Understanding Steven Soderbergh. Part 2.

On my previous post I wrote about Steven Soderbergh’s professional life. The goal was to give some context on why I consider him a leading force in the future of filmmaking, regardless the quality or financial success of his most recent movies.

I started paying close attention to how Steven Soderbergh works around 2014 when he released the Cinemax show The Knick.

On this post (and the next one) I’ll share everything I know on Soderbergh’s production schedule, using the iPhone to shoot Unsane and High Flying Bird, his approach to scriptwriting, and why he prefers working with skeleton crews.

The huge advantages of small crews.

Let’s start with that last part. By now you know I prefer to shoot with the smallest possible crew and the least amount of gear. So much so that I recently started a new website called the 1 Person Crew. There I shared why Robert Rodriguez is also one of my heroes. But here’s Steven Soderbergh’s take on the advantages of working lean and mean:

“One of my favorite shooting days on High Flying Bird was when we did the opening scene at The Standard hotel. We took a break, and then we started walking downtown New York with a crew of four or five people, and André. I’m walking and I’ll go, “Okay, stop, we’ll put the camera here.” Shoot that, walk, walk, walk, okay, we’re stopping here. It was really fun. It took us two hours to walk and shoot our way down to the World Trade Center.”

Steven Soderbergh

Steven Soderbergh’s iPhone

“‘I don’t want to wait on the tool, the tool should wait on me.”

Steven Soderbergh quoting Orson Welles.

High Flying Bird and Soderbergh’s previous movie Unsane were shot on an Apple iPhone. It’s all about size, and the ability to get the shot he wants in tight quarters. In Unsane when space got particularly tight, Soderbergh would just tape the iPhone to the wall to get the frame he wanted.

The visuals are harsh and uncompromising, but Soderbergh sees that as part of the appeal. Unsane is a great worst-nightmare movie, a tense piece of low-budget auteurship that plops the viewer into an absurd scenario and then ratchets up the tension for the next 90 minutes.”

The Atlantic

For “High Flying Bird” Soderbergh originally wanted to shoot anamorphic, and have a much cleaner, slicker look. But the challenge was gaining access to real-life locations that embodied an affluent world. For a small, nimble production, the advantages of the iPhone outweighed the image fidelity of an ARRI or RED cameras that cost a hundred times more.

“The iPhone seemed to me a pretty natural fit for that approach. It still is, in my mind, in terms of the scale of it, the speed that was necessary to execute it, in the time we had allotted.”

Steven Soderbergh

On High Flying Bird there’s a shot where three actors are walking down an office corridor. As all three break in different directions the camera follows one actor into an office, and then retreats.

A 350-pounds dolly? Screw that! Instead, Soderbergh sat in a wheelchair, holding the iPhone on this tiny Gimbal mimicking a mini crane movement.

“Using a more traditional approach with normal-size cameras would have been extremely difficult, if not impossible. To get the lens where I wanted, to be moving in certain way or have the camera reach multiple destinations without either somebody getting hurt, or the shot being compromised because of the size of the equipment. A normal size dolly, weighs 350 pounds. Moving quickly can be dangerous and somebody could get hurt. And we could have been there for hours.”

Steven Soderbergh

“I get very frustrated when it takes a long time to execute it. Like, as soon as I feel it, I want to shoot it. And so, that’s one of the biggest benefits of this method — the time from the idea to seeing an iteration of it is incredibly short, like, a minute, like, maybe less. For me, the energy that that creates on set, and I think on screen, is huge.”

Steven Soderbergh

Soderbergh’s lighting package (shooting with the iPhone or proper cinema cameras) has been stripped down to a 12-inch by 12-inch LED panel (like this) in recent years. The look can be more evocative of a filmmaking student than an Oscar-winning director with 30 features under his belt. But this is as much an aesthetic as a practical decision, especially since 2000 when Soderbergh took over the cinematographer’s role on his films.

From Script to Screen.

The Knick’s original script called for 10 episodes. Instead of working on complete episodes one at a time Soderbergh turned the script into a “10-hour movie” shooting the first season in 73 days. In other words, Soderbergh shoot eight to nine script pages a day, double the typical rate for a TV drama. This wasn’t a new approach for him. Back in 2003 each episode for K Street was plotted, scripted, shot, cut, and broadcast in five days. Same exact story for the 2017 Netflix series Godless.

“The original script for Godless was 175 pages. Instead of chopping one of its limbs off, we thought “why don’t we turn this into a series?” So we approached Netflix with the idea and they said “Go. You’re starting tomorrow. Netflix ability to move that quickly and that definitively is their biggest advantage.”

Steven Soderbergh

On my next post I’ll share the gear, schedule and workflow Soderbergh used the the Cinemax series The Knick, and why I believe his production approach will be the way how many TV shows and features will be produced from now on.