Why Steven Soderbergh’s Appreciation for Steven Spielberg Has Only Grown Stronger
Steven Soderbergh is a filmmaker who works fast. In just the next two months, he’ll be releasing two major films: this week, his POV-ghost film “Presence” will hit theaters, and then in mid-March, the Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender-led spy thriller “Black Bag” will be released. But one project that the director has been tinkering away at for years, in between films, is his dream of writing a book about his profession.
“I’ve been working on a book about directing for 15 years,” said Soderbergh while he was a guest on an upcoming episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. “It was always going to use as its spine, a shot by shot, scene by scene analysis of ‘Jaws,’ just as a way of orienting people, so that I could still go off into digressions, but that I always returned to a narrative that pulls you through the book.”
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The book is not intended for the general public, but will be a very “inside baseball” look at what a director actually does. The direction of the book shifted focus in early 2024, and instead of doing an analysis of Steven Spielberg’s finished film, Soderbergh decided he wanted to take the reader inside the decision-making process behind shot sequencing.
“In order to aid this idea of what directing is, and what the job really entails, [I wanted it to be] a granular recreation of the experience of directing it,” said Soderbergh.
To accomplish this, he got Universal to provide the “Jaws” daily production log and the lined shooting script. From these documents, Soderbergh has done the hard work of recreating every day of shooting for which there are reports.
“I’m in the middle now of just building that out and trying to just walk you through what the experience must have been like to direct this film, especially in the latter part after they’ve done all the land shooting, and they get out into the ocean, and it starts to go bad,” said Soderbergh. “As a filmmaker, reading these logs and these descriptions, it’s excruciating, it’s painful. I know what it’s like to have things not happening [right], but this is on a level that is just mind-blowing.”
But it’s with this understanding of what Spielberg was experiencing that Soderbergh’s understanding of what the director actually accomplished has grown. Studying one of his favorite “Jaws” sequences, the little brown eel scene, Soderbergh realized just how much more useful this new approach to the book would be in revealing what a director actually does.
“Oh, my God, the huge, important creative decisions being made on the fly in order to either solve a problem, or just improve the movie, period. So you get a real sense of his fluidity of thought and his inspiration as you read how the shots are being thought of, and in what order, and how often he goes back to do things again,” said Soderbergh. “This is a much clearer picture of what a director does than me just describing the finished product.”
Soderbergh is also walking away from the experience with a renewed appreciation for Spielberg, who he speculates is the best problem-solver in modern cinema.
“What’s implicated under all of this is his incredible calm during this process. He never panicked and he never gave up,” said Soderbergh of Spielberg on “Jaws.” “In terms of pure staging and understanding in a very deep way movie grammar, both in a shot sense and a story sense, because that’s the other thing that you will appreciate as you see this thing being shaped day-by-day, is he understood the story of what this film should be so clearly, what Kubrick calls the non-submersible units of narrative. He understood what the beats of this film are, from here to here to here. It’s deftness and efficiency is just otherworldly.”
Now that he’s done the work of recreating all the possible shoot days, the next step in the process, which Soderbergh was last working on, was adding his own words to contextualize Spielberg’s decisions.
Another side project for Soderbergh has been getting this own film catalog updated to 4K HDR, as he’s been remastering “Kafka,” “The Girlfriend Experience,””Schizopolis,” “Full Frontal,” and the two Spalding Gray films, including “Gray’s Anatomy.”
“[The rights of] seven movies reverted back to me,” said Soderbergh. “And so we’re in the final stages now of finishing the box set, which will be a small run, individually serially numbered, and then included in that, because ‘Kafka’ is one of the seven, is the recut of version, ‘Mr. Neff.’”
In addition to “Mr. Neff,” Soderbergh’s completely re-edited and reimagining of his 1991 thriller “Kafka,” he done some light re-editing and tightening (“these things often work better shorter”) of “Full Frontal” and “Schizopolis.” What Soderbergh will not be doing is going all Wong Kar-wai or Michael Mann and dramatically moving away from the original color grade of each films’ theatrical release. He also doesn’t view the increased resolution as being a game-changer (“2K to 4K, that’s a difference that you can barely see in a butterfly test”).
For Soderbergh, the need to update his library largely comes down to one specific technological upgrade. “The real difference is the extended dynamic range, the difference between the SDR and HDR is so massive and something that anybody can tell the difference if you put them side by side, it’s just fantastic,” said Soderbergh. “It’s pretty standard to do the SDR pass first, and then do HDR. Recently, I started doing the opposite because the SDR was so depressing to look at that I wanted to spend more of the hours looking at HDR. I mean, I never saw prints growing up that looked like that, that had blacks like that, that had whites like that. It’s staggering how good that shit is.”
The advancements in HDR have Soderbergh, a self-proclaimed completionist, motivated to get his entire oeuvre up-to-date. “I think, the only thing I’ve made that doesn’t exist yet in a 4K HDR is ‘Traffic’ — Universal is going back to do ‘Erin Brockovich’ now,” said Soderbergh. “Hopefully, someday, if we can get ‘Traffic’ done one more time, then everything I’ve made will exist in the best format that is available and [I’ll] feel like, ‘OK, I can forget about that.’”
To listen to Soderbergh’s Thursday, January 23 episode talking about “Presence” make sure you subscribe to the Toolkit podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.
NEON will be releasing “Presence” theatrically on Friday, January 24.
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