Words matter. These are the best Steven Soderbergh Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
If you can find interesting ways to be clear, you’re really onto something.
The ought to be a worldwide cultural taskforce that just stops you when you have ideas like combining The Red Desert with an armored car heist movie.
Cinema is not about format, and it’s not about venue. Cinema is an approach. Cinema is a state of mind on the part of the filmmaker. I’ve seen commercials that have cinema in them, and I’ve seen Oscar-winning movies that don’t. I’m fine with this.
The great thing about the business is how Darwinian it is. We have to swim or die – if you are found wanting over a period of time, you’ve either got to change what you’re doing or find something else to do.
I’m of the minority opinion that presidents should be given more power for less time.
I try to focus on the stuff that I can control and let go of the other stuff.
I love caper films.
To me the director’s job is to leave it in better shape than you found it, literally.
In Full Frontal and K Street, I learned to take advantage of the mobility that digital provides.
I think I’m good at amplifying an actor’s strengths, and minimizing their weaknesses. And they all have strengths and weaknesses.
‘Logan Lucky’ is an experiment. The problem that I think needs to be addressed is, what has happened to movies for grown-ups made by people who are still interested in the idea of cinema?
You don’t go make ‘Schizopolis’ if you’re trying to protect some idea of yourself as a filmmaker.
I look at other filmmakers and see skills in them that I wish I had but I know that I don’t. I feel like I have to work really hard to keep myself afloat, doing what I do. But I find it pleasurable.
When people say that moviegoing is dead, I go, ‘OK, so the makers of ‘Get Out’ should’ve sold that movie to a platform? Then they don’t have this insane, crazy success theatrically all over the world.’
The key to making good movies is to pay attention to the transition between scenes.
There are three major social issues that this country is struggling with: education, poverty, and drugs. Two of them we talk about, and one of them we don’t.
It’s pretty clear to me that working as a director for hire agrees with me. I like it. The films that have come out of that, I personally like better than the ones that didn’t.
I had more fun making Traffic than either of the Ocean’s films.
A lot of people get very misty-eyed about celluloid. When I think of the time that’s wasted in sending it back to the lab and having it developed and brought back, it would make me insane. I love getting my hands on the stuff immediately. That doesn’t work for everybody. It just works for me.
Traffic is about drugs. As detailed a portrait as I can muster about what is happening in the drug world, from top to bottom, from policy to how things move on the street.
The key is, if you’re not monkeying around with the script, then everything usually goes pretty well.
Warner Bros. has talked about going out with low-cost DVDs simultaneously in China because piracy is so huge there. It will be a while before bigger movies go out in all formats; in five years, everything will.
There’s something really fun about watching people really good at something.
Maybe I’ll paint, do photography, just something else. I can see that.
When you’re sent something and read it, either you can see it while you read it, or you can’t.
A movie that costs only $1.6 million doesn’t have to be a cultural event to turn a profit.
One of the reasons why I think virtual reality, as a narrative format, is never going to go beyond the short-form immersion space is because the bedrock of visual storytelling is the reverse angle. If you can’t look into the eyes of the protagonist, you cannot hold people’s attention for more than 15 minutes.
Getting upset about Netflix, to me, is like getting upset about the weather. It’s just something that’s happening, and we have to decide what we feel about it.
The reverberation of the freedom of making ‘Schizopolis’ absolutely resulted in ‘Out of Sight’ and everything that followed.
I know why we can’t have a frank discussion with our policymakers – if you’re in the government or in law enforcement you cannot acknowledge that drugs are anything but inherently evil and morally wrong.
After making a lot more films, I realized that the movie and TV business is, for all its inefficiencies, one of the best-run big businesses we have.
It’s really easy to make a movie that five people understand. It’s really hard to make something that a lot of people understand and yet is not obvious, still has subtlety and ambiguity, and leaves you with something to do as a viewer.
I just produced Criminal, this remake of Nine Queens, and one of the things that appealed to me about Nine Queens is that it was a performance piece, and that’s the most fun.
It would be nice if all people who saw movies had some sort of basic understanding of what they’re looking at, but I don’t think you can assume that.
When a film like Chris Nolan’s Memento cannot get picked up, to me independent film is over. It’s dead.
Another thing that really excites me: I’d like to do multiple versions of the same film.
Making a film that’s supposed to be fun to watch is really hard – that’s the weird irony of it.
All I care about is the story and telling the story. I don’t care how people ingest it.
I watch a lot of true crime on TV.
Reality shows are all the rage on TV at the moment, but that’s not reality, it’s just another aesthetic form of fiction.
