The one director Steven Soderbergh admitted he was never going to catch: “What can I get better at?
The career of Steven Soderbergh is a fascinating thing because as much as filmmakers love to talk a big game and say there’s nothing they can’t or won’t do, he’s built his livelihood on being one of the few who actually went out of their way to back it up.
Eclecticism has always been at the forefront of the auteur’s thinking, and any new advancements in technology are something he’ll be quick to jump on. Even when he ‘retired’ from the industry, Soderbergh couldn’t help but toy around with new avenues of creating visual, episodic, or multimedia entertainment that tested uncharted waters.
Breaking through as the face of independent cinema’s latest evolution in the late 1980s, Soderbergh has almost done it all. He’s got an Academy Award for ‘Best Director’ under his belt for Traffic, helmed a crowd-pleasing biopic in Erin Brockovich, steered a blockbuster franchise to almost a billion dollars at the box office through his Ocean’s trilogy, and adopted the iPhone for horror flick Unsane and drama High Flying Bird.
Throw in writing and directing every episode of The Knick, remaking Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris for seemingly no other reason than shits and giggles, mounting two-part biopic Che that saw each half unfold under drastically different circumstances, and psychological thriller Presence being shot entirely from the perspective of an unseen entity, there isn’t much he’s yet to check off the list.
That makes Soderbergh one of a kind in a way that few others can lay claim to, but he’s still constantly looking ahead. If he had wanted to be a full-time populist filmmaker, he would have made that jump long ago, but keeping his creative energies refreshed and heading down new avenues has always been integral to his approach.
And yet, there’s one director he’ll always see himself lagging behind, but there’s no shame in that when they’re an all-time great. “Yeah,” he responded to Film Comment when asked if his film-on-film improvements as an artist had a limit. “Spielberg. His staging ability. I’m never going to catch him.”
Set pieces have Steven Spielberg’s lifeblood since his earliest days behind the camera, and while Soderbergh knows he’ll never usurp him there, he’s willing to try. “But when you’re trying to figure out how to get better; I’m not competitive in the sense of looking around at other filmmakers and comparing myself to them,” he explained. “What I do have to think about in trying to navigate myself through a career is: what can I get better at, and what do I have that I can enhance that somebody else doesn’t have?”
What Soderbergh has that somebody else doesn’t have is undoubtedly versatility. He could probably make an Indiana Jones sequel if he wanted to, but Spielberg could never take the reins on Magic Mike. Not many have been able to catch cinema’s highest-grossing director ever, in fairness, but it’s hardly been to Soderbergh’s great shame and embarrassment.
