Steven Soderbergh

Steve Sands/Getty Images

Martin Scorsese and Bobby Cannavale

Nico Tavernese/HBO

Lena Dunham

Jessica Miglio/HBO

Jean-Marc Vallée

Hilary Bronwyn Gayle/HBO
Fill 1
Fill 1
March 29, 2016
Features

Personal Best

"Where can I go do work that I'm really excited about?" When Steven Soderbergh asked himself that question, the answer was television. 

Tatiana Siegel

There are no sweeping city views from Steven Soderbergh's offices in Lower Manhattan.

The windows in his fourth-floor Tribeca suite simply look out at a brick wall, just a couple of feet away. Inside, the space is remarkably uncluttered. The vintage stainless steel desks and furniture complement Soderbergh's own work style: all efficiency, no distractions. After all, he's been known to edit in the van on the drive home from an all-day shoot.

Dressed on this winter day in utilitarian jeans, unbuttoned shirt and work boots, the Oscar-winning director of Traffic — who famously retired from film directing in 2011 — is entirely focused as he prepares to explain why he abandoned cinema to pursue his art on the small screen. It winds up being a 90-minute answer. But when Soderbergh commits to something, he doesn't go halfway.

"I'm a completionist," he says, never once taking a break during the conversation to read an email or text, interact with an entourage (only his assistant floats quietly into the room now and then) or even sip water. "I'm just built that way. I don't have an 'on' and an 'off' switch."

That ethos was evident in his series The Knick, which he executive-produced. He also directed, shot and edited all 20 episodes of the Cinemax hit, just as he had done 13 years ago with sister network HBO's groundbreaking but short-lived political series K Street.

Along the way, Soderbergh has become the poster boy for film auteurs moving to television, bringing a cinematic vision and quality to the medium. In the wake of his K Street experiment, he has been followed by the likes of David Fincher, Martin Scorsese, Cary Fukunaga and Jean-Marc Vallée — a once improbable prospect akin to a roster of all-star baseball players snubbing the majors to suit up for a Minor League team.

On April 10, his latest series, The Girlfriend Experience — inspired by a 2009 film that he directed — will debut on Starz. Soderbergh hand-picked Lodge Kerrigan and Amy Seimetz to write and direct the 13 episodes and turned to Riley Keough, whom he'd cast in his 2012 romp Magic Mike, to star as a law firm intern who moonlights as a transactional sex worker.

As for his so-called retirement from film directing, he says: "Yeah, yeah. Very happy in television land," then goes on to explain: "The economics [of the film business] don't make any sense to me and have a detrimental impact on how decisions get made. I understand I'm in a business, but I don't want to work in a bad business.

"And I felt it had become a bad business for me. I just was not having any fun."

A double Emmy winner for HBO's Liberace biopic, Behind the Candelabra — and an executive producer of Amazon's coming-of-age comedy, Red Oaks — Soderbergh downplays his role as a trendsetter,

"I can only assume that anybody would be making that decision using criteria similar to mine, which is, 'Where can I go do work that I'm really excited about?'"

Auteur is French for author.

In Hollywood parlance, it means a filmmaker whose personal influence and artistic control over a movie are so great that he or she is regarded as the author of the movie. But to network executives, the term increasingly means an acclaimed film director with a distinct aesthetic or style of storytelling who moves to the small screen as an executive producer.

"Film is a director's medium, television is a producer's medium," says Starz CEO Chris Albrecht. "What you have in Steven with Girlfriend Experience is an executive producer's mind, a director's talent, a storyteller who chose these two people — Amy and Lodge — to execute what he saw as this interesting piece of art that could be told in 13 half hours of television.

"Steven is the keeper of the vision but [also] the guy who can take the paintbrush out of the artist's hand and do a perfect stroke on the canvas. So the idea of auteur to me is a consistent vision."

Albrecht worked with Soderbergh on K Street back when he was running HBO. Looking to land a slot on Soderbergh's post-film retirement dance card, he emailed the director in 2014.

"I said, 'Hey, don't forget your old friend Chris,'" Albrecht recalls. "He said, 'I've got something for you, but you've got to let me do it my way.

"You've got to give me the money, you've got to let me go off, and I'm going to bring you back this film.' It's not a normal way to do stuff, It's something you would only consider with very few people, and Steven is the top of that list — not just because he's such a great filmmaker but also because we've watched him doing television at the same high level that he executes in features."

Soderbergh paired Seimetz and Kerrigan — who, as creator-writer-executive producer-directors, are signed on for two seasons — having worked with Kerrigan on a never-released indie, In God's Hands. He says he "hovered around" while the arc of the Girlfriend season was being built and gave notes on all the scripts.

"It was kind of an experiment to see if I could supervise a version of the way we worked on The Knick," he explains, "in which you give two filmmakers complete freedom within a certain economic parameter to do whatever they want."

During a sit-down interview at the Sundance Film Festival, Kerrigan offers a simple assessment of Soderbergh's role: "He empowers you to go do your thing." That the first four episodes of Girlfriend Experience debuted at the venerable indie festival is further proof that auteur TV is becoming synonymous with traditional cinema.

When it came time to cast his star, Soderbergh turned to Keough. The actress (Elvis Presley's granddaughter) was hesitant given that she hadn't worked in television before. But one of the greatest enticements of auteur TV is that it mimics film production.

Keough — who will star only in the first season and be replaced by a new lead in season two — had access to four scripts when she was offered the role and had all 13 scripts some four months before shooting began in January 2015 in Toronto (substituting for Chicago).

"That was great for me," says Keough, also at Sundance. "I don't think it's typical that you get to read every episode before you start shooting. Every episode had the same directors; it was shot like a film. It wasn't quick like TV shooting. It was very independent-style filmmaking."

Soderbergh gave notes to his directors on all the edits, but he was not on hand for the unhurried shoots: the equivalent of five days per episode. For greater efficiency, the series was crossboarded — with scenes from different episodes shot on the same day — as were The Knick and Fukunaga's first season of True Detective for HBO.

"I've done a lot of episodic directing-for-hire — Homeland, The Americans, Bates Motel, The Killing," Kerrigan says. "But this method is so much better. There's a real unity of vision that you don't get with the traditional model."

As film studios increasingly place their bets on product with the widest possible reach — comic book-based tentpoles and enduring mega-franchises like Star Wars — there's little room left for filmmakers looking to tackle a story with even a whiff of cultural specificity or edge.

By contrast, television has become the premier platform for interesting, adventurous, niche storytelling. Unlike film, the economics of long-form television support that approach, with foreign markets clamoring for a window into another culture

"I don't have any philosophical issue with comic-book movies," Soderbergh says. "I just never read comic books. There has been a shift [in recent years] toward a kind of film that I don't know how to make. And if you're not in that world, you're in this quote-unquote 'important film' world, which can be as calculated and as cynical [as creating tentpoles]. And that's not fun either."

It should come as no surprise that Oscar-winning and-nominated directors such as Scorsese (HBO's Boardwalk Empire and Vinyl), Fincher (Netflix's House of Cards) and Kathryn Bigelow (who is developing an untitled jihadi recruitment drama for HBO) have joined Soderbergh in TV's new circle of hands-on executive producers.

For Scorsese, who developed Vinyl as a feature film before reconfiguring it as a series for HBO, there's simply more creative freedom in television.

"In features, I have it up to a point," he says, "But you make the film you want to make within the parameters for wide mainstream consumption [in a two- or three-hour window].

"With Vinyl, we were all running into the same problems of how much time do we cut, how many characters do we cut, how do we get this past the MPAA." Given the resources for a film-like 35-day shoot, Scorsese directed the first episode of Vinyl, which no one at HBO would dare call a pilot.

"Marty had a vision for this, and not just a vision in terms of the production value, but the musical elements, casting...." says HBO president Michael Lombardo. "It's like watching a master chef put together ingredients and you go, 'Is that going to work?' And yet it's undeniable when you can sit and watch it. It's not a two-hour pilot — it's a movie."

Though Scorsese didn't direct the remaining nine episodes of season one, he was even more involved with Vinyl than he was with Boardwalk Empire, selecting the cast and overseeing the edits of every installment. He says he plans to direct the opening episode and two additional episodes in season two,

Similarly, Jean-Marc Vallée, who directed the film Dallas Buyers Club to three Oscar wins and a best picture nomination, made the move to episodic TV with HBO's upcoming Big Little Lies, for which he executive-produced and directed all seven episodes.

Vallée originally signed on to direct just the pilot, then was persuaded to add two more episodes before agreeing to the entire run.

"I was scared of attacking the whole thing," he remembers, "but then I said, 'Let's stop this nonsense. I'm going to direct everything, and it will be easier for everyone. I have total freedom to shoot like a feature film. I had 90 days to shoot seven episodes.

"It's like, 'I have the time to do quality material and character-driven stuff.' And of course, it's going to attract more and more people if HBO and other TV networks and Netflix continue to have this attitude and this approach of supporting the creative aspect."

On the horizon are TV projects from such film auteurs as David Lynch (Showtime's 2017 Twin Peaks redo) and Fincher (teaming with Charlize Theron for Netflix's serial killer-themed Mind Hunters). Woody Allen is moving forward with an untitled half-hour comedy series for Amazon that will take place in the 1960s. He recently cast Elaine May and Miley Cyrus as the leads.

In January, Spike Jonze told the Television Critics Association that he has no immediate plans to direct films while he's overseeing the launch of the new network Viceland. Echoing the sentiment of Soderbergh and the others, the best-director Oscar nominee (Being John Malkovich) said his latest mission is "just a different type of film for me."

Likewise, Spike Lee (with an adaptation of She's Gotta Have It for Showtime) and Darren Aronofsky (with the ambitious event series One Strange Rock for National Geographic) are pursuing the medium, while others who found only niche success in film — like Jill Soloway and Lena Dunham — are carving out much bigger names in television (Soloway with Amazon's Transparent and Dunham with HBO's Girls).

"The fact that these directors are coming from the film world into the TV world is what's turbo-charging this evolution of the auteur in TV," Albrecht says.

And in a further sign of the times, Scott Rudin — who is perhaps the highest-profile auteur film producer in the business, having produced No Country for Old Men and The Social Network — last year inked a three-year first-look deal that involves a trio of distribution entities: Fox Broadcasting, FX Networks and National Geographic Channel.

The takeaway was clear: TV is the new destination for thought-provoking, boundary-pushing fare that the film studios are loath to touch,

As a result, even the most in-demand film directors will commit to the small screen in the coming years. After becoming the first director to win back-to-back DGA Awards for Birdman and The Revenant, Alejandro González Iñárritu will turn his attention to his Starz series, The One Percent, about a dysfunctional family struggling to keep its farm from financial ruin.

The project reunites Iñárritu with his Oscar-winning Birdman writing team for the drama that will star Ed Helms and Hilary Swank (Iñárritu plans to direct several episodes).

"This is one of the most exciting things that I've been looking forward to in my career, and I've been doing this a long time," Albrecht says. "When you have someone like Alejandro, it's such a complex creative approach. Conceptually, it's fairly simple, but it needs to feel like a very finely made film."

As for Soderbergh, who is credited with starting the auteur TV wave, it turns out he may not really be out of film directing.

As this story went to press, news broke that he may be directing a new film with frequent collaborator Channing Tatum, which is expected to be one of the hottest projects to circulate among the studios this spring. Initially, he slammed the news as wrong via Twitter but later removed some of his most emphatic denials.

When asked if he would direct or merely produce — which he has continued to do during his retirement from film — his office declined to clarify.

Regardless, Soderbergh appears committed to television.

"With The Knick, Michael Lombardo said, 'I don't know what you have in mind. I'm just telling you be bold,'" Soderbergh recalls. "Nobody's ever said that to me about a movie."

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