The movie Steven Soderbergh “couldn’t direct 30 seconds of”
The career of director Steven Soderbergh is one of those rare instances where a filmmaker has simultaneously managed to master the art of the blockbuster mega-hit and the indie critical darling. With Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Erin Brockovich, Traffic, Ocean’s Eleven, Che and Magic Mike to his name, Soderbergh has established himself as one of the big players in American cinema.
It’s often felt that there’s no genre or movie that Soderbergh would not be able to make into a production of the highest order, but even as a director with widespread acclaim, he has admitted that there are some projects that he’d never be able to take on, including a critically admired dystopian action movie.
“The ability to stage well is a skill and a talent that I value above almost everything else,” Soderbergh once told The Hollywood Reporter. “And I say that because there are people who do it better than I’ll ever be able to do it after 40 years of active study. I just watched Mad Max: Fury Road again last week, and I tell you I couldn’t direct 30 seconds of that.”
“I’d put a gun in my mouth,” the director added. “I don’t understand how [George Miller] does that, I really don’t, and it’s my job to understand it. I don’t understand two things: I don’t understand how they’re not still shooting that film, and I don’t understand how hundreds of people aren’t dead.”
Mad Max: Fury Road arrived on screens in 2015 with George Miller co-producing, co-directing and co-writing the fourth instalment in the longstanding film franchise. Starring Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron, and Nicholas Hoult, Fury Road returns to the barren post-apocalyptic wasteland to envision a dangerous, resource-scarce future.
“But he’s off the chart,” Soderberg said of Miller. “I guarantee that the handful of people who are even in range of that, when they saw Fury Road, had blood squirting out of their eyes. The thing with George Miller, it’s not just that, he does everything really well.”
The director signed off, “The scripts are great, the performances are great, the ideas are great. He’s exceptional. I met him once for about 30 seconds at the Directors Guild Awards in Los Angeles the year of Fury Road. But you don’t want to say that stuff to somebody’s face; it’s embarrassing.”
Check out the trailer for Mad Max: Fury Road below.
