The hilarious reason Steven Soderbergh would never direct a superhero movie: “There’s no fucking”
The work of American writer, director, and cinematographer Steven Soderbergh spans over four decades of cinema and covers a multitude of genres and styles. A constant fixture of the industry, Soderbergh is a consistent and respected name, starting his career in 1989 with the release of his Palme d’Or-winning drama, Sex, Lies and Videotape before kicking off a career that flirted with mainstream Hollywood whilst thriving on its periphery.
Having told the media multiple times of his plans to retire from the film industry, Soderbergh has gone through several creative identities, embracing everything from low-budget independent drama to frenetic action cinema. Experiencing artistic high points, creative troughs and commercial success, he is an ever-adaptive filmmaker with an eclectic range of skills and abilities.
Ever since his success in the late 1980s, Soderbergh has had the chance to work with the likes of George Clooney, Matt Damon, Brad Pitt, Gary Oldman, Daniel Craig, Adam Driver and Channing Tatum, making something new and surprising with each outing. Though, despite his work having spanned multiple genres, one area Soderbergh is yet to leap into is the world of superheroes, which the filmmaker vocally opposes.
Speaking in an interview with The Daily Beast, the director outlined his intentions behind the 2022 movie Kimi, a thriller starring Zoë Kravitz as an agoraphobic Seattle tech worker who uncovers a mysterious crime, and, at the same time, he leant his thoughts towards the trend of contemporary superhero cinema.
“It really becomes about what universe you occupy as a storyteller,” the filmmaker states, revealing that he isn’t a “snob” toward the bombastic world of Marvel and DC movies. For Soderbergh, his interests are too rooted in reality for him to be entirely interested in taking on an Ant-Man or Doctor Strange tale: “I’m just too earthbound to really release myself to a universe in which Newtonian physics don’t exist”.
Continuing, the Kimi director explains that one lack of innate human desire holds him back from taking on these projects: “For me to understand the world and how to write or supervise the writing of the story and the characters—apart from the fact that I can bend time and defy gravity and shoot beams out of my fingers—there’s no fucking. Nobody’s fucking! Like, I don’t know how to tell people how to behave in a world in which that is not a thing”.
Indeed, it is not the abundance of CGI which is a problem for Soderbergh, nor the somewhat linear storytelling or paper-thin characters, it is the lack of sex which keeps him far away from Marvel.
It’s questions such as “Who’s paying these people? Who do they work for? How does this job come to be?” that Soderbergh simply can’t get his head around, and with his track record of largely earth-bound drama, who can blame him? “The fantasy-spectacle universe, as far as I can tell, typically doesn’t involve a lot of fucking,” the director definitively concludes.
