Steven Söderbergh is a filmmaker who works quickly. In just the next two months, he will release two major films: this week, his POV Ghost Movie “Presence” hits theaters, and then in mid-March comes the Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender-led spy thriller ”Black bag” will be released. But one project that the director has been tinkering with for years, between films, is the dream of writing a book about his profession.
“I’ve been working on a book about directing for 15 years,” Soderbergh said as a guest on an upcoming episode of Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. “It would always be used as its backbone, a shot-by-shot, scene-by-scene analysis of ‘Jaws,” just as a way of orienting people, so that I could still go into digressions, but that I always came back to a story that pulls you through the book.”
The book is not intended for the general public, but will be a very “inside baseball” look at what a director actually does. The focus of the book shifted focus to early 2024, and instead of doing an analysis of Steven Spielbergis ready filmSoderbergh decided he wanted to take the reader into the decision-making process behind shot sequencing.
“To support this idea of what directing is and what the job really entails, (I wanted it to be) a detailed recreation of the experience of directing it,” Soderbergh said.
To accomplish this, he had Universal provide “Jaws” daily production log and the lined shooting script. From these documents, Soderbergh has done the hard work of recreating each day of reported shooting.
“I’m in the middle of just building it out and trying to go through what the experience must have been like directing this movie, especially in the latter part after they’ve done all the land shots, and they get out to sea, and it’s starting to bad,” Soderbergh said. “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 happen (right), but this is on a level that’s just mind-blowing.”
But it is with this understanding of what Spielberg experienced that Soderbergh’s understanding of what the director actually accomplished has grown. Studying one of his favorite sequences in “Jaws,” the little brown needle scene, Soderbergh realized how much more useful this new approach to the book would be in revealing what a director is actually doing.
“Oh, my God, the huge, important creative decisions that are made on the fly to either solve a problem, or just improve the movie, period. So you get a real sense of his fluid thinking and his inspiration when you read how the shots are conceived, and in what order, and how often he goes back to redo things,” says Soderbergh. “This is a much clearer picture of what a director does than me just describing the finished product.”
Soderbergh also walks away from the experience with a renewed appreciation for Spielberg, who he speculates is the best problem solver in modern cinema.
“What’s involved throughout all of this is his incredible composure throughout this process. He never panicked and he never gave up,” Soderbergh said of Spielberg on “Jaws.” “In terms of pure staging and understanding in a very deep way film grammar, both in a shot sense and a story sense, because that’s the other thing that you’re going to appreciate as you watch this thing take shape day by day, is he understood the story of what this film should be so clearly, what Kubrick calls the non-submersible units of the story. He understood what the beats of this film are, from here to here. Its skill and effectiveness are just extraterrestrial.”
Now that he’s done the work of recreating every possible shooting day, the next step in the process, which Soderbergh most recently worked on, was to add his own words to contextualize Spielberg’s decisions.
Another side project for Soderbergh has been getting his own film catalog updated to 4K HDR, as he’s remastered “Kafka,” “The Girlfriend Experience,” “Schizopolis,” “Full Frontal” and the two Spalding Gray films, including ” Gray’s “Anatomy.”
“(The rights to) seven films reverted to me,” Soderbergh said. “And so we’re in the final stages now of finishing the box, which will be a small series, individually serial numbered, and then included in that, because ‘Kafka’ is one of the seven, is the new version, ‘Mr. Neff. “
In addition to “Mr. Neff,” Soderbergh’s complete re-edit and reimagining of his 1991 thriller “Kafka,” he did some light re-editing and tightening (“these things often work better shorter”) of “Full Frontal” and “Schizopolis.” What Soderbergh won’t do is go all Wong Kar-wai or Michael Mann and dramatically depart from the original color grade for each film’s theatrical release. He also doesn’t see the increased resolution as a game changer (“2K to 4K, it’s a difference you can barely tell in a butterfly test”).
For Soderbergh, the need to update his library depends largely on a specific technological upgrade. “The real difference is the increased dynamic range, the difference between SDR and HDR is so huge and something that anybody can tell the difference if you put them side by side, it’s just amazing,” Soderbergh said. “It’s pretty standard to do the SDR pass first and then do the HDR. Recently I started doing the opposite because 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 like grew up looking like that, having blacks like that, having whites like that. It’s amazing how good that shit is.”
Advances in HDR have motivated Soderbergh, a self-proclaimed completionist, to update his entire oeuvre. “I think the only thing I’ve done that’s not yet in a 4K HDR is ‘Traffic’ — Universal is coming back to do ‘Erin Brockovich’ now,” Soderbergh says. “Hopefully, one day, if we can get ‘Traffic’ done one more time, everything I’ve done will exist in the best format available and (I’ll) feel, ‘OK, I can forget that.'”
To listen to Soderbergh’s episode Thursday, January 23, which talks about “Presence” make sure you subscribe to the Toolkit podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.
NEON will release “Presence” in theaters on Friday, January 24.
