Steven Soderbergh’s ‘Crackpot Theories’ on How Moviegoing Has Changed

In 2014, Steven Soderbergh was ostensibly in retirement. He had emerged as a young pioneer of independent cinema with his 1989 debut sex, lies, and videotape. Since then, he’d worked in every genre and at all levels of the studio system. Soderbergh directed glossy franchise entertainment (Ocean’s Eleven), Oscar-winning successes (Traffic and Erin Brockovich), hard-boiled noirs (Out of Sight and The Limey), and low-budget experiments (Full Frontal, Schizopolis, and The Girlfriend Experience). He’s never been afraid to try something new.

So when Soderbergh declared that he was done making movies and had moved on to TV (directing every episode of Cinemax’s The Knick), it seemed like a fascinating new step in his career. Upon returning to film in 2017 with Logan Lucky, he’s crafted projects that bypass traditional Hollywood production and marketing formulas, targeting his advertising to find the right audience, editing trailers himself, and ignoring the usual branding paradigms. His latest project, High Flying Bird, is about an NBA agent and a rising basketball star who try to do something similar in their own industry. Written by Tarell Alvin McCraney and starring André Holland, the movie was shot using iPhone cameras (like Soderbergh’s last film, the thriller Unsane) and debuted on Netflix.

The Atlantic talked with Soderbergh about shooting movies on cell phones, the future of the theatrical experience, the Netflix production process, and what his ideal Oscars ceremony would look like. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

David Sims: How did High Flying Bird come to you? Did you hear about the script or was it more organic than that?

It was pretty serendipitous. André [Holland] and. We started kicking around a couple ideas for projects about sports, and this one seemed to check off a couple of important boxes. The key being that the scale of it allowed for completely independent financing. They say sometimes, . My saying that I wanted to be able to do the movie at this [smaller] scale created a clear structure from the get-go. I talked a lot about and —hyperverbal, short time frame, limited locations. I said [to Tarell Alvin McCraney], . To Tarell’s credit, he really took that on and understood it.