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pianocrash wrote: Thu Mar 20, 2025 5:45 am

pistolwink wrote: Wed Mar 19, 2025 8:18 pm Yeah, the sets were nice.

I wonder, has anyone tried to sync up Soderbergh's amazingly extensive media diet to the productions of his films? Does he spend 10-hour-days shooting an intimate scene between Blanchett and Fassbender and then go home to watch two movies (I particularly enjoy his double feature of Born to Be Bad and Mad Max), binge a TV series, and read a novel?

I would think he's pretty concise with his leisure time as he is with his shooting regime, that is he concentrates it pretty specifically for maximum results. As for his book readings, I'm guessing he lists them as they are completed (probably in chunks, over time), unless he's speed reading (1990's represent). There are small chunks here & there wherein there is no activity at all (as with the first week of Black Bag prep), but it's probably hard to notice when most of the logs are just Jaws or Hacks over & over again.

This reminds me of Art Garfunkel listing every book he’s read in chronological order over the last 6 decades

I was struck by how much Black Bag had in common with Closer. In both, partner-hopping couples eviscerate each other amid luxe furnishings. The espionage aspect felt like a frill.

Soderbergh assesses Black Bag's underperformance:

“This is the kind of film I made my career on. And if a mid-level budget, star-driven movie can’t seem to get people over the age of 25 years old to come out to theatres – if that’s truly a dead zone – then that’s not a good thing for movies. What’s gonna happen to the person behind me who wants to make this kind of film?”

“I know for a fact, having talked to somebody who works at another studio, that the Monday after Black Bag opened, the conversation in the morning meeting was: ‘What does this mean when you can’t get a movie like this to perform?’. And that’s frustrating.”

[…]

“I’ve got a lot to think about,” he says, softly. “I think The Christophers is going to be fine, but after that… I can’t go make another movie whose target audience is the same as Black Bag’s. That’s just not an option.”

Really sad.

Speaking of Soderbergh - has anybody got any updates on his planned Blu Ray release of his earlier work?

“This is the kind of film I made my career on. And if a mid-level budget, star-driven movie can’t seem to get people over the age of 25 years old to come out to theatres – if that’s truly a dead zone – then that’s not a good thing for movies. What’s gonna happen to the person behind me who wants to make this kind of film?”

RedLetterMedia just posted a discussion on this very topic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0Jwv40MkiY

I have a passion for French cinema and as a result a passion for French actors. This extends to some other European actors too.

But there isn't a person under 60 that appears in English speaking cinema that on name alone will get me into a cinema or for that matter on to my couch to watch a film or streaming series. All my favourites in English language cinema are either dead or have thankless roles in mostly unappealing ventures.

I only went to the cinema to watch Black Bag because of Steven Soderbergh. Fassbender & Blanchett together or alone won't get my $$$ (though Marisa Abela whom I'd never heard of was dynamite in the film).

Maybe because we the public know so much about actors appearing in English language films now, that they have long lost their mystic. The internet and social media has probably made things even worse since the turn of the century.

I saw this in a theater, but have either Fassbender or Blanchett ever been real box-office stars? Calling this a "star-driven film" seems like a bit of an overbid outside of an arthouse context - these two actors are arthouse darlings, and naturally the movie performed basically like an arthouse film. I'm not sure there was ever a time when this movie would have been a huge box-office performer in a larger general-audience sense. Furthermore, it seems to me, given the box-office totals, that the dedicated Fassbender/Blanchett fans probably showed up in pretty strong numbers. The question of "what could anyone have reasonably expected?" looms large over these comments of his.

Maybe more to the point, I think Soderbergh's constant whining about the box office performance of his films is disingenuous, if not downright hypocritical. For one thing, the guy's spent most of his career intentionally undercutting the audience-pleasing aspects of his movies. And while I sorta enjoyed this one, it's not exactly something that I'd expect to generate strong word-of-mouth outside of people already predisposed to like his films - it doesn't exactly scream "people will love this!" to me. But that's the kind of movies he sets out to make - he's always, for better or worse, had a strong experimental streak and cold detachment to the material (and this movie's central character is coldly detached himself). By and large, he doesn't make audience-pleasing movies! On purpose! As time goes on, even less and less so! And even when he tries to, he can't help but be condescending about it, like when he fretted that he made a movie specifically for all the rural folk and yet the ingrates still didn't show up despite his pandering.

Secondly, Soderbergh himself spent a pretty decent chunk of his career exploring alternative distribution channels and working to shorten theatrical windows. Adult-themed movies being rushed to home exhibition - this is the world he helped to pioneer! He was telling us 20 years ago that theatrical was dead and it was time to get on board with VOD, and now here he is whining that too many people want to watch movies at home.

For a guy who made as many Ocean's sequels & all those Magic Mikes, you'd think he'd had enough of Hollywood, but I guess you can never fully let yourself out of the business, especially for someone who loves & loathes it in equal measures.

While I don't doubt that the audience pull isn't what it used to be for receipts, overall, this is also an industry hell-bent on prequels & destroying IP until it's microcosmed and rendered absolutely useless, not to mention the fact that people just don't have the attention span as the audience grows younger (I would watch a Soderbergh children's movie, with no happy endings, no central conceit, and lots of CGI Nose Army, however). Also, it makes for good publicity, even if the truth hurts your pocketbook, but I can't help but feel like those who need to make 50M budgeted films to turn a profit also need to account for why people go to the movies in the first place, especially when, given the option, most people in certain demographics would totally watch a 90min picture in 100 segments on TikTok (as long as the parts are labeled appropriately).

Also, to be on par with that video (which I did not finish), they seem to be also critiquing the slowest months of the movie-earning seasons, but they still have a point in terms of quality vs. quantity. If Hollywood isn't gambling, stop: get some help :^o

Soderbergh should thank the gods every day that Sid Sheinberg and Lee Wasserman at Universal/MCA loved King of the Hill so much that they basically saved him from permanent director’s jail after making a string of unprofitable films throughout the 90’s. Compare his career to other filmmakers who had feature debuts around the same time like Leslie Harris, Wendell Harris, Jr., Everett Lewis, Matty Rich, etc. They either never had the ability to make a second feature or were very quickly discarded by the studio system

I agree completely about Fassbender not being a box office draw. The Killer likely wouldn’t have fared well in theatres, either

Brian C wrote: Tue Apr 22, 2025 5:01 pm

Spoiler

I saw this in a theater, but have either Fassbender or Blanchett ever been real box-office stars? Calling this a "star-driven film" seems like a bit of an overbid outside of an arthouse context - these two actors are arthouse darlings, and naturally the movie performed basically like an arthouse film. I'm not sure there was ever a time when this movie would have been a huge box-office performer in a larger general-audience sense. Furthermore, it seems to me, given the box-office totals, that the dedicated Fassbender/Blanchett fans probably showed up in pretty strong numbers. The question of "what could anyone have reasonably expected?" looms large over these comments of his.

Maybe more to the point, I think Soderbergh's constant whining about the box office performance of his films is disingenuous, if not downright hypocritical. For one thing, the guy's spent most of his career intentionally undercutting the audience-pleasing aspects of his movies. And while I sorta enjoyed this one, it's not exactly something that I'd expect to generate strong word-of-mouth outside of people already predisposed to like his films - it doesn't exactly scream "people will love this!" to me. But that's the kind of movies he sets out to make - he's always, for better or worse, had a strong experimental streak and cold detachment to the material (and this movie's central character is coldly detached himself). By and large, he doesn't make audience-pleasing movies! On purpose! As time goes on, even less and less so! And even when he tries to, he can't help but be condescending about it, like when he fretted that he made a movie specifically for all the rural folk and yet the ingrates still didn't show up despite his pandering.

Secondly, Soderbergh himself spent a pretty decent chunk of his career exploring alternative distribution channels and working to shorten theatrical windows. Adult-themed movies being rushed to home exhibition - this is the world he helped to pioneer! He was telling us 20 years ago that theatrical was dead and it was time to get on board with VOD, and now here he is whining that too many people want to watch movies at home.

It's strange to me that the perspective of a filmmaker who has spent his career feverishly attempting to find ways both within and around a stagnating and hostile studio system to carve out space for personal filmmaking pitched firmly to the mainstream, who is constantly looking to open doors for future filmmakers to make movies that aren't properties of Disney or Marvel without being relegated to an arthouse ghetto, would be met with such dismissiveness (peppered with language that almost suggests a certain glee in knocking him down a peg) here of all places. The portrait of Soderbergh as a disingenuous, hypocritical, condescending whiner who scorns and antagonizes (but also panders to) his audiences is not a filmmaker I recognize.

Brian C wrote: Tue Apr 22, 2025 5:01 pm…he's always, for better or worse, had a strong experimental streak and cold detachment to the material (and this movie's central character is coldly detached himself). By and large, he doesn't make audience-pleasing movies! On purpose! As time goes on, even less and less so!

Even if one accepts the premise that Soderbergh's films uniformly evince a "cold detachment to the material" (I don't), one must still explain how a filmmaker who supposedly deprives audiences of entertainment used to have hits and win Oscars. That would seem proof enough that it wasn't Soderbergh who changed so much as the ground beneath his feet, and he has spent the better part of a decade trying to figure out why and meet the audience where they are (streaming platforms and all).

Almost nothing he's made post-The Girlfriend Experience (2009) has been anywhere near as experimental or "alienating" as the some of the work he made early in his career. A pivot away from audiences toward deliberately obscure or off-putting films just isn't borne out by the work. He makes sub-two hour genre films with recognizable stars that are easy to grasp narratively and emotionally, and are more accessible than something like Tenet, or even Oppenheimer. If "even less and less so" merely refers to declining box office figures, it would seem to me you're admitting that audience culture has simply changed and that this has nothing to do with his filmmaking style specifically.

Brian C wrote: Tue Apr 22, 2025 5:01 pmI'm not sure there was ever a time when this movie would have been a huge box-office performer in a larger general-audience sense. […] The question of "what could anyone have reasonably expected?" looms large over these comments of his.

He does not appear to be saying that they expected Black Bag to be a "huge" box-office performer on the level of, say, a Marvel or Christopher Nolan movie. Only that it did not meet what were presumably proportional expectations based on the genre, talent, marketing, and whatever other market research informed the projections. The reasonable expectation is to make a reasonable amount of money (at least break even at the BO, I'd wager) that would make films with a similar scale and ambition viable for studios to want to consistently make, as was the case once upon a time in Hollywood. It's clear from the article that others in the industry involved in producing had reason to expect more and were surprised by the film's underperformance, so to chalk this up merely to selfish whining willfully ignores the bigger picture.

Brian C wrote: Tue Apr 22, 2025 5:01 pmAnd even when he tries to, he can't help but be condescending about it, like when he fretted that he made a movie specifically for all the rural folk and yet the ingrates still didn't show up despite his pandering.

This is a flagrantly uncharitable characterization of his assessment of Logan Lucky's performance. As far as I can recall, my impression of his reaction was more simply one of analytical bewilderment and plain disappointment that his experimental funding/marketing strategy (which, if successful, would've gone a long way in rejuvenating mid-budget filmmaking by reshaping studios' approaches to marketing budgets) failed, and failed again with Unsane. Far from accusing audiences of being "ingrates," he's repeatedly accepted the blame himself and continued looking for ways around the problem.

Brian C wrote: Tue Apr 22, 2025 5:01 pmSoderbergh himself spent a pretty decent chunk of his career exploring alternative distribution channels and working to shorten theatrical windows. Adult-themed movies being rushed to home exhibition - this is the world he helped to pioneer!

Alternative distribution channels for the smaller budgeted films more experimental in nature or conceived with a more specialized audience in mind, that otherwise likely wouldn't even have a shot at getting made under current studio economic structures, yes. Not for a film like Black Bag, which, no matter how you slice it, is not an arthouse film and would never have been considered one at any earlier point in Hollywood. And it's not like Blanchett is Isabelle Huppert, or something; the idea that the star of Thor: Ragnarok is not a "big enough" star to help what amounts to a stylish and sexy whodunnit—Knives Out with a drier sense of humor—make back its budget after a month in theaters seems like yet another illustration of precisely Soderbergh's point about the alarming/awkward state of the business, given that Hollywood churned out mid-budget thrillers with actors nowhere near as big as her or Fassbender for decades.

I don't think characterizing Soderbergh as a "pioneer" of VOD becoming a dumping ground for adult-oriented movies is accurate, unless I missed that Bubble was a massive, industry-shifting hit for HDNet Movies. In fact, I think laying blame on any filmmaker—let alone one with as little clout as Soderbergh—for being somehow instrumental in the current state of affairs, rather than on the people and corporations that actually make and control the platforms and the decisions about funding, marketing, and distribution, is pretty nonsensical and frankly laughable. Seems to me the accelerated shift to VOD was a direct consequence of COVID's impact on an industry that was already sidelining mid-budget adult-oriented films in single-minded pursuit of astronomical profits in a global market. It's rather obvious this situation would have inevitably come about even if Soderbergh hadn't been there early attempting to find ways to make it work for artists, and not just executives and shareholders.

Brian C wrote: Tue Apr 22, 2025 5:01 pmHe was telling us 20 years ago that theatrical was dead and it was time to get on board with VOD

When and in what context did he said this?

Re: VOD

Soderbergh said this around the release of Bubble and his then-burgeoning professional relationship with Mark Cuban

I don't recall Soderbergh saying theatrical was dead. He's argued on a few occasions—including during the pandemic— that studios are unlikely to abandon theatrical release because nothing raises cash like a huge opening weekend (and big weeks to follow). The issue is that the types of films that can open big have been narrowing. It's for his smaller projects that Soderbergh experimented with alternative distribution methods. I think what's rattled him is that, as folks upthread note, a film that was pitched straight down the middle couldn't break even theatrically.

There definitely used to be a place for filmmakers who primarily made mid-budget or lower-cost prestige films that were aimed squarely at older demographics (e.g. Peter Weir, Peter Yates, Jonathan Demme), but everything now is hedged on 9-figure mega productions

Having finally caught up with Black Bag, Presence was by far the superior film. I found the archness of Black Bag quite obnoxious and was not convinced the dialogue or couple dynamics are nearly as sophisticated as the film thinks they are. The spy stuff was too convoluted to be involving. The whole thing may have worked better had it leant more into being a screwball.comedy.

Cate Blanchett gives another one of her "grand dame" performances which didn't have me worried about her safety even once. While there is an affecting humanity about Presence when all is revealed, I found this smug and offputtingly mannered. At least it was short.

I liked Black Bag a lot. It strikes me that for someone with such a notable style, he really does try to pare everything down to the essentials to tell the story and this is a tight 93 minutes. I don’t love the diffused lighting like we’re back twenty years ago filmmaking wise, but he’s always doing something like this to entertain himself. It did occur to me that a movie like this could have benefited a bit from more “name brand” actors in the roles of the accused quintet minus Blanchett (gone are the days of calling in favors for a star-studded Haywire), but all that really matters here is efficiency and it nevertheless excels at that

I wonder if reading the BFI Modern Classics of Jaws on 10th January; watching Duel on 15th January and reading the BFI book on Close Encounters on 17th january were part of prep for his interviewee appearance in the Laurent Bouzereau "Jaws @ 50" documentary, in which Soderbergh wore his Jaws T-shirt!

It strikes me that he doesn't watch nearly as much foreign-language cinema (or TV) as you might expect. That is to say, very very little at all.

diamonds wrote: Tue Dec 17, 2024 4:21 pm Soderbergh is also set to shoot The Christophers in February, the latest in an ongoing collaboration with screenwriter Ed Solomon:

The Christophers is a dark comedy about the estranged children of a once-famous artist who hire a forger to complete his unfinished works so they can be discovered and sold after his death.

If memory serves, he recently indicated that he might be shifting more toward comedies in the future.

Trailer.

That looks wonderful.

Soderbergh using lotsa AI to create "surreal" images for his upcoming films.
"...a process he’s found 'really fun because you need a Ph.D. in literature to tell it what to do.'”

Damn, RIP

Have had no issue with Korine using AI, will likely have no issue with Soderbergh using it (unless the output sucks, which it might!)

Happy to hear in the same interview that the box set of all of his films that he owns the rights to will be coming to his website by June.

For such a "try every new movie-tech invention once" guy, it was only a matter of time. I'd expect this to be as lasting as his iPhone phase, though we'll see if it produces anything in the ballpark of those two movies. The Spanish-American War movie with Wagner Moura sounds good despite that, but AI-assisted John & Yoko movie has high potential to be intolerable boomer slop, and I can't imagine even a Ph.D. will result in the computer spitting anything one-hundredth as interesting as Yoko's own art.

The only director I've seen do anything interesting with generative AI is Radu Jude, who used it in Dracula to make horrifying sexually-charged slop about the distortion of libidinal desires by the machine, though I imagine someone like an Ari Aster-type could use it to reasonable effect. I'm a little more wary with Soderbergh.

Side note: not sure if I heard anyone else say this, but part of the reason that the new Claire Denis movie is having trouble getting distribution (besides the fact that it's awful) is because it has some really obvious generative AI use in its opening.