The director Steven Soderbergh called “an actual poet”
As the 1980s drew to a triumphant close, Steven Soderbergh made one of the most important contributions to American independent cinema of all time. His 1989 drama Sex, Lies, and Videotape revolutionised the indie film circuit of the following decades, opening the doors for Miramax and a wave of movie directors to succeed.
In fact, Soderbergh’s debut was so well admired that it won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, making him the youngest solo director to win the coveted prize. From there, Soderbergh spent the first half of the 1990s trying to emulate his independent success but couldn’t seem to eclipse Sex, Lies, and Videotape.
Eventually, Soderbergh made the leap to big-budget blockbusters, largely leaving his independent cinema roots behind, beginning with 1998’s Out of Sight, which marked his first collaboration with George Clooney. Before long, Soderbergh had also contributed to a number of big studio movies like Erin Brockovich and Ocean’s Eleven.
In 2002, Soderbergh arrived at his science fiction drama Solaris, based on Stanislaw Lem’s 1961 novel of the same name. If that sounds familiar, then it’s likely because the book was also the basis for Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 sci-fi movie Solaris, although Soderbergh had promised to stick closer to the source text than Tarkovsky had.
“I really just had a very different interpretation of the Stanislaw Lem book, which has a lot of ideas in it, enough, I think, to generate a couple more films,” Soderbergh had once told the BBC. Starring George Clooney and Natascha McElhone, Soderbergh’s Solaris takes place on a space station orbiting the titular planet and sees Clooney’s Dr Chris Kelvin question his past and the strange motivations of the planet itself.
Asked why he had bothered to remake Solaris at all, considering the fact that Tarkovsky’s original is regarded as a masterpiece of science fiction, Soderbergh explained, “Well, I’m a big fan of Tarkovsky. I think he’s an actual poet, which is very rare in the cinema. The fact that he had such an impact with only seven features, I think is a testament to his genius. I really loved the film. I didn’t feel his film could be improved upon.”
Even so, Soderbergh felt that he wanted to look further into Lem’s novel. The Polish author had worked with Tarkovsky on the Soviet filmmaker’s movie but had admitted that he hadn’t “really liked” his version. Tarkovsky wanted to create a story that was based on Lem’s novel but still had artistic freedom from it, whereas Lem would have preferred a direct iteration with no divergence.
In Tarkovsky’s film, the emotional lives of the scientists working on the space station are explored, whereas Lem’s novel largely views the condition of humankind through a wider lens. Still, even though he was keen to pay more attention to the Lem novel, Soderbergh couldn’t help but be blown away by the cinematic works of Tarkovsky, who had also delivered the likes of Andrei Rublev, Stalker and Mirror throughout his career.
Discussing his impression of and love for the science fiction genre, Soderbergh signed off, “I hope that science fiction is viewed by filmmakers of my generation and the one on our heels as a viable way of exploring characters and human issues. I think it’d be great if people stopped looking at science fiction films as westerns.”
