I'm not entirely sure what made me pick Steven Soderbergh. Part of the reason is because I made the decision roughly four years ago, and whatever initially inspired that pick has long since exited my memory. I guess I wanted to pick a contemporary filmmaker and I wanted to pick one whose works I had mostly not seen. It's that latter part that excludes most of the potential choices. That's not to say, if I were to continue this for a while, that I wouldn't be willing to pick a filmmaker whose films I have seen, it's just part of the reason I'm even doing this is to watch films I haven't.
In any case, I think I have Soderbergh's career roughly sketched out. Soderbergh is a restless director, something that you could probably gather from his average of one movie made per year. But I think it goes even beyond that. He needs to challenge himself. If he doesn't feel challenged, he's not going to make the movie.
Of course, it didn't start that way. At the beginning, he was just trying to get in the business. And he did via Sex, Lies, and Videotape. He apparently wrote that entire movie in eight days on a cross country trip. I'm not sure how a 25-year-old was able to secure financing for $1.2 million and have a studio allow him to direct it. Nonetheless the movie was a moderate hit, especially for being an independent movie, and it got critical acclaim.
He ultimately was able to the carry the prestige that making that film brought him by basically making whatever he wanted. Which explains the mostly black-and-white mindfuck that Kafka was. Nobody searching for commercial appeal is making that movie. After that, he made King of the Hill, and I suppose a Depression era movie following a kid is not exactly marketable either, although this movie I think is for everyone, even if it was a hard sell.
For his fourth movie, he returned to a well that he would many times: the genre movie. The genre movies he made were typically cliché movies, not written by him, and he would try to spruce them up with some inventive directing. The Underneath fucks with time, but again it wasn't successful at the box office.
His next two films were guaranteed to not make any money, which was just as well, because he clearly made them for himself and on a microscopic budget. Schizopolis, an absolutely bizarre movie, apparently was made to get him inspired again, which it did so successfully, but it got bad reviews. And Gray's Anatomy was made because he loved Spalding Gray, and you probably have to love him to in order to want to watch that.
In 1998, his career changed drastically. He had been through a run of movies that made no money and while few of them carried a big budget, he realized his career wouldn't last long if he continued to do that. So he made Out of Sight with George Clooney. He had by far his biggest budget of his career, and actually it didn't make a lot of money. It was, however, his most seen movie since his first one and received critical acclaim.
He made another genre movie in The Limey the next year and then had one of the greatest years a filmmaker has ever had in 2000. He made two Best Picture Nominees, Traffic and Erin Brockovich, two drastically different movies. Traffic won four Oscars, though not Best Picture, and he basically could get any actor and make any movie he wanted at this point.
Rather than going against the grain, he made Ocean's Eleven, which was a box office smash hit. I wouldn't call it "selling out," but four of his last five movies at this point were somewhat designed to appeal to a mass audience, with the exception being The Limey, and it may have seemed like he would be content with his career continuing in that direction. That would have been a wrong assumption.
After he had established himself as mainstream director, he then made one of three types of films to keep himself interested I imagine. He either tackled a genre picture, typically one he had never tackled before, a movie with a different kind of approach to filmmaking, or he made a movie that held a message near and dear to his heart, whether that message was more hidden or explicit.
In 2002, he tried his hand at comedy, unsuccessfully, and science fiction, more successful although I didn't love that either. In between the two Ocean's sequels, which I guess busts my theory of his picks since it's not in either of those three categories, he made a movie with non-actors, and made a film noir movie that tried to mimic 1940s film noirs in style (The Good German.)
Though the non-actor movie Bubble was loved by Roger Ebert, it didn't get great reviews. He made the two-part Che, and while it's not really a political movie, one gets the sign that the man the movie is about holds politics pretty close to Soderbergh's with maybe less violence involved. He's at least sympathetic to the revolutions, that I'm sure of.
In 2009, he made The Girlfriend Experience, which also featured non-actors, although this one seemed better reviewed than his first try. Despite this, he didn't return to this non-actors after this movie despite intending to make more. He also made The Informant! which is Soderbergh tackling a new genre: satire.
After a year where he made a documentary for his old friend Gray, who had since committed suicide, he again tackled brand new genre films for 2011. In Haywire, he probably made the closest thing to an action movie he'll ever make. And in Contagion, well I think he was just interested in making a film about what a pandemic would look like. A movie that would become weirdly relevant sooner than he probably thought.
In 2012, he basically made the guy version of The Girlfriend Experience with real actors and more mainstream appeal in Magic Mike. Along with The Girlfriend Experience, both movies also relate to the themes pushed back in his debut, so you could also argue that it features a "message" important to him, since he returns to it.
In 2013, he made a cliché thriller (Side Effects) and then tried his hand at making a biopic (Behind the Candelabra.) And then he retired. When he returned and stepped away from television, he was brought out of retirement by his wife's script, which was sort of a return to the Ocean's days in Logan Lucky.
And once he was back in, he returned to his old output. He made two movies entirely on iPhones (one of which is Unsane) and then made a movie that is more message than movie in The Laundromat. He has one more movie that is evidently completed but without a release date. Not sure if that is coronavirus related or not. And then another which is in pre-production.
What has this man not been able to do? He has film noir, action, satire, heist, biopic, war, science fiction, a period piece, thriller, a documentary, and even a sports movie (High Flying Bird). Most of those categories feature a movie that is at least moderately well-reviewed. He does not have a superhero movie or zombie movie technically. I don't think he's interested in making movies that feature not real things. But you could argue the Ocean's movies are basically superhero movies and that Contagion is a zombie movie with no zombies if you want.
He has not, to my mind, been able to do one thing though: a comedy. The most successful version of a comedy he's made is The Informant!, which isn't really a comedy. The closest he's come to a comedy is Full Frontal, which is just awful. If he ever makes a funny comedy, he'll have done literally everything well. I don't expect him to though. It's not like his inability to make a good comedy has inhibited his ability to have comedy in his other movies, so it's a worthwhile tradeoff for his career.
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