INT: Steven Soderbergh

Academy
Award winner Steven Soderbergh has become one of the most powerful
and eminent directors in

Hollywood

. With an impressive resume
consisting of noteworthy films and a long list of A-list actors at
his disposal, he has put on his directing cap once again for his
forthcoming film, THE
GOOD GERMAN.

Set
in the ruins of

Berlin

in 1945 just after WWII, THE GOOD GERMAN uncovers a different story
of post Nazi Germany. It is
the story of a

U.S.

war correspondent sent to cover the upcoming Potsdam Peace
Conference only to stumble upon a murder, run into a former love and
discover that everyone who has lived through the horrors of the war
is burdened with little secrets stemming from the need for survival
and power. The film is
reminiscent of the classical

CASABLANCA

and is shot in a traditional film noir style.
It’s a mystery, romance and thriller all in one.

Soderbergh,
who is an acclaimed director of such famous films as OCEAN’S 11,
TRAFFIC, ERIN BROCKOVICH and OUT OF SIGHT, sat down last week, to
talk about his latest creation, THE GOOD GERMAN.
See what the brilliant director had to say.

Steven
Soderbergh

Did Paul [Attanasio,
the screenwriter] know
that you were going to do this movie in black and white?

No.
That came later. There
were a couple of different ways to go.
I think the assumption initially was that it would be normal.
Color, we’ll go to

Germany

and we’ll do it like a regular movie.
And then that started to seem less interesting to me and also
expensive, like more expensive than I thought.
It should be strangely enough, but the way we ended up doing
the film was one of the more economical ways to do the film.
Then this idea from being able to use archival footage in
some way or footage from other films that were made from that period
became appealing and that started and then that started to dictate
the black and white.

Did
you decide to leave modern aspects like language, sex scenes out
because they couldn’t be done in that era?

If
you’re just literally imitating that aesthetic in every particular
including the way people speak and the fact that those filmmakers
were working under the Hays code, then to me it really is just a
pastiche, and you’re not pushing the ball forward or sideways or
anywhere, you’re just literally making a copy of something.
So again, like for instance Far From Heaven or like The Last
Picture Show, we thought the most interesting version of the movie
is, this aesthetic from sixty years ago with…… when we say it’s
modern, people were saying f*ck in 1945 and they were feeling each
other up and there were moral issues that were difficult and ugly.

The
problem is again; people making movies in this country were
censored. So that
combined with a desire to have attention between those two things,
attention between this aesthetic that’s very glamorous, very
romantic inherently and an approach to narrative and characters,
that is the antithesis of that which is interesting to me.
I wanted that battle to be played out through the song
because I thought that would be interesting, that would be
interesting to watch. It
would not be a passive experience to watch a movie in which that
battle’s taking place.

Honestly,
until we get into these situations, it’s not something I’ve ever
articulated to anybody involved in the movie or would have.
That’s the result of thousands of hours of work and
conversations about “how do you want it, or how do we want to
do it or how should people talk.”
And you have to remember, our sense of how people behaved
sixty years ago is largely shaped by the movies that were made sixty
years ago.

Can you talk about the archival material and how tricky it was in using
it?

We
got some of it from here, we got some of it from
Germany
but we got most of it from

Russia

strangely enough. There
was a Russian archive that had an enormous amount of material from

Berlin

from the summer of 1945. It
was a real find for us and the trick was organizing it and filing
it, and then trying to fit it into the script, identify the areas
where I needed it. It
was very laborious but we had so many different people working on
that for years. It was a
very elaborate system of what the shot was, what time of day, what
part of the city, were there cars in it, were there people in it.
It was really boring.

Can you talk about your
collaboration with George
[Clooney]?
Are there things that you’re still learning about him and
what did you
learn from him in this
particular film?

I
want to say he’s getting better and better but it makes it seem like
he wasn’t good when we started and that’s obviously not the case.
I just think he’s getting better and better.
I always thought he was…I was one of the people when I saw
him on ER and went, that guy is a movie star.
That was just my gut reaction when I saw him on that show,
like that guy is a movie star. And
you know when Out Of Sight came up, and that was a movie I had to
pursue, part of it was my belief that this guy’s ready to pop and I
felt like Out Of Sight was, you know I really wanted to do it and I
really wanted to do it with him.

I
just felt like I want to get on this train.
And so like I said I just think he’s getting (better)…. and
you look at the choices he’s made since Out Of Sight, it’s a pretty
incredible range of material to go from Out Of Site, Three Kings, O
Brother, to Solaris, to Syriana, that’s a pretty impressive array of
performances you know. And
I think people… he gets this rap like you know “George is
always George,” but I don’t think that’s true at all.

Do you feel that you have to convince him to do low budget movies like
this or is he just as excited to go into them because of your
relationship?

Oh
no, no. He does that
anyway. When he
does a movie for the Coen brothers or when he did Three Kings or
doing movies like Syriana, he’s not making a lot.
He doesn’t care about that.
I mean I’m sure he feels very pragmatic about it.
He’s like, I have money, what I want is a series of titles on
the shelf of movies that I made that I can look back on and feel
good about.

What
does it take to get you to say yes to a project?

It
starts with the story. It starts with the content. That’s how this
started. I just thought, ‘This is a good story, an interesting
story, one I really hadn’t seen before.’ (It’s) the
exoneration of Nazi scientists by the Americans. This was not
something I’d really read about and so I was really interested. By
the way, there’s a great, great documentary that PBS did a year
ago, a little over a year ago. We watched it a year and a half ago,
about this subject. I think it’s called In Search of Nazi
Scientists. Anyway, if you can find it, and I’m sure it’s
available, it’s great. So that’s how this started.

In
essence, this is a story about torturers getting away with it, about
Americans bringing scientists who did evil elsewhere onto American
shores…

I
just think there were no good options here. There was no good
choice. There really wasn’t. This is what happens in a post-war
environment. I think the Americans in this case didn’t have a
choice. I suppose you could have gone to the American public and
said, ‘Hey, look, we want to bring these people over to build
these rockets because if we don’t they’re going to go to

Russia

. But there’s this thing – a lot of them ran slave camps. How do
we all feel about that?’ But we don’t live in that world. We
just don’t. There was an operation, and it was called
‘Overcast’ in its initial incarnation, and then it got called
‘Paperclip.’ It was a mandate to do exactly this, to find these
people, clean up their past, get them to

Utica

and ‘Let’s start building stuff.’ Like I said, I don’t know
what other options there were.

How
does the collaboration between you and George work?

We
are alike in ways that are helpful to getting work done and we’re
not alike in ways that are helpful to making the work better. So
it’s a good mix. We both have a similar attitude about how you do
your work and we both like to work a lot. Creatively, we’re very
much in sync and the ways we’re not perfectly in sync are helpful;
you know what I mean? He’s less pretentious.

Going
back to how you choose projects is there something thematically;
stylistically you keep going back to that we’re not seeing?

Well,
I try not to look back. That’s ultimately… I don’t know that
I’d ever think about it. It’s certainly something I wouldn’t
think about until I stopped because I think this is not an
intellectual medium. There are a couple of examples and I won’t
state them, but I think for the most part intellectuals don’t make
very good movies. It’s an emotional medium and I think you can
really outsmart yourself. So, analysis of that kind is just
something I think can be dangerous. It’s a business in which a
great number of people have managed to move bag and baggage into the
third person. You have to watch out for that. Part of that process
is thinking about, ‘Well, what is my career like and how do people
think about me?’ That’s just something I don’t want to get
into.

How’s
Ocean’s 13 going?

Horribly (sarcastically)

.

You’ve
been quoted as saying it’s a return to the first film, but
you’re not known for stepping back. So how do you pull off both:
return to the first, but not repeat yourself?

They’re
very risky. I’m really happy with it. It was sad, near the end of
it, to basically go, ‘this is the last time I’m going to see
these people in a room.’ I really like them all and they all like
each other, and there was a very strong sense of ‘We were really
lucky that these movies came about and that we got to do them and
this is it.’ At the end of it there was a real sense of passage
and wondering, for me, ‘Wow, I wonder if I’ll ever find another
commercial movie to make.’ But also, just these people; I won’t
be hanging out with those people anymore.

Why
two Che Guevara projects (The Argentine and Guerrilla) back to back?

Well,
Kill Bill. Those were two movies. What’s the quickest thing I can
say? I think the reason for it being two films will be apparent to
anyone who sees them. I think the biggest issue is going to be how
far apart to put them out. I would like them to go out a week apart.
That specific thing hasn’t been done yet. The Clint Eastwood movie
just got moved up, but I don’t know that anybody has ever made two
movies that were released a week apart. I think that would be really
cool, but we’ll see.

Are
you incorporating The Motorcycle Diaries stuff or is all that after?

It’s
after.

Ocean’s
13 doesn’t have to be the last one…

Yeah,
it does.