Steven Soderbergh Quotes

I just produced Criminal, this remake of Nine Queens, and one of the things that appealed to me about Nine Queens is that it was a performance piece, and that's the most fun.

You're supposed to expand your mind to fit the art, you're not supposed to chop the art down to fit your mind.

Your take on things is what is either going to make you somebody people talk about or no.

A movie that costs only $1.6 million doesn't have to be a cultural event to turn a profit.

I guess I just look at talent as a very subjective thing. I mean, if you never tried playing an oboe, how do you know you're not the most talented oboe player ever? The point is that if you don't love it, then it doesn't matter.

It takes one asshole to ruin the whole thing. That's it. One. The problem with the world is one asshole comes up with a really bad idea and now we're all taking our shoes off at the airport.

We're all standing on the shoulders of what other people have done. But you're supposed to take that and add your own sauce. It can be intimidating, believe me.

Everything is the director's fault - you can quote me on that. There are no excuses.

There's a technical reason why I think that frame rate is weird and it has to with your brain's ability to scan beyond a certain rate. The point is I find it looks weird.

In the land of ideas, you are always renting.

Nobody's talking about movies the way they're talking about their favorite TV shows.

I'm a big believer that if there's something you really want to do, don't walk away because of the deal.

But my sense in talking to people when I travel is that the film business is not that dissimilar from a lot of other businesses.

If you're going to make a movie for ten thousand you can talk everybody into doing it for free. You could make a really good-looking movie right for ten grand, if you have an idea.

"A meteor hits planet Earth" - that's a story idea but that doesn't give me any indication of what the character is.

I don't consider myself to be particularly gifted in the way that other filmmakers are gifted.

Well, it's 15 years since Sex, Lies And Videotape, and if you hang around long enough you're having the same arguments with just a new set of people every few years and it gets boring.

I tend to be drawn more to people than pure story ideas.

People like Chris Nolan are shooting isolated sequences in IMAX. Those cameras are the size of a Volkswagen.

I come from a generation that was surrounded by popular music, but I don't know if anybody's ever going to move the ball forward as far and as fast as the Beatles did.

There is sadness of when you're watching someone enjoy something that you think is substandard. The ineffable sadness when someone is happy and something is not as good as it should be.

Traffic is about drugs. As detailed a portrait as I can muster about what is happening in the drug world, from top to bottom, from policy to how things move on the street.

My first three movies, I didn't start editing until we were finished shooting. That's unthinkable to me now.

If you're sitting around thinking what other people think about your work, you'll just become paralysed.

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.

Lying is like alcoholism. You are always recovering.

I'm sure some people will say, 'Why do this?' And my response is, 'Why wouldn't you?' The film business in general is using a model that is outdated and, worse than that, inefficient.

The key is, how do you feel with the one asshole? They cannot be talked to. That's why they are assholes.

[I watch] Fincher, Spielberg, Cameron, McTiernan. Just people who are good at staging action. I like to know where I am. I don't like the kind of cutting where you don't know where you are.

The art model of problem solving is incredibly efficient because ideology has no place there.There's only the thing and what the thing needs to be.

Some filmmakers, you know, have their style and then they kind of go looking for the movie. I'm not like that. I don't have one style that I want to take from movie to movie.

I guess why the Ocean's films are hard for me is because on the one hand you have to make sure the performances are there, but on the other hand it's a film that demands, to my mind, a very layered and complex visual scheme. That takes a lot of time to figure out.

You got to deal with reviews the same way you deal with your views, which I a long time ago stopped reading because the point is if you believe the good ones you have to believe the bad ones. It's kind of all or nothing.

I'm probably more character-driven than plot-driven. It's rare for me to attach myself to an idea for a story.

I feel I need to really think about whether there's a way to use what skill I have to address things that outrage me, like the 13 year old girl getting stoned to death. Because I don't think making a movie is going to help that, or change that.

I like to make all kinds of movies. I'd do 'Ocean's Thirteen' with the right script.

Once I had a potentially heart attack-inducing eight double espressos in one day. I think my assistant secretly swaps my coffees for decaf as she doesn't want me to die of caffeine overdose.

If you're not smart enough to know what Fidel meant during the Cuban revolution, that - when they were on the Granma - Fidel was already a rock star in Cuba, and how important that was to the indigenous population, then you're not paying attention.

All human interaction, you can break it down to incentives. All relationships, at some level, are transactional. They're fascinated with incentives.

Never done an explosion, but I have had explosive diarrhea, and that was very, very real. Good thing I have my trailer.

My experience over the years with working with people who are not actors or not trained actors is that you have to get to know them well enough to see what they have that's translatable onto the screen. So you're constantly calibrating to play to their strengths. And the key is to never ask them to do things that are beyond their abilities or are really far away from who they are at their core.

The key is, if you're not monkeying around with the script, then everything usually goes pretty well.

I know why we can't have a frank discussion with our policymakers - if you're in the government or in law enforcement you cannot acknowledge that drugs are anything but inherently evil and morally wrong.

I suppose I could try to be some avant-garde artist if I wanted to, but that doesn't interest me as much.

So I think that life is sort of like a drumbeat. It has a rhythm and sometimes it's fast and sometimes it's slower, and maybe what's happening is this drumbeat is just accelerating and it's gotten to the point where I can't hear between the beats anymore and it's just a hum.

If I'm a director and I read a script and I say yeah I really want to do this, I would never walk away because the deal wasn't very good - that I wasn't getting paid very much or that the chances that I would see anything on the back end were remote because of the financial waterfall and the way it's structured. I would never use that as a reason not to do something.

If you're a painter and you want people to know who you are and recognize your work, you've got to build some long-term value.

I'm a grinder. I'll beat you because I will not sleep.

I've never been a snob. It [movie] is just about stories. And I've never felt just because it's a big screen and you plop down your eight bucks that gives it a special meaning. It's just "Are you good at telling a story?"

Castro, without question, is one of the smartest politicians that's ever walked.

To me the director's job is to leave it in better shape than you found it, literally.

I've begun to believe more and more that movies are all about transitions, that the key to making good movies is to pay attention to the transition between scenes. And not just how you get from one scene to the next, but where you leave a scene and where you come into a new scene. Those are some of the most important decisions that you make. It can be the difference between a movie that works and a movie that doesn't.

Truth and facts have to trump partisanship. There has to be something that's true regardless of what your angle is on it.

That's why my attitude, even on my larger-scale movies, is to make them cheap. The less these things cost, the better for everybody.

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.

Any time I think out loud, 'I can't believe this is my job,' and remember I am a very lucky duck. Whether marshalling hundreds of zombies, doing crazy stunts or shooting big music numbers, I just feel fortunate to have made my passion my vocation.

I can make a movie about Lee Harvey Oswald and make you feel what he feels and make you understand why he believes what he believes. That doesn't mean I think you should go out and shoot JFK.

When you're sent something and read it, either you can see it while you read it, or you can't.

When I look around the world and think why is everything working or not working, it's because it's entrenched ideology. You can't solve a problem if you're sitting down with people who say, "All these ideas are off the table because of what I believe."

Surprisingly, I don't throw away that much. I don't move forward with a lot of things unless they're going somewhere. You also have to remember that when you're working with other artists, you have to be really careful about how you deal with that stuff.

There are three major social issues that this country is struggling with: education, poverty, and drugs. Two of them we talk about, and one of them we don't.

I've tried to get better about weighing what I think the accessibility of an idea is against the cost of executing it. I've tried to be smarter about that, because if you're not smart about that, you're going to be unemployed. But I'm still mystified about what works for people. And I'm not talking about my movies, I'm talking in general. I'm mystified by the stuff that doesn't work. I'm mystified by what's going on in the critical side, too.

I find myself in situations a lot where I have to say to someone, "This can be better," and it's hard to say that.

I think there are only two times that I've ever ended up paying somebody their quote. Like what they actually were worth in the marketplace.

I think the feeling that we're going to work together again usually starts to come up before the first project's even done. The Black Keys and I have already talked about starting on something new.

Everything had been done long before I started making movies. I mean, there's nothing that Godard hasn't already done. You can't do a single thing that Godard hasn't already thought of. And so you struggle to do something that is not predictable.

You can't get good at anything unless you do it day in and day out, over and over.

Every time you make something that somebody likes, your impulse is to remind them that if you hadn't made some of these other things that they hated, you wouldn't have been able to make the thing that they liked.

Never had a cup of coffee in my life. Dr Pepper is my caffeine delivery system of choice.

What are the stories you want people to tell about you?

I think that music is a very difficult art form in which to be avant-garde. When we sit down to listen to a piece of music, I think our implicit hope is that we're going to find it beautiful, or at least emotional, on some level.

Reality shows are all the rage on TV at the moment, but that's not reality, it's just another aesthetic form of fiction.

Making a film that's supposed to be fun to watch is really hard - that's the weird irony of it.

Stuff I like is getting trashed and stuff that is being praised I think is terrible. I don't really feel in sync with what's happening, but at the same time, what I think keeps me afloat is that I try not to be, and don't want to be, very indulgent. I try to make the films as lean as possible, and to not spend a lot of time crawling up my own ass creatively.

In Full Frontal and K Street, I learned to take advantage of the mobility that digital provides.

I stopped reading reviews about my own movies. I read stuff about other people's movies.

A real litmus test for me is how people treat someone who is waiting on them. That's a dealbreaker for me.If I were on the verge of getting into a serious relationship and I saw that person be mean to a waiter ... I'm out.

I'm not a snob. If I feel like there's a star that's the best person for that role, then that's who I get.

A lot of people go to the movies wanting the movie to be about feelings, and it's really not about that. Or rather it's about feelings in the abstract.

I'm very comfortable with failure. I'm very comfortable being the guy who disappoints people.

The best set was probably 'Bloody Sunday.' We had no money for extras and gambled on months of outreach to persuade the people of Derry to turn out and march for us on one single afternoon. And they did. In their tens of thousands. Seeing them march, their patience and their dignity and their commitment, I knew the movie would have a quality of truth.

I just find it annoying that in these sequences [ of the fight scenes], traditionally, there's music trying to pump you up. I don't like that, personally, as an audience member. This just reflects my taste.

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.

It's pretty clear to me that working as a director for hire agrees with me. I like it. The films that have come out of that, I personally like better than the ones that didn't.

Men tend to define themselves by what they do, and so if you're dealing with a character who's trying to figure that out, or multiple characters, then there's something there for guys, too.

I had more fun making Traffic than either of the Ocean's films.

When things go right it's hard to figure out why, but when things go wrong it's really easy.

Jude [Law] is really good at playing an obsessive. He has a very watchable quality when he's on a quest for something.

I don't have any kind of ideology that precludes me from moving in one direction or another. I just want creative autonomy and I want at least an opportunity that it's going to be seen.

We have to have a version of our own story that we keep telling ourselves that allows us to get up in the morning. This version of yourself is what you sell to yourself. I think it necessarily includes ... not looking at certain things. Everybody's got some blind spot.

I think about art a lot only in two contexts. One is narrative.The other thing that I'm interested in, which is tangential, but not unrelated ... All art to me is about problem solving.

I look at other filmmakers and see skills in them that I wish I had but I know that I don't. I feel like I have to work really hard to keep myself afloat, doing what I do. But I find it pleasurable.

The ought to be a worldwide cultural taskforce that just stops you when you have ideas like combining The Red Desert with an armored car heist movie.

You're being mean to someone who's helping you. What is that? Everyone knows who the assholes are, and I avoid them.

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.