Interview (Written): Steven Soderbergh

The director comes out of ‘retirement’ to make Logan Lucky.

Four years ago with Behind the Candelabra, Steven Soderbergh announced his retirement from making movies. Since then he directed all 20 episodes of the Cinemax series ‘The Knick’ and exec produced ‘The Girlfriend Experience’ (Starz) and ‘Red Oaks’ (Amazon). But now with Logan Lucky, he has returned to movies a medium he knows so well with numerous credits including Sex, Lies, and Videotapes, Out of Sight, The Limey, Erin Brockovich, Oceans Eleven, Oceans Twelve, and Magic Mike.

In this Entertainment Weekly interview, Soderbergh describes why he returned to directing movies.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: What is your origin with the project? How does it end up in front of you?
 STEVEN SODERBERGH: I was given the script through a friend and asked if I would recommend some possible directors. Not unlike Bud Selig when he was charged with finding a commissioner for Major League Baseball, I thought that I was the right person to direct this film, and the search was stopping. I really couldn’t bear the thought of somebody else getting to do it. Now, that happened to coincide with some ideas that I’d had regarding distribution, and the timing seemed right. It was a movie that I very much wanted to make and also the opportunity to experiment with this new model was becoming possible, so I decided to pull the trigger.

I do want to dig in and talk about the model, because you’ve said that you’re “testing out personal theories” with this release. What’s the plan, and what are those theories?
 By all standards, this is a studio movie. It’s a very commercial movie with movie stars in it that’s going to go out to 2,500 to 3,000 screens. The question is, “Can you do what the studios normally do from a distribution standpoint with a lot less resources and with a much better economic structure for the people who made the film?”

So this is your critique of studio distribution and an attempt to simplify it.
 My feeling is that it’s gotten way too expensive to release a film wide, and the way that the economic structure of a studio is set up, if you’ve what we’ve done on this movie — which is everybody’s worked for scale — you’re too far away from your money. That’s why there is no middle man. There is no one talking a cut. The money is coming directly back to the creative pool.

This sounds like a much larger version of what Shane Carruth did on Upstream Color, which he released entirely by himself.
 If it works, it’s a lane for people like myself to drive in. We formed Fingerprint Releasing to do this and to be able to export this to other filmmakers. So if someone like Alejandro Iñárritu, Alexander Payne, or Sofia Coppola wants to use this model that we’ve set up, it’s sitting there ready to be used.

Is there any kind of short explanation for what the plan is?
 There’s no one component that hasn’t been done before, but I think it’s a combination of components. There have been advancements in technology that make it a lot easier to get a movie out in 3,000 screens than it was even two years ago. The economic model is pretty simple. You sell the foreign to cover the cost of the [film] negative. We sell the non-theatrical rights to cover the cost of the [prints and advertising], and that’s it. It’s really simple. People have done this before. The distribution part is only a little different because we control it in a way that you normally don’t get to control distribution.

And Logan Lucky is the movie to test that with?
 It was just one of those moments where the planets aligned. All of the indicators are there, that I should be doing this. I’m excited about it creatively because it’s the kind of movie that I like to make. It’s the kind of movie that I like to see. Some of these issues that I’ve had in the past with the way movies are released can be mitigated. It seemed like all green lights to me.

Here is a trailer for Logan Lucky:

For the rest of the Entertainment Weekly interview, go here.

Movie Website.

NOTE: There is a lot of speculation about who the screenwriter is. Officially her name is Rebecca Blunt, however on IMDb Pro, she has no agent, no manager, no nothing. Per a Vanity Fair article:

Blunt, says Soderbergh, is a real woman with a journalism background who is from West Virginia; the lived-in, hangin’ out vibe in her screenplay comes, so he says, from her direct experiences. The Charlotte Motor Speedway (the site of the picture’s big set piece) really did have sinkholes that required miners to patch up. “That sparked her imagination about what’s under there.”

But who is this woman? According to Soderbergh, she’s a friend of his wife (E! correspondent and former model Jules Asner), who gave him, as he puts it, “a Sophie’s choice.” As everyone knows, the least chill thing you can do is ask your friend to give your script to their big-time filmmaker spouse.

“If you enable this behavior, you’ve done something wrong.” Soderbergh shrugs. “But if you say no to your wife, you’ve done something wrong. There’s no good answer here.”

Whoever wrote the script, it looks like a helluva lot of fun.