Steven Soderbergh’s Unique Movie-Business Mindset
The one director perfectly merging his artistic talent with commercial interests.
“I think if I were going to run a studio I’d just be gathering the best filmmakers I could find and sort of let them do their thing within certain economic parameters. So I would call Shane Carruth, or Barry Jenkins or Amy Seimetz and I’d bring them in and go, ok, what do you want to do? What are the things you’re interested in doing? What do we have here that you might be interested in doing? If there was some sort of point of intersection I’d go: Ok, look, I’m going to let you make three movies over five years, I’m going to give you this much money in production costs, I’m going to dedicate this much money on marketing. You can sort of proportion it how you want, you can spend it all on one and none on the other two, but go make something.” — Steven Soderbergh (who else would this be? Come on now!)
I think it really says something about how cinema is currently, as a business, that a director like Steven Soderbergh can be one of the more well known directors in Hollywood at the moment. Sure, he’s no Spielberg, Tarantino, Scorsese or Fincher, but practically nobody is, and for a director of brilliant, small and oddball projects like Bubble (2005) to be able to also make consistently massive hits with audiences in a way that seems so impossibly…
