The Instant Expert's Guide to Steven Soderbergh

It says much for his standing in the American film community that Steven Soderbergh was recently asked to look into ways in which safe production could resume once lockdown restrictions have been eased. Given that he has always been something of an outsider and seven years ago launched a blistering attack on the current Hollywood studio system, he might seem an odd choice. But, as the latest entry in Cinema Paradiso's Instant Expert series suggests, we should never be surprised where this singular talent is concerned.

You may not notice the names Peter Andrews and Mary Ann Bernard, as the credits roll at the end of a Steven Soderbergh film. Cinematographer Andrews has been a key member of the director's team since 2000, while editor Bernard came aboard two years later. What fans of the eclectic auteur will already know, however, is that the pair are little more than pseudonyms borrowed from his parents, as Soderbergh shoots and edits his own work. He also produces for himself and others.

Despite having so much control over his projects, Soderbergh remains something of a cinematic chameleon, as he flits between personal and commercial projects. Indeed, rather than imposing a leitmotific vision, he amends his stylistic approach to suit the material. Consequently, Soderbergh is one of the few film-makers working today who can experiment and entertain while presenting pictures that are artistic or escapist, or both.

From Georgia to Game Shows

The fifth of Peter and Mary Ann Soderbergh's six children. Steven Andrew Soderbergh was born in Atlanta, Georgia on 14 January 1963. As an older brother had been committed to an institution, Steven enjoyed a close relationship with his father, a university lecturer and administrator whose own father had arrived in the United States from Stockholm. Something of polymath, Peter had served as a Marine in the Korean War and had written a book about combat films, as well as two price guides to old 78 rpm phonograph records.

The family relocated to Charlottesville, Virginia when Steven was a boy and it was here that he developed a talent for baseball. Around the age of 12, however, he suddenly lost the ability to bat and pitch and, when Peter became Dean of Education at Louisiana State University, he enrolled his son in the animation class on the Baton Rouge campus. They also started going to the pictures together and Soderbergh includes a number of films he saw during this period among the personal favourites that have influenced his eclectic style. Among the titles available from Cinema Paradiso are Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941), Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950), Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show (1971), Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation (1974) and Alan J. Pakula''s All the President's Men (1976).

The young Soderbergh was also a big fan of the first Beatle film, A Hard Day's Night (1964), and later published a book of interviews with its director, Richard Lester, entitled Getting Away With It, or: The Further Adventures of the Luckiest Bastard You Ever Saw (1999). He also developed an admiration for European cinema, as he found the plotting and characterisation to be more satisfyingly complex. In addition to the auteurs of the nouvelle vague, he was also impressed by Italian cinema and told one interviewer, 'When you see an Antonioni film at an impressionable age, it has a huge impact.'

While he was making short Super 8 and 16mm films like The Janitor (which bore the influence of Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, 1976) and a monochrome high-school saga entitled Skoal, Soderbergh attended a class at Coates Hall by documentarist Michael McCallum, who proved an enduring influence. Adopting the moniker Mr X, Soderbergh also acted in a class production of John Patrick's Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning play, The Teahouse of the August Moon, which had been filmed in 1956 by Daniel Mann in 1956, with Marlon Brando and Glenn Ford. Prior to graduation, Soderbergh thanked John Lennon, Glenn Miller and George Lucas before ending his yearbook entry with the phrase, 'See you in LA.'

Deciding to skip college, Soderbergh set off for California and landed a job as a freelance editor on the TV game show, Games People Play, which was hosted by Bryant Gumbel. Away from the set, he wrote screenplays like After School in the hope of finding a backer. He also had a stint as the score keeper on the Showtime game show, Laff-A-Thon, and once awarded victory to the wrong contestant. Despite having acquired an agent, Soderbergh felt he was going nowhere and returned to Baton Rouge, where his parents divorced on his 20th birthday after his mother had acquired a reputation for astrology, parapsychology and psychic surgery. He would later joke, 'You know who my mom is? She's Beatrice Straight in Poltergeist, that's my mom.'

Undaunted, Soderbergh found a job as a coin changer at an amusement arcade and continued making short films such as Rapid Eye Movement (1981), a self-guying comedy in which he also starred as a nerdy fanboy dreaming of making it big in Hollywood. He also gained more editorial experience by cutting commercials and local TV spots for a company called Video Park. However, he quit when he was hired by the Prog Rock band Yes to direct their next concert film and Soderbergh received a Grammy nomination for Yes: 9012 Live (1984). Not wanting to get boxed in making music videos, he turned down the chance to work with Neil Young because he was more intent on making a feature version of Winston, a short he had made about the traumatic breakdown of a relationship.

The Indie Icon Who Wasn't

Following a six-month struggle to raise funding, Soderbergh shot Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989) in five weeks in Baton Rouge before locking himself away for three months of editing. The effort proved worthwhile, as Soderbergh was hailed as the great hope of American independent cinema after the film's premiere at what would become the Sundance Film Festival. In fact, much of his $1.2 million budget had come from within the studio system, as the newly formed Point 406 company found a production partner in RCA/Columbia Home Video.

Nevertheless, when Sex, Lies, and Videotape won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, the indie tag was applied again, as Soderbergh made history by becoming the youngest solo winner of the prestigious award after 23 year-old Louis Malle had shared it with Yves-Jacques Cousteau for The Silent World (1956). It was also noticed that the 26 year-old Soderbergh was the same age as Orson Welles when he had made Citizen Kane. Yet, when jury foreman Wim Wenders announced that the winner had 'given us confidence in the future of cinema', Soderbergh had sought to downplay the moment by accepting the award with the quip, 'Well, I guess it's all downhill from here.'

No one could have predicted how prophetic those words would come to seem over the next few years. Newly married to actress Betsy Brantley, the man dubbed by critic Roger Ebert 'the poster boy of the Sundance generation' turned down the chance to work with Robert Redford, while a proposed collaboration with Sydney Pollack on The Last Ship, in which the planet is repopulated by the crews of the two submarines that escaped a nuclear conflagration, disappeared into development hell. Instead, Soderbergh cast Jeremy Irons, Alec Guinness and Theresa Russell in Kafka (1991), an elliptical biopic scripted by Lem Dobbs and filmed in Prague for $11 million that failed to impress critics or audiences.

'I was going to get my head handed to me on my second film, pretty much no matter what I did,' he later claimed, 'In a way, I decided I would go out in flames by making a film that really had a big red bull's-eye on its chest. Because I figured, why not take it all at once?' Having only made back $1 million at the box office, Soderbergh failed to set the tills ringing with King of the Hill (1993), an adaptation of writer AE Hotchner's autobiographical novel about a 12 year-old boy (Jesse Bradford) who is left to fend for himself in a St Louis hotel during the Great Depression after his mother is hospitalised with tuberculosis, his brother goes to stay with an uncle and his German father hits the road to sell watches. Although it only recouped $1.2 million of its $8 million budget, this thoughtful film remains among Soderbergh's personal favourites and it's well worth a second look from Cinema Paradiso.

Perhaps its commercial under-performance persuaded Robert Redford to withdraw an offer for Soderbergh to direct Quiz Show (1994), an account of the 1950s Twenty-One scandal involving contrasting contestants Charles Van Doren (Ralph Fiennes) and Herb Stempel (John Turturro). The episode left a sour taste, as did the clash with Paramount producer Scott Rudin over a proposed $12 million adaptation of John Kennedy Toole's cult novel, A Confederacy of Dunces.

Nettled by the realisation that he had no clout in Hollywood, Soderbergh accepted the invitation to make two episodes for Fallen Angels (1993-95), a TV series executive produced by Sydney Pollack. Following 'The Quiet Room', Soderbergh starred Brendan Fraser in 'The Professional Man', which centres on a lift operator who masquerades as a hitman. This vignette is available from Cinema Paradiso on Perfect Crimes, which also includes Tim Hunter's 'Fly Paper' and Agnieszka Holland's 'Red Wind', which casts Danny Glover as an African-American Philip Marlowe.

Soderbergh remained in noirish mood for The Underneath (1995), a remake of Robert Siodmak's Criss Cross (1949) that saw Peter Gallagher take on the Burt Lancaster role of the prodigal son who tries to win back his ex-wife by robbing his new stepfather's armored car. Unfortunately, comparisons proved odious and the $6.5 million movie grossed just $536,020 after being slated by the press. In a later interview, Soderbergh admitted that the whole project had been a miscalculation ('What the hell am I doing here making an armored-car heist movie?').

Moving swiftly on, he collaborated with author Spalding Gray on Gray's Anatomy, a monologue follow up to Jonathan Demme's Swimming to Cambodia (1987) that failed to find favour, and Schizhopolis (both 1996), an anarchic non-linear satire that sees the writer-director-composer take the dual roles of Fletcher Munson, a speech writer for a religious cult, and Jeffrey Korchek, a lookalike dentist who is having an affair with Munson's wife (who was played by Betsy Brantley in the hope that the role would give her closure following her divorce from Soderbergh in 1994).

Judging by the cri du coeur penned on 31 July 1996, Soderbergh himself seemed unconvinced by his efforts to buck the system. 'What's bugging me,' he wrote 'is the possibility that this road that I've been encouraging myself (and everyone around me) to follow the last year and a half leads nowhere, or perhaps somewhere worse than the place I left. But what's the alternative? Go back and make stupid Hollywood movies? Or fake highbrow movies with people who would be as cynical about hiring me to make a "smart" movie as others are when they hire the latest hot action director to make some blastfest? I just don't know where to turn.'

Luckily, salvation was at hand in the guise of that nice Dr Doug Ross from the hit TV medical series, ER (1994-2008).

Crossing the Divide

While searching for a winning formula, Soderbergh reached out to other film-makers looking to establish themselves. He served as executive producer on Scott McGehee and David Siegel's stylish thriller, Suture (1993), while also producing Greg Mottola's The Daytrippers (1996) and Gary Ross's Pleasantville (1998). Moreover, he contributed to the screenplay of Guillermo Del Toro's Mimic and Ole Bornedal's Nightwatch (both 1997), with the latter being an English-language remake of the Dane's 1994 original. Soderbergh also tried to help Henry Sellick mount an adaptation of Carol Hughes's children's book, Toots and the Upside Down House. But, while this remains unmade, Soderbergh had more luck with his own directorial change of tack.

His good fortune even extended to being talked into accepting Universal's adaptation of Elmore Leonard's Out of Sight (1998) after he was on the verge of passing to pursue another project. Ordinarily, Soderbergh would have plumped for a less famous face than George Clooney, but he recognised his value to a scenario that sought to combine mainstream and arthouse sensibilities. 'If you're trying to sneak something under the wire,' he told one magazine, 'by which I mean an adult, intelligent film with no sequel potential and no merchandising, it's nice to have one of the world's most bankable stars sneaking under with you.'

In fact, Clooney would become a regular collaborator, as Soderbergh adopted the motto, 'Talent + Perseverance = Luck. Be ready when it happens.' Despite the critical acclaim, however, Out of Sight wasn't a huge hit and Soderbergh still had much to prove to the money men when he made The Limey (1999) from a screenplay by Lem Dobbs. Once again, the impressionistic approach to psychology and storytelling struck more of a critical than a commercial chord, but Soderbergh was on a roll.

Reuniting with producers Danny DeVito, Michael Shamberg and Stacey Sher, he tackled a biopic for the first time with Erin Brovkovich, which earned Julia Roberts the Oscar for Best Actress. Soderbergh was also recognised and, when Traffic (both 2000) was also cited by the Academy, he became the first director to be nominated twice in a single year since Michael Curtiz had doubled up with Four Daughters and Angels With Dirty Faces (both 1938). He took the award for Traffic, but was pipped (twice) to Best Picture by Ridley Scott's Gladiator.

Following on from his most garlanded outing, Soderbergh produced his most profitable, as Ocean's Eleven (2001) went on to gross over $450 million worldwide. Reuniting him with Clooney and Roberts, the all-star cast also included Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Don Cheadle and Andy Garcia. He struck gold again with Ocean's Twelve (2004) and Ocean's Thirteen (2007). Indeed, so propitious was his association with the franchise that he agreed to producer Gary Ross's Ocean's Eight (2018), for which he helped assemble the dream team of Sandra Bullock, Cate Blanchett, Anne Hathaway, Mindy Kaling, Sarah Paulson, Rihanna, Helena Bonham Carter and Awkwafina.

While we're on the subject of Soderbergh the producer, we should draw your attention to his credits on Anthony Russo's Welcome to Collinwood (2002), Gregory Jacobs's Criminal (2004) and John Maybury's The Jacket (2005), as well as his executive exertions on Christopher Nolan's Insomnia, Todd Haynes's Far From Heaven, Godfrey Reggio's Naqoyqatsi, George Clooney's Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (all 2002), Lodge Kerrigan's Keane (2004), Rob Reiner's Rumour Has It..., Stephen Gaghan's Syriana and George Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck (2005). Also look out for his rotoscoped guest spot talking about Louis Malle's Black Moon (1975) in Richard Linklater's Waking Life (2001).

The Art of Navigating a Turn

In 2002, Miramax billed Full Frontal as 'an unofficial sequel of sorts' to Sex, Lies, and Videotape. Shooting on digital video for the first time, Soderbergh sought to blur the line between fact and fiction by encouraging actors like Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts, David Duchovny and Catherine Keener to play what the audience might conceive to be versions of themselves. The production company disliked Soderbergh's original title, The Art of Navigating a Turn, but this perfectly reflected the feat he was attempting to pull off in putting A-list stars in an improvised avant-garde scenario.

With James Cameron acting as co-producer, Soderbergh opted for a more conventional approach in making Solaris (2002), a remake of the 1972 Andrei Tarkovsky film of the same name that was similarly adapted from a novel by Stanislaw Lem. Once more, George Clooney headlined as Dr Chris Klein, a widowed psychologist whose stay aboard a troubled space station causes him to have what he takes to be visions of and visitations by his late wife, Rheya (Natascha McElhone). Tackling a tricky topic and a revered source with intelligence and style, Soderbergh proved once again that it was possible to reach a wide audience with a niche project.

Dipping out of Hollywood, Soderbergh cast Robert Downey, Jr. and Alan Arkin as an advertising executive and his psychiatrist in 'Equilibrium', which found its way into Eros (2004), a vignette triptych that was completed by Wong Kar-wai's 'The Hand' and Michelangelo Antonioni's 'The Dangerous Thread of Things'. Soderbergh also teamed with George Clooney to co-produce K Street (2003), a bold 10-part HBO series that sought to put the politicial events of the previous week into a dramatic context. He also worked with Catherine Zeta Jones on a musical version of the Antony and Cleopatra story. But Cleo has yet to see the light of day.

Much to the annoyance of the National Association of Theatre Owners, Soderbergh's next feature, Bubble (2005), was released on DVD just four days after it had opened in cinemas and on HDNet. Produced for just $1.6 million, the story of a love triangle at a doll factory in a small Mid-Western town confirmed Soderbergh's commitment to innovation. But it also revealed his ability to think outside the box and he has largely been proved right in dismissing concerns about 'day-and-date' releases being 'the biggest threat to the viability of the cinema industry today' by countering, 'I don't think it's going to destroy the movie-going experience any more than the ability to get takeout has destroyed the restaurant business.'

Keen to demonstrate his support for the mainstream, Soderbergh joined forces with George Clooney again for The Good German (2006), the story of a journalist's involvement with an American GI (Tobey Maguire) and an old flame (Cate Blanchett) in postwar Berlin. Filmed in monochrome in the Academy ratio favoured by Golden Age Hollywood, the action consciously invites comparison with Michael Curtiz's Casablanca (1942), although it also contains a strong hint of Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949). Unfortunately for Soderbergh, audiences didn't share his fondness for knowing nostalgia and the feature only made back a fifth of its $32 million budget.

Cinema Paradiso offers you the chance to gauge whether time has been kind to what some critics dubbed a vanity project. It also enables users to see both parts of Soderbergh's 257-minute biopic of Ernesto 'Che' Guevara, the Argentinian guerilla who played vital roles in the Cuban Revolution and the spread of anti-capitalist resistance in Latin America in the 1960s. When Terrence Malick, who had covered Guevara as a reporter in 1966, withdrew from the project, Benecio del Toro persuaded his Traffic director to take the helm and Soderbergh expanded Che (2008) into two sections, 'The Argentine' and 'Guerilla'. Del Toro's instincts were rewarded with the Best Actor prize at Cannes. But the epic divided experts and critics alike and, consequently, this difficult, but imposing picture was overlooked entirely by the Academy.

After such an arduous assignment, Soderbergh opted to work cheaply and quickly on The Girlfriend Experience (2009), which he filmed with a Red One digital camera for $1.3 million. He provoked more controversy by casting porn star Sasha Grey as the Manhattan prostitute whose business in the run-up to the 2008 presidential election is affected by the credit crunch. But he also took another swipe at the Hollywood network by showing the film on Amazon Video on Demand before it hit cinemas. Drawing on Michelangelo Antonioni's Red Desert (1964) and Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers (1972), the film made more headlines than money. But it spawned a successful TV spin-off in 2014 and Soderbergh is due to co-produce the third season when shooting resumes after the Covid-19 emergency.

In the same spirit of independence, while directing Tot Mom on stage, Soderbergh made The Last Time I Saw Michael Gregg solely for the edification of the actors involved in the story of a theatre company's bid to stage Anton Chekhov's play, The Three Sisters. More people caught Soderbergh's archive documentary about Spalding Gray, And Everything Is Going Fine (2010), although it's been more widely seen on disc than screen after being released by the acclaimed Criterion Collection. Yet Soderbergh was always careful to keep the commercial offerings coming and he teamed with screenwriter Scott Z. Burns on The Informant (2009), which stars Matt Damon as Mark Whitacre, who spent two years wearing a wire for the FBI to expose the price fixing tactics of his colleagues at the food processing company, Archer Daniels Midland.

Soderbergh was all set to roll on another biopic when Sony pulled the plug on his account of how Billy Beane had used statistical analysis to transform the fortunes of the Oakland Athletics baseball team. Rather than try to revive the project elsewhere, Soderbergh walked away and Moneyball (2011) was eventually made by Bennett Miller with a script by Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin, while Brad Pitt took the role of the game-changing number cruncher. Instead, Soderbergh moved on to make Haywire, another Lem Dobbs scenario that was completed in Ireland in early 2010, but only premiered in November 2011. Although Michael Douglas, Ewan McGregor, Michael Fassbender and Antonio Banderas are involved, the focus falls on mixed martial artist Gina Carano, who is sold out by a member of the black ops agency for which she performs clandestine missions with the utmost precision.

While waiting for the studio to get round to releasing his film, Soderbergh served as the second unit director on Gary Ross's adaptation of Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games (2012). He also added Lynne Ramsay's take on Lioner Shriver's bestseller, We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011), to a roster of executive producer credits that also now included Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly (2006), Gregory Jacobs's Wind Chill, Tony Gilroy's Michael Clayton, Todd Haynes's I'm Not There (all 2007) and Marina Zenovich's documentary, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired (2008). In 2009, he also joined the producer ranks on Brian Koppelman and David Levien's Solitary Man, which paired Michael Douglas and Susan Sarandon.

Calling It Quits (or Not)

With his previous picture still on the shelf, Soderbergh embarked upon Contagion (2011), another Scott Z. Burns scenario that has become something of a cult hit during lockdown. Following their collaboration on Haywire, Soderbergh teamed up with Channing Tatum again on Magic Mike (2012). Such was the film's success that Soderbergh acted as camera operator on Gregory Jacobs's sequel, Magic Mike XXL (2015). However, the back injury incurred by George Clooney while shooting Syriana put paid to his chances of playing Napoleon Solo in Soderbergh's take on The Man From UNCLE and the project eventually passed to Guy Ritchie in 2015, who teamed Henry Cavill and Armie Hammer as Solo and Ilya Kuryakin, the roles originally played in the cult TV series (1964-68) by Robert Vaughn and David McCallum.

In 2012, Soderbergh let slip his disillusion with the movie business when he told a reporter, 'when you reach the point where you're saying, "If I have to get into a van to do another scout, I'm just going to shoot myself," it's time to let somebody who's still excited about getting in the van, get in the van.' However, he was soon back in harness making Side Effects, a psychological thriller that sees New Yorker Rooney Mara experience an adverse reaction to the anxiety medication prescribed by psychiatrist Jude Law. While promoting the film, however, Soderbergh hinted that he would move away from feature production around his 50th birthday and gave notice of a greater involvement with television by pairing Michael Douglas and Matt Damon in Behind the Candelabra (both 2013), an HBO teleplay scripted by Richard LaGravenese from Scott Thorson's account of his relationship with the famed pianist, Liberace.

Around this time, Soderbergh delivered an incendiary address at the 56th San Francisco International Film Festival, in which he expanded upon his contention that American audiences had come to prefer escapism since 9/11. While he recognised the validity of old-fashioned entertainment, he lamented the fact that the bean-counters running the studios knew little about the medium and often invested in pre-solds and sequels rather than more demanding idea films. As he defined it, 'a movie is something you see, and cinema is something that's made'. He continued, 'Cinema is a specificity of vision. It's an approach in which everything matters. It's the polar opposite of generic or arbitrary and the result is as unique as a signature or a fingerprint. It isn't made by a committee, and it isn't made by a company, and it isn't made by the audience. It means that if this film-maker didn't do it, it either wouldn't exist at all, or it wouldn't exist in anything like this form.'

He ended contentiously by warning that the number of independently produced films was dropping alarmingly. As a result, 'cinema as I define it, and as something that inspired me, is under assault by the studios and, from what I can tell, with the full support of the audience'. Given such a depressing state of affairs, Soderbergh announced that he would be devoting his creative energies to the theatre and television because 'I just don't think movies matter as much any more, culturally.'

A matter of months into what the media called his retirement, Soderbergh was back in the spotlight at the helm of The Knick (2014-15), which starred Clive Owen in a drama about a fictionalised version of Manhattan's Knickerbocker Hospital in first decades of the last century. He also made his Off-Broadway debut in January 2014 with The Library, a Scott Z. Burns drama about the aftermath of a school shooting that starred Chloë Grace Moretz. Amusingly, 2014 also saw Soderbergh release 'The Butcher's Cut' of Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate (1980) and a monochrome silent version of Steven Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), with the score being replaced by the one composed by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross for David Fincher's The Social Network (2010).

Soderbergh also remained busy on the producing front, as he followed an associate credit on Spike Lee's Da Sweet Blood of Jesus (2014) with executive nods on two documentaries, Laura Potras's CitizenFour (2014) and Eugene Jarecki's The King (2017). He has since exec'd Brian Welsh's Beats, Scott Z. Burns's The Report (both 2019) and Dean Parisot's Bill & Ted Face the Music (2020). In September 2015, Soderbergh also announced that he would direct Sharon Stone in Mosaic, a murder mystery that would be broadcast on HBO and made accessible via a dedicated app that allowed users to choose the character perspective from which to view the action. This complex project went live two years later and once again put Soderbergh in the vanguard of movie innovation.

That said, he stuck to the tried-and-trusted action formula when he returned to features with Logan Lucky (2017), a full-throttle heist thriller in which siblings Channing Tatum. Adam Driver and Riley Keough team with explosives expert Daniel Craig to steal $14 million from the Charlotte Motor Speedway in West Virginia on the day of a NASCAR race. While this had all the gloss of a Hollywood studio picture, it was actually produced through Soderbergh's own Bleecker Street and Fingerprint Releasing companies. But he was far from finished when it came to breaking the mould, as he managed to film Unsane (2018) in complete secrecy using three rotating iPhones fitted with 4K digital camera. Showing how Claire Foy becomes convinced that her stalker has infiltrated the clinic in which she's recovering from post-traumatic stress, the film paved the way for High Flying Bird, a sports agent drama that Soderbergh shot on an iPhone 8.

The Laundromat (2019) is a Scott Z. Burns-scripted satirical thriller about the Panama Papers scandal that paired Gary Oldman and Antonio Banderas as financiers Jürgen Mossack and Ramón Fonseca and co-starred Meryl Streep as a woman on the trail of her misappropriated money. Streep also returned alongside Gemma Chan, Dianne Wiest, Candice Bergen and Lucas Hedges in Let Them All Talk, which was partially filmed aboard the ocean liner, Queen Mary 2. This is ready for release, but work has yet to begin on Soderbergh's next venture, Kill Switch, a crime thriller from Mosaic writer Ed Solomon that is slated to star Don Cheadle and Josh Brolin. He is also planning a miniseries with Lem Dobbs about Turkish surgeon-cum-anthropologist, Emin Pasha.

As one might expect, Soderbergh has been anything but idle during lockdown. as he has returned to writing. In addition to adapting David Levien's crime novel, City of the Sun, he has also licked into shape a long-gestating sequel to Sex, Lies, and Videotap, which kind of brings us back to where we began. Don't think for a second, however, that Steven Soderbergh has run out of original ideas.