Steven Soderbergh talked about a giant book on JawsSteven Spielberg's classic thriller that he first saw in 1975 and has been working on for nearly 15 years.
“I've been working on this thing [the book] which apparently concerns the direction and uses as its backbone an analysis of the making of Jaws “Every day,” Soderbergh revealed during an informal conversation at the Toronto Film Festival on Thursday.
Don't expect his how to do it Jaws They are sold at airports.
“This book is not for general consumption. It is for people interested in films, either as spectators or as [who] you want to do this work. Because if you want to do this work, you have to understand the work. This is the work,” Soderbergh said of his long-gestating passion project.
Expect more than a scene-by-scene analysis of Jaws: “I'll tell you how it was created, as a starting point for talking about problem solving and process.”
The problem is that the book is not finished yet and may never be completed, the Oscar-winning director warned. Writing about Jaws will take Soderbergh back to the first film that made him think he could become a Hollywood director.
He remembered seeing Jaws in a movie theater in St. Petersburg, Florida, at the age of 13 and emerging into the real world with two questions: “What does directed by Mean mean? And who is Steven Spielberg?”
Fortunately, Soderbergh understood The Jaws log, a Carl Gottlieb book about action thrillers that he pored over to learn how to solve problems on a movie set. “I carried this book with me, it was like the Bible. I wore out many copies,” he said.
And when Soderbergh got to high school and had his film equipment, he started making short films. The director was speaking at TIFF about his latest film, the spooky ghost story Presencestarring Lucy Liu, Chris Sullivan and newcomer Callina Liang, will have its international premiere.
He recalled his success with Sex, Lies and Videotape In 1989, independent cinema changed because Soderbergh, together with other directors such as Spike Lee and Jim Jarmusch, made the film industry suddenly see its first profits thanks to the adoption of auteur films, after an initial moment of glory in the 70s.
“It just seemed like people were ready to see something an individual had done after they had taken a breath. They wanted to see a signature. They wanted to feel like a real person was talking to them,” Soderbergh said.
Where are those distinctive arthouse films today? “This overlap of commercial cinema and a distinctive directorial presence lately, to be honest, is most evident in horror films,” Soderbergh said. He screened for the first time Presence at Sundance earlier this year, some 35 years after the debut of Sex, Lies and Videotape in Park City.
Soderbergh went on to direct an eclectic array of films such as Traffic, Erin Brockovich, Contagion, Magic Mike AND Behind the candelabras. Presence follows a family who moves into a new home only to recognize a disturbing presence in the house. The thrill of the haunted house is pushed to the point where the family seems on the verge of collapse.
Soderbergh told the TIFF audience that horror films are a perfect medium for filmmakers and even claimed that every film he's made since ThatHis epic two-part biopic about the Argentine doctor who became a global revolutionary was a genre film.
“I think everybody wins if you respect the pillars of that genre. You can fill this thing with whatever you want to fill it with,” Soderbergh explained. The story of Presence It was shot entirely in a single setting and from the ghost's point of view, with the camera moving inside the house during the apparition.
This allows Soderbergh’s subjective camera to take in every corner of the family’s old two-story house in a leafy suburb, quickly swooping over some spaces and zooming in for longer looks at others. “It’s a simple cinematic idea. You’re in a point of view and you’re in a house and you know you’re in a point of view, but you don’t know who it is,” he insisted.
Soderbergh said Presence It's about a family, that's for sure, but the genre element “is the Trojan horse to show a family in desperate circumstances, made even more intense by the fact that its members don't know they're in trouble.” Presence It is expected to be distributed by Neon.
Soderbergh also addressed the future of movie stars in the streaming age, where TV series may not need A-list stars to get aired, but theatrical releases do. “For movies to work, they need movie stars. It’s great if the story is big enough to draw people in on its own, but that’s hard, and increasingly hard, to do,” he argued.
An evolving business model for Hollywood has made it harder to measure the value of movie stars. “It’s become harder to quantify what brings people to a specific movie and what makes a specific movie successful,” Soderbergh noted.
Which makes it all the more critical that filmmakers do good work from great scripts. “Ultimately, the only solution is good stuff. You have to make good stuff. You have to focus on that,” Soderbergh said.