The war movie Steven Soderbergh called “one of the best things I’ve ever seen”
As someone with experience in making critically acclaimed indie gems such as Sex, Lies, and Videotape, as well as big-budget franchises like the Ocean’s series, Steven Soderbergh has extensive knowledge about the different domains in the cinematic landscape. Earning praise from film scholars as well as garnering impressive box office numbers, Soderbergh has done it all.
While Soderbergh’s late-stage style in recent years has not managed to grab the same kind of attention as some of his previous works, it’s still fascinating to see how the American filmmaker’s visual framework has evolved through films like No Sudden Move. It’s something that Soderbergh’s most hardcore fans had highly anticipated for his next project, a psychological thriller called Presence, which premiered at Sundance earlier this year.
Interestingly, Soderbergh’s cinematic signature could also be useful for an unconventionally gripping war movie, which he had initially planned to focus on while making a film about the Korean War. The Ocean’s Eleven director was particularly inspired by one infamously harrowing masterpiece of the genre: Elem Klimov’s 1985 magnum opus Come and See.
Soderbergh told Playlist: “It’s an interesting conflict, and I wanted to model it along the lines of Elem Kilmov‘s film Come and See. He stopped making films after he made it. It’s one of the best things I’ve ever seen. You can be sure that Steven Spielberg saw it before he went and did Schindler’s List. It’s unbelievable. It follows this sort of young kid through these events in the Second World War, and it’s stunning. And I wanted to do something along those lines where it was kind of, where it had an abstract, episodic, surreal quality.”
Often regarded as the greatest anti-war film ever made, Come and See is a haunting exploration of humanity’s inherent relationship with violence by focusing on the destruction and despair of wartime atrocities, seen through the eyes of a young boy whose innocence is lost forever. Soderbergh had hoped to bring that same unsettling energy to his vision.
Talking about the Korean War in which his father had served, Soderbergh added: “Visually, it was a very interesting war. It didn’t go anywhere, but for a few months, I was thinking about it and reading a lot about it, and that was at least a context in which visually there was action stuff in it, but it wasn’t like this. I thought, ‘Oh, there are a couple of things; there are a couple of ideas for large-scale sequences that I’d like to try.'”
While that project never saw the light of day, Soderbergh had a clear vision in his mind of what he wanted to create, maintaining that he wanted to go in the opposite direction compared to Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan. As he continues to develop his late style, a war film à la Come and See might still be on the table for the Magic Mike filmmaker.
