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Steven Soderbergh assumed he’d be making in the middle of making a “Star Wars” film right about now. His and Adam Driver’s idea for bringing back the actor’s Kylo Ren character in “The Hunt for Ben Solo” seemed like a go, but instead became the first time in “Star Wars” history that a script approved by LucasFilm was shelved by Disney.
Despite Soderbergh’s well-earned reputation for speed and efficiency, even he knew the big tentpole, VFX-driven franchise film would be two years of his life, so when it fell apart, he had an unexpected and uncharacteristic void in his schedule with no other projects lined up to fill it.
“It didn’t seem to be an option to remain passive in this situation; I needed to find something to do,” said Soderbergh in an interview with IndieWire for his new film “The Christophers.” “I talked to Michael Sugar, my manager, and said, ‘Start looking for stuff, and while you’re looking, I’m going to start writing.’”
Soderbergh doesn’t necessarily consider himself a screenwriter, preferring to lean on repeated collaborations with in-demand screenwriters like Ed Solomon (“The Christophers,” “No Sudden Movie,” “Full Circle,” “Mosiac”), David Koepp (“Black Bag,” “Kimi”), and Scott Z. Burns (“The Informant!,” “Contagion,” “Side Effects,” “The Laundromat”), but he wasn’t willing to wait around and got to writing himself.
“I’ve owned this John Barth novel (“The Sot-Weed Factor”) for 30 years, so I finally [took a] crack at that, and there were two other things that were two sentence ideas, that I thought, ‘There’s nothing stopping me from sitting down and working on these,” said Soderbergh. “So it was really a way of filling up a blank space where I didn’t think there was gonna be a blank space.”
And in typical Soderbergh fashion, he finished all three scripts, one of which he told IndieWire would be his next film.
“As it turned out, it was really good for me because I got into a rhythm,” said Soderbergh. “In addition to the [three] scripts, I finished the ‘Jaws’ book, which was long, long, long gestating.”
It’s the exact opposite of what happened to Soderbergh’s fictional painter, Julian Sklar (Ian McKellan), in his new film “The Christophers.” Sklar hasn’t painted in decades, and his once-successful career and the unfinished portraits in his attic (“The Christophers” of the film’s title) haunt him to the point of paralysis. For Soderbergh, the key was to adapt the mindset he had before he became a successful director and his 1989 breakout “Sex, Lies, and Videotape.”
“I just kind of pretended, “this is Pre-‘Sex, Lies,’” said Soderbergh. “What was I doing then? I was writing constantly to see if I could generate something that would get me work.”
Soderbergh has always valued his relationship with other filmmakers, relationships that kept from following in Sklar’s fictional footsteps.
“He’s so alone, I luckily have friends and colleagues who I can talk to [about] these things and be inspired by. My setup as a human being involves a lot of encounters and conversations with other people,” said Soderbergh. “Between Julian’s children and his friends, some of whom have passed on — and a lot of whom I think he just doesn’t talk to because he was so caustic and critical toward most of them — he’s not really incentivized.”
A Neon release, “The Christophers” expands on Friday, April 17.
English (US) ·