Steven Soderbergh Quotations

There are three major social issues that this country is struggling with: education, poverty, and drugs. Two of them we talk about, and one of them we don't.

I had more fun making Traffic than either of the Ocean's films.

The key is, if you're not monkeying around with the script, then everything usually goes pretty well.

I'm sure some people will say, 'Why do this?' And my response is, 'Why wouldn't you?' The film business in general is using a model that is outdated and, worse than that, inefficient.

Warner Bros. has talked about going out with low-cost DVDs simultaneously in China because piracy is so huge there. It will be a while before bigger movies go out in all formats; in five years, everything will.

But my sense in talking to people when I travel is that the film business is not that dissimilar from a lot of other businesses.

Making a film that's supposed to be fun to watch is really hard - that's the weird irony of it.

The great thing about the business is how Darwinian it is. We have to swim or die - if you are found wanting over a period of time, you've either got to change what you're doing or find something else to do.

Reality shows are all the rage on TV at the moment, but that's not reality, it's just another aesthetic form of fiction.

I just produced Criminal, this remake of Nine Queens, and one of the things that appealed to me about Nine Queens is that it was a performance piece, and that's the most fun.

Lying is like alcoholism. You are always recovering.

In Full Frontal and K Street, I learned to take advantage of the mobility that digital provides.

When you're sent something and read it, either you can see it while you read it, or you can't.

I know why we can't have a frank discussion with our policymakers - if you're in the government or in law enforcement you cannot acknowledge that drugs are anything but inherently evil and morally wrong.

Well, it's 15 years since Sex, Lies And Videotape, and if you hang around long enough you're having the same arguments with just a new set of people every few years and it gets boring.

Another thing that really excites me: I'd like to do multiple versions of the same film.

I'm very comfortable with failure. I'm very comfortable being the guy who disappoints people.

To me the director’s job is to leave it in better shape than you found it, literally.

When things go right it's hard to figure out why, but when things go wrong it's really easy.

I guess I didn't feel confident enough to be searching in a big public way. I was very content at the time to toil in obscurity on things that I thought might point me in certain directions or teach me certain things - not knowing what that would be.

I guess why the Ocean's films are hard for me is because on the one hand you have to make sure the performances are there, but on the other hand it's a film that demands, to my mind, a very layered and complex visual scheme. That takes a lot of time to figure out.

I look at other filmmakers and see skills in them that I wish I had but I know that I don't. I feel like I have to work really hard to keep myself afloat, doing what I do. But I find it pleasurable.

I'm in the process of working out an arrangement to make some very, very, very small films in the midst of all these films and maybe that will help. But you get tired of talking. You just want to do it.

Maybe I'll paint, do photography, just something else. I can see that.

The ought to be a worldwide cultural taskforce that just stops you when you have ideas like combining The Red Desert with an armored car heist movie.

I was at the Laundromat every Sunday, the one over across the (Belpre) bridge. I'd go to the Laundromat and then I'd have the chicken club at Wendy's.

I don't think we should be trying to control how people experience art. They can see it on a screen or on a T-shirt. If you've got something that's interesting, it just really doesn't matter how they're seeing it.

We feel in many cases we're going to get a better response to some of our movies in Europe, or outside of the United States, than in the United States.

It added realism. Every once in a while, it's nice to see somebody on screen who you felt was from that place and spoke like somebody from that place.

We had a big night over there, where I destroyed Misty Wilkins in a game of straight pool. She was talking trash and we went over there and I beat her senseless.

At the most basic level, it's a lot of free publicity.

Is it inappropriate for the director of 'Ocean's Twelve' to go to Belpre, Ohio?

The technology is there. Consumers now want choice, and they should have it. At the very least, let's find out -- instead of speculating -- what it's going to mean in the long run and in the larger picture.

Reality shows are all the rage on TV at the moment ... but that's not reality, it's just another aesthetic form of fiction.

A cycle of Americana from an oblique angle.

They're forcing the issue onto characters, ... force these people to be humiliated.

It's as much defined by the people who haven't gotten it as by the people who have,

It's about love and jealousy, ... but in a place I don't think has ever been shown in a film before. Or not as it is.

I tried very hard not to disturb the cast. We designed the story to fit the town, ... incorporate much of their own lives into the story.

It's fun when you've asked the community for help ... you want to go back, at least let them see what the results were. We had a great time here.

That line doesn't exist, ... It's all exploitation. I mean, it is if you're honest about it. You pick up a camera and point it at someone, you are exploiting them. I don't care who you are. The issue to me is what is the agreement between you and the person you are exploiting? But I know the experience we had in Ohio and how people on both sides of the camera felt. And that is what matters to me.

The biggest thing is people having access to the movie who might not have access to it for a while. They might have read about it and they're interested but they don't live near an art cinema, or they don't have a video store that carries this kind of stuff, and this way they can get it and get a hold of it as soon as they've heard about it.

I wanted to be as site-specific as possible. I said to each actor, 'I want you to talk about things you know about.' There's a screenplay but the goal was to incorporate as much of them into the characters as possible.

I want them to sell 'Bubble' DVDs in the theater lobby,

I liked that he was prolific. I liked the subject matter. I envied his ability to really be a part of the worlds that he portrayed. He was in it in a way that I could never be. And, I don't know, just the bluntness of his movies or most of them, I really like. I was watching a lot of them and had some of them with me when I was in Ohio, not to ape anything in specific, just for the feeling.

I just wanted to make a movie about love and jealousy, ... but in an environment that you don't often get to see in movies. The whole appeal was the simplicity of it. The idea was just to not tart it up. These cameras make it easy to go in without any lights, on all real locations.

I approached them because I?d read that they?d bought the Landmark Theatre chain. They control all the forms of distribution for their own product - now?s the time to try this idea of simultaneous release. You really need someone who?s into each of those pies to pull it off. And so I called Todd and said, ?Let?s hook up and have lunch and talk about this. Don?t you feel - don?t we all feel - like this is where it?s going?

This is my response to certain trends in the entertainment industry, ... are gone. I wish it weren't so. Everything changes and evolves and we've got to get with it, embrace it and find a way to make it work. The movies are not the way they used to be when I grew up. It's 30 years later!

This is a genie that I think you can't put back in the bottle. The technology is available and the consumer, you know, is the one who is driving this.

A movie that costs only $1.6 million doesn't have to be a cultural event to turn a profit.

[I watch] Fincher, Spielberg, Cameron, McTiernan. Just people who are good at staging action. I like to know where I am. I don't like the kind of cutting where you don't know where you are.

My experience over the years with working with people who are not actors or not trained actors is that you have to get to know them well enough to see what they have that's translatable onto the screen. So you're constantly calibrating to play to their strengths. And the key is to never ask them to do things that are beyond their abilities or are really far away from who they are at their core.

Men tend to define themselves by what they do, and so if you're dealing with a character who's trying to figure that out, or multiple characters, then there's something there for guys, too.

I make every movie like it's the last one. "If this was the last movie, what decision would I make?" That's how I make my decisions.

You should never assume anything coming from a critical standpoint. You should go into everything assuming you're going to get crushed.

It's a weird thing to say, but it would appear to me axiomatic that if you understood fully what I was doing and appreciated it, you would like it.

I stopped reading reviews about my own movies. I read stuff about other people's movies.

Stuff I like is getting trashed and stuff that is being praised I think is terrible. I don't really feel in sync with what's happening, but at the same time, what I think keeps me afloat is that I try not to be, and don't want to be, very indulgent. I try to make the films as lean as possible, and to not spend a lot of time crawling up my own ass creatively.

I've tried to get better about weighing what I think the accessibility of an idea is against the cost of executing it. I've tried to be smarter about that, because if you're not smart about that, you're going to be unemployed. But I'm still mystified about what works for people. And I'm not talking about my movies, I'm talking in general. I'm mystified by the stuff that doesn't work. I'm mystified by what's going on in the critical side, too.

I always have a plan, but then I'm always ready to throw the plan out, and everyone's ready to make a radical left turn if necessary.

I just find it annoying that in these sequences [ of the fight scenes], traditionally, there's music trying to pump you up. I don't like that, personally, as an audience member. This just reflects my taste.

My first three movies, I didn't start editing until we were finished shooting. That's unthinkable to me now.

People like Chris Nolan are shooting isolated sequences in IMAX. Those cameras are the size of a Volkswagen.

There's nothing else exactly like it in any other art form, the orchestration of so many different elements. It's endlessly fascinating what can be done editorially. You can create meaning where there was none, you can create feeling where there was none, you can create narrative where there was none. Two frames can be the difference between something that works and something that doesn't. It's fascinating.

Usually I'm thinking about the palette. I'm thinking about the color for the most part, then I'll start thinking about composition and movement.

I never leave the writer behind, because you rewrite the movie in post, or at least I do. I always do, and I feel like anybody who doesn't at least explore that possibility is short-changing themselves. Editing is the most fun and most exciting part of the process.

If you're not flying people around on wires, and you're only allowing them to do things that people can really do, it can't go on for very long, because eventually somebody gets the drop on the other person and then it's over.

I'm not precious about anything. The effort it took to get something means nothing to me in post. It means nothing to the audience. I'll chop limbs off. I'll put an arm where a leg should be. I'll do anything.

There are people who are originals and the stuff they make really is new. It isn't based on anything else. But I've decided I'm not that-I was never that. My abilities are to synthesize a wide range of references and ideas into something that feels relatively unified and coherent.

You can't get good at anything unless you do it day in and day out, over and over.

I've never been a snob. It [movie] is just about stories. And I've never felt just because it's a big screen and you plop down your eight bucks that gives it a special meaning. It's just "Are you good at telling a story?"

Anytime you've got something that can take you into the political realm then you've opened up the conversation a lot.

Nobody's talking about movies the way they're talking about their favorite TV shows.

Everything had been done long before I started making movies. I mean, there's nothing that Godard hasn't already done. You can't do a single thing that Godard hasn't already thought of. And so you struggle to do something that is not predictable.

I like a lot of different kinds of movies, I like a lot of different kinds of paintings.

There's a technical reason why I think that frame rate is weird and it has to with your brain's ability to scan beyond a certain rate. The point is I find it looks weird.

I'm not going to spend two years of my life on something that I'm not excited about.

Some filmmakers, you know, have their style and then they kind of go looking for the movie. I'm not like that. I don't have one style that I want to take from movie to movie.

My father, who was the one who really got me hooked on movies, liked all kinds of films, and I saw all kinds of films at a very young age.

Ego is something that everybody, creative especially, has to grapple with. You need enough ego to keep going but not so much ego that you're deaf or blind, that you're making a mistake and can't fix the course.

Your take on things is what is either going to make you somebody people talk about or no.

There's a difference between failures and things that are bad.

There is sadness of when you're watching someone enjoy something that you think is substandard. The ineffable sadness when someone is happy and something is not as good as it should be.

In nature, if a cell gets too big, it divides. You can't come up with a set of rules that's going to work for 350 million people. You're just not.

It takes one asshole to ruin the whole thing. That's it. One. The problem with the world is one asshole comes up with a really bad idea and now we're all taking our shoes off at the airport.

The key is, how do you feel with the one asshole? They cannot be talked to. That's why they are assholes.

All human interaction, you can break it down to incentives. All relationships, at some level, are transactional. They're fascinated with incentives.

A real litmus test for me is how people treat someone who is waiting on them. That's a dealbreaker for me.If I were on the verge of getting into a serious relationship and I saw that person be mean to a waiter... I'm out.

You're being mean to someone who's helping you. What is that? Everyone knows who the assholes are, and I avoid them.

I'm a grinder. I'll beat you because I will not sleep.

If you're a painter and you want people to know who you are and recognize your work, you've got to build some long-term value.

I was lucky that I was getting exposed to a lot of different kinds of films, and I was liking them all. So it seemed logical to me that you could - as in the style of the studio directors of the 30s and 40s - jump from one genre to the next, with the same satisfaction.

I'm a big believer that if there's something you really want to do, don't walk away because of the deal.

I think the feeling that we're going to work together again usually starts to come up before the first project's even done. The Black Keys and I have already talked about starting on something new.

I have no shame in making music that maybe, if you listen to it long enough, you'll realize you've heard this or that part of it before. I'm still very excited by an amazingly written song, so that's really the thing that I work on when I make records with people.

I suppose I could try to be some avant-garde artist if I wanted to, but that doesn't interest me as much.

Whenever you experiment with something, it's very easy to take the emotion out of it. And going back and forth between wanting to be respected artistically and wanting to move people is its own challenge.

A big part of making an album is that you want to have enough material - you want to have enough stuff for people to hear and know that it represents you. So it does sometimes turn into a situation where you're saying to the person you're working with, "Well, what do you want?" But then there are other times when I work with people and they'll turn to me and say, "How do you want to do this?" And that's actually when I work best.

I try to use other songs or bands as reference points - it seems like the easiest way to get across what are really differences of taste or opinion. If you know what kind of music somebody loves, then you can kind of figure out why they do what they do.

I guess I just look at talent as a very subjective thing. I mean, if you never tried playing an oboe, how do you know you're not the most talented oboe player ever? The point is that if you don't love it, then it doesn't matter.