Ocean’s Eleven, Magic Mike and Black Bag’s Steven Soderbergh is still getting it done

Who else but Steven Soderbergh could release two feature films within two months of each other?

Horror film Presence, which is shot from the perspective of a ghost, was released in early February, and next week is the debut of suspenseful spy thriller, Black Bag, a star-studded affair with Cate Blanchett, Michael Fassbender and Pierce Brosnan.

For someone who won the Cannes Palme d’Or with his debut, the 1989 beloved indie flick Sex, Lies and Videotape, Soderbergh doesn’t need to be as nimble, prolific or efficient as he is.

When he won the 2000 Oscar for best director for Traffic, he beat not just Ridley Scott, Ang Lee and Stephen Daldry, he also bested himself for his work on Erin Brockovich. He and Michael Curtiz in 1939 are the only people to be nominated twice in the directing category in the same year.

Soderbergh is one of the great workhorses in Hollywood, always up to something. In 36 years, he’s directed 35 films such as Ocean’s Eleven, Magic Mike and Out of Sight and seven TV projects including Behind the Candelabra and The Knick – and that’s including a “retirement” from cinema in the mid-2010s when, sick of the business, he dedicated himself to painting.

It was the two-part Che Guevara biopic, Che, which was the catalyst for that step back. He still had his hand in TV and producing, but as he told The New York Times in 2017, “I’ve really lost my interest as a director – not as a producer or viewer – in anything that smells important. It just doesn’t appeal to me at all anymore. I left that in the jungle somewhere.

It was a script called Logan Lucky that lured him back. His wife, Jules Asner, had written it under a pseudonym, and it reinvigorated Soderbergh. But you can see in that in his post-retirement slate, he started to do things differently.

He was flexible and did most things either outside of the studio system or differently.

He shot his 2020 film, Let Them All Talk, over two weeks aboard the Queen Mary 2 as it crossed the Atlantic Ocean. He served as the director, cinematographer and editor, filming his actors (Meryl Streep, Candace Bergen, Dianne Wiest and Lucas Hedges) with a camera in a wheelchair and no other technical wizardry except for some sound equipment.

He also made two movies using only iPhones – the 2018 horror film Unsane and the 2019 sports drama High Flying Bird.

In an era where cinema films are either $200 million IP-driven franchise blockbusters or scrappy indies such as the five-time Oscar-winning Anora, it’s incredible that someone of Soderbergh’s stature and inventiveness is still getting things done in the mid-budget range, and getting those films onto a big screen

While heist caper No Sudden Move and Zoe Kravitz thriller Kimi were both released on HBO in the US, his three most recent films went to theatres first.

Black Bag, a London-set espionage mystery in which Fassbender’s spy needs to discover who among five people including his wife (Blanchett) is responsible for a security breach, might’ve been a dragged-out six-episode miniseries instead of a taut, 90-minute film from a lesser filmmaker.

It is testament to Soderbergh’s influence and work ethic that he got it done.

At an appearance at the Karlovy International Film Festival in July, he said in an onstage Q&A session that he still believed that the two-hour, feature-length story is here to stay.

“I could be wrong, but I’m told, at the least in the United States, by two of the independent distributors that I’ve been working with, they’re now seeing a wave of young people in their early 20s who are going to the movies and want to see something that is not a piece of IP,” he said.

“There’s a wave of young people familiarising themselves with cinema, and going to the movies regularly – and it’s been on the rise over the last few years. That’s encouraging.”

KEY SODERBERGH FILMS

SEX, LIES AND VIDEOTAPE

A revolutionary film that kickstarted an indie movement, the movie stars James Spader and Andie MacDowell. It’s a frank depiction of sexual desire, neuroses and repression.

TRAFFIC

With several intersection subplots, Traffic looks at the drug trade from different viewpoints, ranging from the politicians and enforcers to the users and the traffickers. Its enormous cast included Benicio del Toro, Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones.

OUT OF SIGHT

The first of Soderbergh’s collaborations with George Clooney, Out of Sight benefits greatly from the sizzling chemistry between the future Nescafe ambassador and Jennifer Lopez, as a fugitive bank robber and the US marshal tasked with catching him.

OCEAN’S TRILOGY

The heistiest of heist capers, the Ocean’s movies are so much fun thanks to their starry ensemble casts (Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Julia Roberts and the rest) and their elaborate schemes.

ERIN BROCKOVICH

Julia Roberts won an Oscar for her performance in this real-life David vs Goliath case in which a law secretary takes on a utility company for contaminating the land and poisoning the residents in a small town.

MAGIC MIKE

Inspired in part by Channing Tatum’s own experiences as a young stripper, Magic Mike isn’t just about hot, gyrating men, but also their inner lives and ambitions. It spawned two sequels.

CONTAGION

Every was watching this in the first weeks of Covid, maybe looking for a roadmap out. A highly contagious virus makes the jump from bat to human and a global pandemic ensues as it races to develop a vaccine.

LOGAN LUCKY

The film that pushed Soderbergh out of retirement, it’s about a working class family plotting to rob a NASCAR raceway. It stars Channing Tatum, Adam Driver, Riley Keogh and Daniel Craig.

HIGH FLYING BIRD

Shot on an iPhone, the sports drama stars Andre Holland as an agent trying to pull off a gutsy move involving a rookie basketball client during a league lockout.

BLACK BAG

A spy with a knack for ferreting out lies is put in a tough position when his wife becomes one of five suspects in security breach.