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Saturday, Jul 4, 2009
It's been a very hot year for the director of New York Film Critics Circle favorites "Traffic" and "Erin Brockovich." Next year may be hotter still.
Dec 20, 2000 | With his chunky, horn-rimmed glasses swiped from Lisa Loeb, Steven Soderbergh looks just like what he is -- the Geek King of Hollywood. Hot off his success earlier this year with "Erin Brockovich," Soderbergh's new film, "Traffic," due out Dec. 27, has already been named the best film of the year by the New York Film Critics Circle, with the pale, 38-year-old Baton Rouge, La., native also earning best director honors.
"Traffic," an epic, two-and-a-half-hour war on drugs "Rashomon" based on the popular BBC miniseries of the same name, delves into almost every aspect of America's never-ending drug habit with the intensity of a PBS "Frontline" documentary and the grittiness of erstwhile NBC drama "Homicide: Life on the Street."
Littered with impressive performances by Michael Douglas, Benicio Del Toro, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Don Cheadle, Dennis Quaid, Luis Guzman and others, "Traffic" is serious Oscar bait, as is "Erin Brockovich." Both are part of a Soderberghian winning streak that began with the George Clooney-Jennifer Lopez romantic caper "Out of Sight" in 1998 and continued the following year with "The Limey," starring Terrence Stamp and Peter Fonda.
Apparently nothing can stop the Soderbergh juggernaut -- shooting on his remake of the 1960 Rat Pack vehicle "Ocean's 11" is slated to begin next year with more A-list stars than a British tabloid, including Julia Roberts, Clooney, Brad Pitt and Matt Damon.
I'd expect such success from the guy who at age 26 snagged a Palm d'Or at Cannes for his modest freshman effort, "sex, lies and videotape." But it hasn't always been so easy for Soderbergh. His recent book, "Getting Away With It, Or: The Further Adventures of the Luckiest Bastard You Ever Saw," chronicles his Gen X, pre-midlife crisis though a series of conversations with veteran director Richard Lester, interspersed with diary entries filled with ennui and self-doubt. Soderbergh admits he was coasting for several years following his initial triumph, and "Getting Away With It" reveals a generous portion of his dissatisfaction at that time with filmmaking, his critics and himself.
How do you choose your projects?
It's all gut -- what am I interested in at the moment? Having come out of an experience like "Out of Sight," "The Limey" or "Erin," it's a matter of what I feel like doing next. I'm usually just trying to find something that's going to provide a different experience than the one I just had.
Why "Traffic"?
It was a combination of things. There's actually a passage in "Getting Away With It" where I'm musing about drugs, wondering what they're about and what role they have in our society. Clearly this was something I felt was worth addressing, but I had no idea what a film about that might be like. It wasn't until I ran into Laura Bickford, the producer, and she mentioned that she had the rights to make the miniseries into a film. I thought, "Ah, that's how you should do it." Then we were doing research on writers and came up with Steve Gaghan, who we thought would be perfect -- the only problem being he was already writing a drug movie for Ed Zwick. Luckily, everybody agreed to combine the projects.
Had you seen the BBC miniseries?
I saw it when it ran over here in 1990, I think, on PBS. I always remembered it, but not enough to think of transplanting it to this country. That was Laura's good idea.
To what degree did "Traffic" the BBC series influence "Traffic" the film?
A lot, in that two of the stories track very similarly. The Mexico story we invented from scratch. But the feeling of it is similar to the BBC series in that it took, I think, an evenhanded approach to a very complicated issue. It didn't wear its politics on its sleeve, and I appreciated that. It was just trying to show you things, not lecture you. We definitely tried to emulate that.
Why did you decide to shoot the film with a different style for each geographical location? Was that a device used in the miniseries?
No, the miniseries looked all the same. That device is meant to help people orient themselves. As soon as I cut to one of the new stories, the viewers know where they are before they even see a character. I'm asking so much of them -- there are so many characters, so much information -- I thought: At least if they know where they are, I'm helping them a little bit. Plus those three places felt very different to me. My impressions of Mexico were different from La Jolla, Calif., and different from Ohio in the winter.
