"Two frames can be the difference between something that works and something that doesn’t. It’s fascinating."

I watched Steven Soderbergh's "The Girlfriend Experience" the other night. Like his other improvised film with non-actors, "Bubble," it was pretty fascinating. And like Soderbergh's "The Limey" the film played around with time fracture/memory/sequencing brilliantly via editing. I went in search of more info, and came across this interview with Soderbergh from January 2012 by Scott Tobias. The Onion A.V. Club's interviews are the best - they always get to the nerdy nitty gritty. Excerpts from the interview below.

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AVC: Given your collaboration with Lem Dobbs with this and The Limey, and your films in general, I was curious to know when in the process you leave the writer behind. Have there been other situations [like The Limey] where you found yourself radically altering the film as written in the shooting and editing process?

SS: The answer to the first question is, I never leave the writer behind, because you rewrite the movie in post, or at least I do. I always do, and I feel like anybody who doesn’t at least explore that possibility is short-changing themselves. Editing is the most fun and most exciting part of the process. I was showing Lem every iteration to get his thoughts, and talk about structure, and talk about, “Hey, if we wanted to shoot some more stuff, what would it be?” So that’s an ongoing discussion. Haywire is fairly close to what’s written, but when [we were in post], we tried a lot of different structures there before settling on the one we have now. And, ironically, the film that went through the most transformation in post that I’ve ever made was The Limey. That was completely built in the editing room.

AVC: Did you sense when you were putting The Limey together that Lem would have some displeasure, or did that all come later? That was the most scared I’ve ever been in an editing room. It was shot and cut chronologically. It was written that way, and it was done that way, and it didn’t work. I’m not saying that’s the script’s fault. I’m just saying it didn’t work. It had to be rethought from frame one. And before we figured out what the algorithm was, I thought we were in trouble. I remember the day—God, this would be January 1999—Out of Sight had just won the National Society Of Film Critics awards for picture, director, and screenplay, and I got a call from Stacey Sher, one of the producers, going, “I’ve got great news, it was just announced that blah blah blah.” And I remember thinking, “I really don’t care. I would trade that for one edit that would work.” It was one of those weird juxtapositions of people applauding you and the reality of what you’re experiencing in the moment is, “I’m in real trouble. I’m stuck.” And it was ironically a piece of music that Cliff Martinez had sent to me to listen to that got us unstuck. It was this piece that runs throughout the movie, a sort of piano riff. It’s very atmospheric, very cinematic. Just by chance he said, “Here’s a little doodle I’ve been working on,” and when I heard it, it had a memory sound. And I said to [editor] Sarah Flack, “Load that into the AVID,” and I just started rattling off a list of random images from the film, and I said, “Put these images together. Just playing them.” And we started looking at images juxtaposed over that piece of music and suddenly I could see, “This is what we have to do. This is what we’re going to do to solve this.” And we started, and it was painstaking, but that’s how we figured it out.

AVC: And you’ve never had an experience quite like that?

SS: I’ve been in situations where I’ve felt like, “We’ve got some work to do,” or “I need to do some more shooting,” or, “I’m going to have to make some tough decisions.” I have an hour of edited material that was cut out of Contagion. I had to make some really, really tough choices there.

AVC: Are you ultimately pleased to make those choices?

SS: Yeah, you have to.

AVC: You’re not someone who’s like, “Well, I want a three-hour cut down the line at some point”?

SS: No, not at all. I’m not precious about anything. The effort it took to get something means nothing to me in post. It means nothing to the audience. I’ll chop limbs off. I’ll put an arm where a leg should be. I’ll do anything.

AVC: But it sometimes means something to the actors and writers, doesn’t it?

SS: Yeah. But, again, everybody, including me, has to submit to what it needs to be. The thing is at the top of the pyramid, the best version of the thing; we all have to serve that. You forget that at your own risk. And I think movies are too long, in general.

AVC: Is that the part of the process you like the most, the editing?

SS: Yeah. Absolutely.

AVC: Why? Just the control?

SS: It’s so unique. There’s nothing else exactly like it in any other art form, the orchestration of so many different elements. It’s endlessly fascinating what can be done editorially. You can create meaning where there was none, you can create feeling where there was none, you can create narrative where there was none. Two frames can be the difference between something that works and something that doesn’t. It’s fascinating.

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AVC: How much planning do you do before you’re on set? Because with something like Contagion, where you have explicate a lot of complicated information, it seems like you’d have to be very meticulous, but then you have something like The Girlfriend Experience, which incorporates lots of external elements and seems a little looser. Does it vary from project to project?

SS: No, not really. I have a plan, I always have a plan, but then I’m always ready to throw the plan out, and everyone’s ready to make a radical left turn if necessary. But they’re all pretty similar. What helps is, I make sure the writers are around. Or if they’re not on set, they’re easily accessible. How to shoot is not normally the difficult part. What to shoot is always the question. Chances are, if you’re having trouble with how to shoot something, it’s because there’s something wrong with the “what.” And I start to go down the list of questions like, “Why is this resisting all of my efforts to capture it properly? What’s wrong? Is it the text? Are we in the wrong location? Are there one too many characters in the scene? Something’s not right.” I’ll slow everything down and stop. I’ll just stop completely with the cast and the writers and try to figure out, “Why isn’t this working?” It doesn’t happen a lot, but there’ve been days. 

There was a day on one of the Ocean’s movies where I just sent everybody home. We had this one scene—it was one of the scenes in those movies where you have 11 people talking—and I just couldn’t come up with a solution. I was just stuck. I just didn’t know how I wanted to do it. We had two days’ schedule to do it, and at lunchtime on the first day I sent everybody home. I said, “You can just go home, I don’t know how to do this. I need to think.” And I decided how to do it that afternoon, and we came in the next morning and we were finished by 11 o’clock, because once I knew what to do, we went through it very quickly. I’ve learned that you can’t force it; you just got to stop and figure it out.

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AVC: You talked about critical perception. What do you feel is your most underrated film? Is there an orphan in your filmography that you’d like to see adopted?

SS: I don’t know. My sense of [critical reaction] since Traffic is based on a vague understanding of what the response is, because I stopped reading reviews about my own movies. I read stuff about other people’s movies. My sense is that The Good German was not fully understood. Probably of all of them, that would be the one. There are other things that have been lambasted that I think had things wrong with them, but [The Good German], creatively, from my standpoint, is a very unified piece, and was, again, from my viewpoint, successful at what it was trying to do. It’s a weird thing to say, but it would appear to me axiomatic that if you understood fully what I was doing and appreciated it, you would like it. But that issue was more in the forefront because it needed critical support to work commercially, and it didn’t get it. So it lost every nickel. The lesson coming out of that one for me was that you should never assume anything coming from a critical standpoint. You should go into everything assuming you’re going to get crushed. It’s like when people talk about Obama. My whole attitude is, “You should govern like you aren’t going to get a second term.” I make every movie like it’s the last one. “If this was the last movie, what decision would I make?” That’s how I make my decisions.