Sex and lies. Two pre-eminent subjects that boldly swirl around the inner
world of the Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh and just occasionally
burst to the surface. Like now, for instance, in the library room of a
London hotel, the 46-year-old film-maker behind Erin Brockovich and
the star-studded Ocean’s Eleven movies, in smart brown
jacket and jeans and black brainbox spectacles, will ping rapidly between
the two poles. He speaks with a pleasing combination of unselfconscious
honesty and the half-smirk of irony. A joke is never far from the surface.
Lies, he says, “are the necessary grease of society. For me, I constantly have
this sensation of how much I can really reveal without causing too much
chaos or violence”. Sex too, he adds seriously, is a minefield, and
something not closely associated with the truth, in all walks of life,
especially from politicians. And then, typically, within seconds he’s joking
about the husband of Jacqui Smith, the former Home Secretary (yes, they’ve
heard of her in Hollywood, too!), who claimed expenses for porn movies and
Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Thirteen (which he rented twice).
“What can I say? The guy likes to laugh, and he likes to pleasure himself. Ocean’s
Thirteen is a very compelling film!” he says, with tongue planted firmly
in cheek.
Sex and lies are, of course, intrinsic to Soderbergh’s professional life, too,
and not just because they were the focus of his breakthrough 1989 film Sex,
Lies and Videotape. Today they are the subjects of his two new movies —
a de-facto double bill whose release dates are within weeks of each other.
In the first instance, Matt Damon plays a pathological liar in the corporate
comedy The Informant!, followed by the low-budget drama, The
Girlfriend Experience, which details the emotionally fragile life of a
high-class prostitute called Chelsea, played by Sasha Grey, a real-life porn
star.
Of the latter movie, a lush and woozy portrait of Manhattan in the
stranglehold of recession (it was filmed in October 2008), he says that he
is most proud of Grey’s performance. The film is a series of professional
encounters with Chelsea, filmed with an essentially chaste and
unexploitative eye, and built entirely around Grey’s quietly impassive
facial expressions. It is a performance that gives Chelsea a “distance”, he
says, that is central to the movie. Similarly, he rejects the idea that with
Grey he has resorted to stunt casting, insisting that the pornification of
mainstream culture is so complete that it hardly matters.
For example? He confesses to being quite the consumer. In fact, he says, he
has been known to storm out of hotels if they don't offer pay-per-view porn.
“I was in a hotel in Anaheim about five years ago, and after checking in I
literally went down to the front desk and said, ‘I don’t understand, there’s
no pay-per-view porn!’ I called my producer and said, ‘I can’t take this,
I’m checking out’. And I went to the hotel across the road. I think it
should be in the bill of rights — when you’re travelling, access to
pornography should be the number three thing on the list after clean towels
and 24-hour room service.” He rolls his eyes upwards, to indicate the hotel
rooms above, and sighs, “They don’t have it here!”
The Informant!, meanwhile, embraces its mythomaniacal protagonist with
something approaching adoration. Here Damon, 30lb (13kg) heavier and
sporting a curvy Wham!-era wig , plays Mark Whitacre, a corporate
whistleblower who attempted to bring down a US “agri-business” giant, but
ended up exposing his own convoluted deceptions; he embezzled more than $9
million (£5.4m).
The tone of the movie is fantastically upbeat and wickedly funny. The wacky
ragtime soundtrack is by Marvin Hamlisch, who scored Woody Allen’s comedy Bananas,
and who was coaxed out of retirement just for the job. The cast, which
includes stand-up comedians in supporting roles, often conveys a sense of
straight-faced characters on the brink of giggling fits.
“Making the movie was the most fun I’ve had on a shoot since Erin
Brockovich,” says Soderbergh. “It was the right material, the right
actor, the right time. I have to say, it felt embarrassingly easy.”
He adds that it was especially easy compared with his previous project, the
four-hour biopic Che, the making of which, he says, has left lasting
scars. The project was underfunded, rushed and was not a project that he was
passionate about. It was “a mistake from day one”, he says. “In 2001,
Benicio [Del Toro, who played Che Guevara] and the producer, Laura Bickford,
came to me and said, ‘We’re interested in making a film about Che Guevara,
do you want to get involved?’ I said, ‘Yes!’ And I knew, even as I said
‘Yes’ that this was going to be one of those movies.”
Soderbergh has experienced plenty of “those movies” over a 20-year career.
When he exploded on to the movie scene with the provocative Sex, Lies and
Videotape (which cost just over $1 million and went on to earn more than
$100 million worldwide) he was celebrated as the father of the new wave of
independent film. Studios offered him lucrative contracts, Demi Moore wanted
him to work for her, but instead of going to Hollywood he made five
successive arthouse failures (including The Underneath and Schizopolis).
Those films, he says today, were vital training. “I needed to make those
movies to learn what I needed to learn to make Out of Sight.” The
1998 movie was an ex-con thriller starring George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez
as antagonistic lovers. It signalled Soderbergh’s belated arrival in
mainstream Hollywood (he would receive an Oscar for Traffic in 2001),
and began a collaborative relationship with Clooney in which they formed
their own production company, Section 8 Entertainment.
As the second youngest of six children born to a university dean, and raised
in Louisiana, Soderbergh says that he learnt to be self-sufficient at an
early age. But more than that, he says, his parents’ marriage was
unsuccessful, “and I think out of some sense of self-preservation I kept a
wall between myself and a situation that I deemed volatile”. Behind that
wall his personality evolved, he says, and the turning point came when he
was 12 years old and he saw Jaws. “It was the first time I came out
of a film going, ‘Who did that? And what does directed by Steven Spielberg
mean?’” A nascent film-maker was born.
He made some short films, wrote six unproduced screenplays, then, after
various odd-jobs in and out of Hollywood, he decided to take a bolder
approach and to write with “more abandon”, weaving in truths, lies and
sexual anecdotes from his own experience to create his winning Sex, Lies
screenplay. “I didn’t really care what anybody thought while I was writing
it, and maybe that’s why it poked through.” The rest is history.
These days Soderbergh, who is married to Jules Asner, the American television
journalist, and has a daughter from a previous marriage, is more reflective
about his place in the movie firmament. Although he has three more projects
coming up — a biopic about Liberace starring Michael Douglas (“That’s going
to be a lot of fun,” he grins), an action movie called Knockout,
and a 3-D musical called Cleo starring Catherine Zeta Jones (“A
musical in 3-D? Come on! It’s going to be awesome!”) — he is nonetheless
confident about his imminent retirement. “I just feel that this is a young
person’s game, and I don’t want to be doing this when I’m 50. By then I’ll
have made 20-something movies, and that’s a lot.” So, does that mean he’ll
be retiring in the next four years? “Oh, I think before that,” he says.
Surely he can’t be serious. A workaholic and consummate movie-maker at the
height of his powers, with Clooney, the cream of Hollywood, at his feet?
“It’s funny,” he begins, “But every time I say I’m trying to wind things down,
people get really angry. ‘Why are you saying that? Stop saying that!’ But
look, if I decide I want to do something else I am allowed to do just that.”
He gives a perplexed shrug and says: “It’s my life, after all!”
The Informant! is being screened at the Times BFI 53rd London Film
Festival tonight, 8.30pm, Vue5; 8.45pm, Vue7; Sat, 1.15pm, Vue7; Mon,
1.30pm, Vue6. The Informant! goes on general release on November 20
and The Girlfriend Experience on December 4
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