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You're being mean to someone who's helping you. What is that? Everyone knows who the assholes are, and I avoid them.
Steven Soderbergh -
People like Chris Nolan are shooting isolated sequences in IMAX. Those cameras are the size of a Volkswagen.
Steven Soderbergh
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In Full Frontal and K Street, I learned to take advantage of the mobility that digital provides.
Steven Soderbergh -
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.
Steven Soderbergh -
I don't consider myself to be particularly gifted in the way that other filmmakers are gifted.
Steven Soderbergh -
I think often people fall into the breadth trap of wanting to do too long a period of time, and obviously there's this sort of algorithm of how much depth you can put into something times how much of their life you're trying to show. My attitude has always been, I'd rather show a briefer period of time in more detail than a longer period of time in less detail.
Steven Soderbergh -
You’re supposed to expand your mind to fit the art, you’re not supposed to chop the art down to fit your mind.
Steven Soderbergh -
There's nothing else exactly like it in any other art form, the orchestration of so many different elements. It's endlessly fascinating what can be done editorially. You can create meaning where there was none, you can create feeling where there was none, you can create narrative where there was none. Two frames can be the difference between something that works and something that doesn't. It's fascinating.
Steven Soderbergh
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I'm not going to spend two years of my life on something that I'm not excited about.
Steven Soderbergh -
Lying is like alcoholism. You are always recovering.
Steven Soderbergh -
Everything is the director's fault - you can quote me on that. There are no excuses.
Steven Soderbergh -
In nature, if a cell gets too big, it divides. You can't come up with a set of rules that's going to work for 350 million people. You're just not.
Steven Soderbergh -
I think that it's fear. The musicians themselves don't seem to know enough about why they're in the positions they're in, so they're afraid to lose those positions. If you're 22 years old and you can't believe you're even in the position to have a career making music, the first thing you're going to think is: Maintain. Don't lose it. And that's precisely what causes you to lose everything.
Steven Soderbergh -
If you think that because you're Che, when you go into Bolivia, when people find out it's you, that they're going to have the same kind of reaction that the Cubans had to Castro, then you're high.
Steven Soderbergh
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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."
Steven Soderbergh -
Your take on things is what is either going to make you somebody people talk about or no.
Steven Soderbergh -
When we look at what's going on in the world and we see the immense level of conflict that seems to always be happening - you can always trace it back to competing narratives.
Steven Soderbergh -
Nobody's talking about movies the way they're talking about their favorite TV shows.
Steven Soderbergh -
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.
Steven Soderbergh -
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.
Steven Soderbergh
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"A meteor hits planet Earth" - that's a story idea but that doesn't give me any indication of what the character is.
Steven Soderbergh -
I'm mystified by the stuff that doesn't work. I'm mystified by what's going on in the critical side, too. 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.
Steven Soderbergh -
I'm obviously really opinionated, but as a producer, you don't necessarily want the person you're working with to try to impress you - you want them to just be themselves.
Steven Soderbergh -
I want to form a political party that's based entirely on what music people listen to. To me, it's a much better barometer of what they think and feel than their political stance.
Steven Soderbergh