergh, it quickly became apparent, was the advance scout for an emerging second wave of independent-minded filmmakers, who, it was widely (and, as it turns out, correctly) thought by many industry executives , could exploit the huge box office potential exposed by the theatrical exhibition of slv (which earned more than $100 million by the middle 1990s). This group of writer-directors comprises many who are now famous and established Hollywood insiders, including Quentin Tarantino, David Fincher, Paul Thomas Anderson, David O. Russell, and Spike Jonze, all of whom have eagerly pushed the accepted limits of Hollywood production during the last two decades. They constitute an informal movement that can justly be termed, in the phrase of Sharon Waxman, as the “rebels on the backlot,” a group that firmly secured the profitability of the commercial/independent sector pioneered by earlier arrivals on the scene, especially the Coens, Jarmusch, and, more distantly, John Sayles and John Cassavetes. It is certainly true, as Waxman observes, that by “2001 a true community of young film artists had emerged from the final decade of the twentieth century.” Chief among them was Soderbergh, who in the first decade of the twenty-first century has established himself even more strongly as an insider. In Waxman’s only slightly hyperbolic phrase, he has managed to “bend the risk-averse studio structure” to his will, a reshaping of the industry in which Tarantino and company have likewise played significant roles in Indiewood filmmaking.1 These filmmakers, however, have not found themselves in a self-destructive struggle with the studio system that, for Welles, eventually meant margin- Introduction...