Stephen Soderbergh is a director who over the past years has never attracted the hype that a number of other undeniably less talented directors have. However this is grossly unfair as he has produced a diverse yet consistently strong body of work over the past 20 years. He has managed to charm cinema's mainstream, becoming the first director in nearly 60 years to be nominated for 2 best director's Oscars at one award's ceremony (in the end winning with Traffic in 2001), win over the art house crowd by winning the Palme D'Or for Sex, Lies and Videotape in 1989 and rake it in at the box office; most notably with the Ocean's Trilogy.
This is all the more remarkable given that his first attempt to break into the industry failed so miserably. After leaving high school in Louisiana he moved to west to find work as a freelance editor but upon not encountering much success he was reduced to being a cue holder and scorer on game shows to make ends meet. This first foray into Hollywood was short-lived and ultimately he returned home fairly quickly, but his passion for film was undiminished as he continued to perfect his craft, making short films and writing scripts.
Anyone asked to guess who gave him his big break would never even come close, it happened to be the now laughable British progressive rock band Yes who gave him the un-envious task of filming their 1985 tour. However, Soderbergh managed to produce a Grammy award winning concert video 9012Live and this led to other projects.
Soderbergh's first proper directing credit came with 1987's Winston, later expanded to become Sex, Lies and Videotape. With this film, at 26 he became the Palme D'Or's youngest ever winner and for the first time he was taken seriously by the film industry. In fact the film was more than just noticed by the film industry, it revolutionised it, being the first low-budget art house film to really set the industry alight and achieve serious box-office returns. The success of Sex, Lies and Videotape is also held to be responsible for precipitating the explosion of independent film in the 90s. Somewhat amazingly for such a momentous film, it was written in just eight days, on a legal pad, while Soderbergh was on a long cross country journey, although Soderbergh has modestly stated that actually he'd been thinking about the film for the last year.
As unlikely as this success must have seemed in his game-show days, he has since proven his immense talent and shown it would have been impossible for him to be ignored for long. What is even more remarkable, however, is the fact that far from being just a multi-award winning director, Soberbergh has shown he is a film making polymath: writing, directing, producing, editing and being in control of cinematography in an array of excellent films. What is even more impressive is that in his breakthrough Sex, Lies and Videotape he fulfilled all of these roles simultaneously, winning the cinema's most prestigious prize in the process. Soderbergh has even scored his mega-low budget Schizopolis and acted cameo roles in the Ocean's Trilogy as the sinister 'vault-bombing thief'.
During the 90s Soderbergh produced a number of remarkable films like Full Frontal and Schizopolis but it has been since the turn of the new millennium that Soderbergh has really become an institution with the multi-award winning and box office smashes of, most notably Erin Brockovich, Traffic and Ocean's Eleven (as well as its two painful sequels...). Of these films Traffic has been by far the best received and most accomplished, combining a widely differing collection of personal stories to create a profound condemnation of America's multi-million pound drug trafficking industry.
Soderbegh has continued this trend of making politically mature films with his ambitious Ché double bill. Rather than being a cynical Hollywood attempt to profit from the immense interest in Guevara's life shown by the success of The Motorcycle Diaries, Soderbergh was refused any American funding and had to search worldwide to get the film made. Indeed immense effort and energy has gone into every aspect of the film, from the extensive research, shooting the film chronologically and in spanish, to an on-set atmosphere actor Edgar Ramirez who plays Ciro Redondo calls "very contemplative" allowing for lots of improvisation to ensure the film hit the right pitch. Soderbergh's innovation and attention to detail have ultimately paid off as both films have attracted a great deal of admiration, and indeed it is these qualities that have made him undeniably one of the greatest directors alive today.
Close-up Film Talk: 20 Years of Soderbergh a talk by Ian Haydn Smith, Editor of The International Film Guide, discussing Soderbergh's career and his importance to contemporary American film is on at the Warwick Arts Centre on Saturday 17th
Che: Part One is on general release now with Che: Part Two coming later in the year.
Boar Recommends:
Sex, Lies and Videotape (1989)
Schizopolis (1996)
Traffic (2000)
Erin Brockovich (2000)
Full Frontal (2002)
Che Double Bill (2009)
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