Steven Soderbergh's State of Cinema

8/13/2019 Steven Soderbergh's State of Cinema

1/10

Steven Soderberghs State Of Cinema Talk

By THE DEADLINE TEAM | Tuesday April 30, 2013 @ 3:10am PDTTags: San Francisco International Film

Festival, Steven Soderbergh

inShare.114 Comments 135

Here is the full transcript of director Steven Soderberghs keynote at the 56th San Francisco

International Film Festival delivered Saturday. At first he requested the festival ensure no still

photographs, audio, or video of his talk at the Kabuki Theater. But instead it was tweeted, blogged,

recorded, and put online. Soderbergh promised in advance to drop some grenades and he opined

about studio executives, indie filmmaking, and cinema vs movies. He did not detail his own retirement:

A few months ago I was on this Jet Blue flight from New York to Burbank. And I like Jet Blue, not just

because of the prices. They have this terminal at JFK that I think is really nice. I think it might be the

nicest terminal in the country although if you want to see some good airports youve got to go to a

major city in another part of the world like Europe or Asia. Theyre amazing airports. Theyre incredible

and quiet. Youre not being assaulted by all this music. I dont know when it was decided we all need a

soundtrack everywhere we go. I was just in the bathroom upstairs and there was a soundtrack

accompanying me at the urinal, I dont understand. So Im getting comfortable in my seat. I spent the

extra $60 to get the extra leg room so Im trying to get comfortable and we make altitude. And theres a

guy on the other side of the aisle in front of me and he pulls out his iPad to start watching stuff. Im

curious to see what hes going to watch hes a white guy in his mid-30s. And I begin to realize what

hes done is hes loaded in half a dozen action sort of extravaganzas and hes watching each of the

action sequenceshes skipping over all the dialogue and the narrative. This guys flight is going to be

five and a half hours of just mayhem porn.

I get this wave ofnot panic, its not like my heart started flutteringbut I had this sense of, am I going

insane? Or is the world going insaneor both? Now I start with the circular thinking again. Maybe its

me. Maybe its generational and Im getting old, Im in the back nine professionally. And maybe my 22 -

year-old daughter doesnt feel this way at all. I should ask her. But then I think, no: Something is going

onsomething that can be measured is happening, and there has to be. When people are more

outraged by the ambiguous ending of The Sopranos than some young girl being stoned to death, then


2/10

theres something wrong. We have people walking around who think the government stages these

terrorist attacks. And anybody with a brain bigger than a walnut knows that our government is not

nearly competent enough to stage a terrorist attack and then keep it a secret because, as we know, in

this day and age you cannot keep a secret.

So I think that life is sort of like a drumbeat. It has a rhythm and sometimes its fast and sometimes its

slower, and maybe whats happening is this drumbeat is just accelerating and its gotten to the point

where I cant hear between the beats anymore and its just a hum. Again, I thought maybe thats my

generation, every generation feels that way, maybe I should ask my daughter. But then I remember

somebody did this experiment where if youre in a car and youre going more than 20 miles an hour it

becomes impossible to distinguish individual features on a human beings face. I thought thats another

good analogy for this sensation. Its avery weird experiment for someone to come up with.

So that was my Jet Blue flight. But the circular thinking didnt really stop and I got my hands on a book

by a guy named Douglas Rushkoff and I realized Im suffering from something called Present Shock

which is the name of his book. This quote made me feel a little less insane: When theres no linear tie,

how is a person supposed to figure out whats going on? Theres no story, no narrative to explain why

things are the way things are. Previously distinct causes and effects collapse into one another. Theres

no time between doing something and seeing the result. Instead the results begin accumulating and

influencing us before weve even completed an action. And theres so much information coming in at

once from so many different sources that theres simply no way to trace the plot over time. Thats the

hum Im talking about. And I mention this because I think its having an effect on all of us. I think its

having an effect on our culture, and I think its having an effect on movies. How theyre made, howtheyre sold, how they perform.

But before we talk about movies we should talk about art in general, if thats possible. Given all the

incredible suffering in the world I wonder, what is art for, really? If the collected works of Shakespeare

cant prevent genocide then really, what is it for? Shouldnt we be spending the time and resources

alleviating suffering and helping other people instead of going to the movies and plays and art

installations? When we did Oceans Thirteen the casino set used $60,000 of electricity every week. How

do you justify that? Do you justify that by saying, the people who couldve had that electricity are going

to watch the movie for two hours and be entertainedexcept they probably cant, because they dont

have any electricity, because we used it. Then I think, what about all the resources spent on all the

pieces of entertainment? What about the carbon footprint of getting me here? Then I think, why are

you even thinking that way and worrying about how many miles per gallon my car gets, when we have

NASCAR, and monster truck pulls on TV? So what I finally decided was, art is simply inevitable. It was on

the wall of a cave in France 30,000 years ago, and its because we are aspecies thats driven by

narrative. Art is storytelling, and we need to tell stories to pass along ideas and information, and to try


3/10

and make sense out of all this chaos. And sometimes when you get a really good artist and a compelling

story, you can almost achieve that thing thats impossible which is entering the consciousness of

another human beingliterally seeing the world the way they see it. Then, if you have a really good

piece of art and a really good artist, you are altered in some way, and so the experience is

transformative and in the minute youre experiencing that piece of art, youre not alone. Youre

connected to the arts. So I feel like that cant be too bad.

Art is also about problem solving, and its obvious from the news, we have a little bit of a problem with

problem solving. In my experience, the main obstacle to problem solving is an entrenched ideology. The

great thing about making a movie or a piece of art is that that never comes into play. All the ideas are on

the table. All the ideas and everything is open for discussion, and it turns out everybody succeeds by

submitting to what the thing needs to be. Art, in my view, is a very elegant problem-solving model.

Now we finally arrive at the subject of this rant, which is the state of cinema. First of all, is there a

difference between cinema and movies? Yeah. If I were on Team America, Id say Fuck yeah! The

simplest way that I can describe it is that a movie is something you see, and cinema is something thats

made. It has nothing to do with the captured medium, it doesnt have anything to do with where the

screen is, if its in your bedroom, your iPad, it doesnt even really have to be a movie. It could be a

commercial, it could be something on YouTube. Cinema is a specificity of v ision. Its an approach in

which everything matters. Its the polar opposite of generic or arbitrary and the result is as unique as a

signature or a fingerprint. It isnt made by a committee, and it isnt made by a company, and it isnt

made by the audience. It means that if this filmmaker didnt do it, it either wouldnt exist at all, or it

wouldnt exist in anything like this form.

So, that means you can take a perfectly solid, successful and acclaimed movie and it may not qualify as

cinema. It also means you can take a piece of cinema and it may not qualify as a movie, and it may

actually be an unwatchable piece of shit. But as long as you have filmmakers out there who have that

specific point of view, then cinema is never going to disappear completely. Because its not about

money, its about good ideas followed up by a well-developed aesthetic. I love all this new technology,

its great. Its smaller, lighter, faster. You can make a really good -looking movie for not a lot of money,

and when people start to get weepy about celluloid, I think of this quote by Orson Welles when

somebody was talking to him about new technology, which he tended to embrace, and he said, I dont

want to wait on the tool, I want the tool to wait for me, which I thought was a good way to put it. But

the problem is that 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. The reasons for this, in my

opinion, are more economic than philosophical, but when you add an ample amount of fear and a lack

of vision, and a lack of leadership, youve got a trajectory that I think is pretty difficult to reverse.


4/10

Now, of course, its very subjective; there are going to be exceptions to everything Im going to say, and

Im just saying that so no one thinks Im talking about them. I want to be clear: The idea of cinema as Im

defining it is not on the radar in the studios. This is not a conversation anybodys having; its not a word

you would ever want to use in a meeting. Speaking of meetings, the meetings have gotten pretty weird.There are fewer and fewer executives who are in the business because they love movies. There are

fewer and fewer executives that know movies. So it can become a very strange situation. I mean, I know

how to drive a car, but I wouldnt presume to sit in a meeting with an engineer and tell him how to build

one, and thats kind of what you feel like when youre in these meetings. Youve got people who dont

know movies and dont watch movies for pleasure deciding what movie youre going to be allowed to

make. Thats one reason studio movies arent better than they are, and thats one reason that cinema,

as Im defining it, is shrinking.

Well, how does a studio decide what movies get made? One thing they take into consideration is the

foreign market, obviously. Its become very big. So that means, you know, things that travel best are

going to be action-adventure, science fiction, fantasy, spectacle, some animation thrown in there.

Obviously the bigger the budget, the more people this thing is going to have to appeal to, the more

homogenized its got to be, the more simplified its got to be. So things like cultural specificity and

narrative complexity, and, god forbid, ambiguity, those become real obstacles to the success of the film

here and abroad.

Speaking of ambiguity, we had a test screening of Contagion once and a guy in the focus group stood upand he said, I really hate the Jude Law character. I dont know if hesa hero or an asshole. And I

thought well, here we go. Theres another thing, a process known as running the numbers, and for a

filmmaker this is kind of the equivalent of a doctor showing you a chest x-ray and saying theres a

shadow on it. Its a kind of fungible algorithm thats used when they want say no without, really, saying

no. I could tell you a really good story of how I got pushed off a movie because of the way the numbers

ran, but if I did, Id probably get shot in the street, and I really likemy cats.

So then theres the expense of putting a movie out, which is a big problem. Point of entry for a

mainstream, wide-release movie: $30 million. Thats where you start. Now you add another 30 foroverseas. Now youve got to remember, the exhibitors pay half of the gross, so to make that 60 back you

need to gross 120. So you dont even know what your movie is yet, and youre already looking at 120.

That ended up being part of the reason why the Liberace movie didnt happen at a studio. We only

needed $5 million from a domestic partner, but when you add the cost of putting a movie out, now

youve got to gross $75 million to get that 35 back, and the feeling amongst the studios was that this

material was too special to gross $70 million. So the obstacle here isnt just that special subject


5/10

matter, but that nobody has figured out how to reduce the cost of putting a movie out. There have been

some attempts to analyze it, but one of the mysteries is that this analysis doesnt really reveal any kind

of linear predictive behavior, its still mysterious the process whereby people decide if theyre either

going to go to a movie or not go to a movie. Sometimes you dont even know how you reach them. Like

on Magic Mike for instance, the movie opened to $38 million, and the tracking said we were going to

open to 19. So the tracking was 100% wrong. Its really nice when the surprise goes in that direction, but

its hard not to sit there and go how did we miss that? If this is our tracking, how do you miss by that

much?

I know one person who works in marketing at a studio suggested, on a modestly budgeted film that had

some sort of brand identity and some A-list talent attached, she suggested, Look, why dont we not do

any tracking at all, and just spend 15 and well just put it out. They wouldnt do it. They were afraid it

would fail, when they fail doing the other thing all the time. Maybe they were afraid it was going to

work. The other thing that mystifies me is that you would think, in terms of spending, if you have one of

these big franchise sequels that you would say oh, we dont have to spend as much money because is

there anyone in the galaxy that doesnt know Iron Mans opening on Friday? So you would think, oh, we

can stop carpet-bombing with TV commercials. Its exactly the opposite. They spend more. They spend

more. Their attitude is: You know, its a sequel, and its the third one, and we really want to make sure

people really want to go. We want to make sure that opening night number is big so theres the

perception of the movie is that its a huge success. Theres that, and if youve ever wondered why every

poster and every trailer and every TV spot looks exactly the same, its because of testing. Its because

anything interesting scores poorly and gets kicked out. Now Ive tried to argue that the methodology of

this testing doesnt work. If you take a poster or a trailer and you show it to somebody in isolation,

thats not really an accurate reflection of whether its working because we dont see them in isolation,we see them in groups. We see a trailer in the middle of five other trailers, we see a poster in the middle

of eight other posters, and Ive tried to argue that maybe the thing thats making it distinctive and score

poorly actually would stick out if you presented it to these people the way the real world presents it.

And Ive never won that argument.

You know, we had a trailer for Side Effects that we did in London and the filmmaking team really, really

liked it. But the problem was that it was not testing well, and it was really not testing as well as this

domestic trailer that we had. The point spread was so significant that I really couldnt justify trying to

jam this thing down distributors throats, so we had to abandon it. Now look, notall testing is bad.Sometimes you have to, especially on a comedy. Theres nothing like 400 people who are not your

friends to tell you when somethings wrong. I just dont think you can use it as the last word on a

movies playability, or its quality. Magic Mike tested poorly. Really poorly. And fortunately Warner

Brothers just ignored the test scores, and stuck with their plan to open the movie wide during the

summer.


6/10

But lets go back to Side Effects for a second. This is a movie that didnt perform aswell as any of us

wanted it to. So, why? What happened? It cant be the campaign because all the materials that we had,

the trailers, the posters, the TV spots, all that stuff tested well above average. February 8th, maybe it

was the date, was that a bad day? As it turns out that was the Friday after the Oscar nominations areannounced, and this year there was an atypically large bump to all the films that got nominated, so that

was a factor. Then there was a storm in the Northeast, which is sort of our core audience. Nemo came

in, so God, obviously, is getting me back for my comments about monotheism. Was it the concept?

There was a very active decision early on to sell the movie as kind of a pure thriller and kind of

disconnect it from this larger social issue of everybody taking pills. Did that make the movie seem more

commercial, or did it make it seem more generic? We dont know. What about the cast? Four attractive

white people this is usually not an obstacle. The exit polls were very good, the review s were good.

How do we figure out what went wrong? The answer is: We dont. Because everybodys already moved

on to the next movie they have to release.

Now, Im going to attempt to show how a certain kind of rodent might be smarter than a studio when it

comes to picking projects. If you give a certain kind of rodent the option of hitting two buttons, and one

of the buttons, when you touch it, dispenses food 40% of the time, and one of the buttons when you

touch it dispenses food 60% percent of the time, this certain kind of rodent very quickly figures out

never to touch the 40% button ever again. So when a studio is attempting to determine on a project-by-

project basis what will work, instead of backing a talented filmmaker over the long haul, theyre actu ally

increasing their chances of choosing wrong. Because in my view, in this business which is totally talent-

driven, its about horses, not races. I think if I were going to run a studio Id just be gathering the best

filmmakers I could find and sort of let them do their thing within certain economic parameters. So I

would call Shane Carruth, or Barry Jenkins or Amy Seimetz and Id bring them in and go, ok, what do you

want to do? What are the things youre interested in doing? What do we have here that you might be

interested in doing? If there was some sort of point of intersection Id go: Ok, look, Im going to let you

make three movies over five years, Im going to give you this much money in production costs, Im going

to dedicate this much money on marketing. You can sort of proportion it how you want, you can spend

it all on one and none on the other two, but go make something.

Now, that only works if you are very, very good at identifying talent. Real talent, the kind of talent thatsustains. And you cant be judging strictly on commercial performance, or hype, or hipness, but I dont

think its unreasonable to expect someone running a multi-billion dollar business to be able to identify

talent. I get it, its the studio, you need all kinds of movies. You need comedies, you need horror films,

you need action films, you need animated films, I get it. But the point is, cant some of these be cinema

also? This is kind of what we tried to do with Section 8 is we tried to bring interesting filmmakers into

the studio system and protect them. But unfortunately the only way a studio is going to allow that kind


7/10


8/10

turnover of new ideas, theres no new ideas about how to approach the business or how to deal with

talent or material. But, again, economically, its a pretty straightforward business. Hell, its the third-

biggest export that we have. Its one of the few things that we do that the world actually likes.

Ive stopped being embarrassed about being in the film business, I really have. Im not spending my days

trying to make a weapon that kills people more efficiently. Its an interesting business. But again, taking

the 30,000 foot view, maybe nothings wrong, and maybe my feeling that the studios are kind of like

Detroit before the bailout is totally insupportable. I mean, Im wrong a lot. Im wrong so much, it doesnt

even raise my blood pressure anymore. Maybe everything is just fine. But Admissions, this is the

number of bodies that go through the turnstile, ten years ago: 1.52 billion. Last year: 1.36 billion. Thats

a ten and a half percent drop. Why are admissions dropping? Nobody knows, not even Nate Silver.

Probably a combination of things: Ticket prices, maybe, a lot of competition for eyeballs. Theres a lot of

good TV out there. Theft is a big problem. I know this is a really controversial subject, but for people

who think everything on the internet should just be totally free all I can say is, good luck. When you try

to have a life and raise a family living off something you create

Theres a great quote from Steve Jobs:

From the earliest days of Apple I realized that we thrived when we created intellectual p roperty. If

people copied or stole our software wed be out of business. If it werent protected thered be no

incentive for us to make new software or product designs. If protection of intellectual property begins to

disappear creative companies will disappear or never get started. But theres a simpler reason: Its

wrong to steal. It hurts other people, and it hurts your own character.

I agree with him. I think that what people go to the movies for has changed since 9/11. I still think the

country is in some form of PTSD about that event, and that we havent really healed in any sort of

complete way, and that people are, as a result, looking more toward escapist entertainment. And look, I

get it. Theres a very good argument to be made that only somebodywho has it really good would want

to make a movie that makes you feel really bad. People are working longer hours for less money these

days, and maybe when they get in a movie, they want a break. I get it.

But lets sex this up with some more numbers. In2003, 455 films were released. 275 of those were

independent, 180 were studio films. Last year 677 films were released. So youre not imagining things,

there are a lot of movies that open every weekend. 549 of those were independent, 128 were studio

films. So, a 100% increase in independent films, and a 28% drop in studio films, and yet, ten years ago:


9/10

Studio market share 69%, last year 76%. Youve got fewer studio movies now taking up a bigger piece of

the pie and youve got twice as many independent films scrambling for a smaller piece of the pie. Thats

hard. Thats really hard.

When I was coming up, making an independent film and trying to reach an audience I thought was like,

trying to hit a thrown baseball. This is like trying to hit a thrown baseballbut with another thrown

baseball. Thats why Im spending so much time talking to you about the business and the money,

because this is the force that is pushing cinema out of mainstream movies. Ive been in meetings where I

can feel it slipping away, where I can feel that the ideas Im tossing out, theyre too scary or too weird,

and I can feel the thing. I can tell: Its not going to happen, Im not going to be able to convince them to

do this the way I think it should be done. I want to jump up on the table and scream, Do you know how

lucky we are to be doing this? Do you understand that the only way to repay that karmic debt is to make

something good, is to make something ambitious, something beautiful, something memorable? But I

didnt do that. I just sat there, and I smiled.

Maybe the ideas I had dont work, and the only way theyll find out is that someones got to give me half

a billion dollars, to see if itll work. That seems like a lot of money, but actually in point of fact there are

a couple movies coming down the pike that represent, in terms of their budgets and their marketing

campaigns, individually, a half a billion dollars. Just one movie. Just give me one of these big movies. No?

Kickstarter!

I dont want to bring this to a conclusion on a down note. A few years back, I got a call from an agent

and he said, Will you come see this film? Its a small, independent film a client made. Its been making

the festival circuit and its getting a really good response but no distributorwill pick it up, and I really

want you to take a look at it and tell me what you think. The film was called Memento. So the lights

come up and I think, Its over. Its over. Nobody will buy this film? This is just insane. The movie business

is over. It was really upsetting. Well fortunately, the people who financed the movie loved the movie so

much that they formed their own distribution company and put the movie out and made $25 million. So

whenever I despair I think, OK, somebody out there somewhere, wh ile were sitting right here,

somebody out there somewhere is making something cool that were going to love, and that keeps me

going. The other thing I tell young filmmakers is when you get going and you try to get money, when

youre going into one of those rooms to try and convince somebody to make it, I dont care who youre

pitching, I dont care what youre pitching it can be about genocide, it can be about child killers, it can

be about the worst kind of criminal injustice that you can imaginebut as youre sort of in the process

of telling this story, stop yourself in the middle of a sentence and act like youre having an epiphany, and

say: You know what, at the end of this day, this is a movie about hope.


10/10

Thank you.

Documents

Steven Soderbergh's State of Cinema