THE chameleon king of American auteur cinema is in a tetchy mood. Bouncing around Venice in promotional overdrive, Steven Soderbergh is juggling numerous hats as director, producer, screenwriter and mini studio mogul. But nagging away like a bad hangover is Ocean’s Twelve, his $110 million bank-heist blockbuster featuring a constellation of A-list names including Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts, George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones.

The huge critical and commercial success of Ocean’s Eleven in 2002 made a second chapter inevitable, but the sequel has performed more sluggishly at the US box office. While not exactly a flop, it has fallen short of expectations for its stellar cast and hefty budget. “The marketplace in the States is just brutal,” Soderbergh says with a shrug. “There are so many films happening every weekend.”

Unlike its predecessor, however, reviews of Ocean’s Twelve have also been brutal on both sides of the Atlantic. With his more artistic money-losers, such as Schizopolis and Solaris, Soderbergh can take refuge in his reputation as an innovative, risk-taking maverick. But here he is being judged on commercial clout, pure and simple. And despite, or perhaps because of, the endless marketing tweaks and test screenings that go into fine-tuning studio blockbusters, Ocean’s Twelve has not done the business.

“I hate test screenings,” the 42-year-old director fumes quietly, “but there’s information you get from them that you just can’t get any other way. There’s no substitute for showing a film to 400 people who are not your friends.”

In fact, Ocean’s Twelve began generating negative headlines long before its release, with lurid reports that Mafiosi had infiltrated the Sicilian shoot in July last year with a view to extorting money. “It was really fascinating to read this stuff,” Soderbergh says incredulously. “I mean, people make this s*** up. We were in Sicily for 36 hours — and nothing happened! Sorry!”

Soderbergh is on the defensive about Ocean’s Twelve, but even his failures are never less than interesting. For all the profit it made, Ocean’s Eleven was arguably the Atlanta-born director’s most crass corporate compromise to date, with scant trace of his wit or stylistic flair.

Flaws notwithstanding, at least its sequel feels closer to signature Soderbergh in its freewheeling pace, handheld camerawork and cinematic in-jokes. It may wear the guise of a multiplex crowd-pleaser, but inside lurks an offbeat indie thriller struggling to get out. And at least dialogue and performance take precedence over car chases and explosions.

“There aren’t really any special effects,” Soderbergh says. “They don’t interest me.

“I’m always surprised when I see a film with a lot of violence in it. Based on my experience that means that the director likes it, and I have difficulty relating to it because I don’t. And the same could be said for sex, but that’s more fun to watch.”

Ironically, there is probably more evidence of the director’s trademark offbeat ethos in Criminal, another ensemble crime drama due for UK release this month, than in Ocean’s Twelve. An English-language remake of Nine Queens, Fabián Bielinsky’s Argentinean con-trick thriller, Criminal was directed by Greg Jacobs, but produced and co-written by Soderbergh. Two very different heist thrillers, but Soderbergh appears more enthused about the one he did not direct.

“I like heist movies. I don’t know why, there’s nothing in my background that would indicate I should be interested in them. But what I liked about Criminal, as opposed to Ocean’s, is that the con is sort of being improvised. You’re watching it develop in front of you.” Soderbergh’s fondness for heist thrillers may have a simpler explanation. After all, it was the sassy 1997 crime caper Out of Sight that saved his career from oblivion first time around.

Ten years ago he was all washed up, a burnt-out Wonder Boy at 32. His 1989 debut sex, lies and videotape had won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and been hailed as a milestone in modern independent cinema — mostly, he claims, because it made a ton of money.

But by the mid-1990s Soderbergh was coping with writer’s block, a disintegrating marriage to the actress Betsy Brantley and a CV full of box-office flatliners.

It was only the critical success of Out of Sight, followed by the highly profitable Oscar winners Erin Brockovich and Traffic, that pulled Soderbergh out of his career nosedive. Since then he has made a point of working with the same lucky stars — Julia Roberts, George Clooney, Don Cheadle, Catherine Zeta-Jones. Most of Ocean’s Twelve, in fact.

As a consequence, Soderbergh has been fortunate enough to balance credibility with commercial success — until now, at least. Through Section Eight, the company he runs with Clooney, Warner Bros continues to fund his more arty projects on the understanding that he rewards them with the occasional box-office juggernaut. “They’ve been very supportive. I’m hoping that this year and next year, when the films we have in production now start to come out, we are able to justify their support.”

Among Soderbergh’s current slate of directing projects is a long-delayed biopic of Ché Guevara, written by the legendary auteur Terrence Malick and starring Benicio DEl Toro. He is also producing Richard Linklater’s cutting-edge computer-animated version of Philip K. Dick’s science-fiction classic A Scanner Darkly, David Gordon Green’s adaptation of John Kennedy Toole’s cult comic novel A Confederacy of Dunces, and a raft of similarly ambitious productions.

Some will be noble failures, no doubt. But the point, insists Soderbergh, is to at least try to break the mediocre mould. “For me, what’s disheartening is to open the paper and see ads for films that were never even meant to be any good,” he says ruefully. “Because even when they’re not successful, they still take up room, they occupy a certain psychic space. That’s frustrating to me.”

“But hey,” Soderbergh admits, “somebody may feel that way looking at an ad for one of my movies.”

Explore Film

• Film Reviews

• Trailers

• DVD

• Oscars

• Cannes

Editor's choice

• U2 at Nou Camp Stadium, Barcelona
• The 50 Best Movie Villains
• The 15 golden rules of theatre etiquette