Steven Soderbergh

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Mike Fleming Jr. has a really insightful interview with Steven Soderbergh at Deadline Hollywood. Among other things, the discussion covers the spiraling costs of launching a blockbuster film, which actually should have grown cheaper with so many new viral ways to reach audiences. I’ll guess the culprits are entrenched interests and insufficient data. An excerpt:

Deadline Hollywood:

On global summer tentpoles, studios routinely use $125 million as the given in the mathematical theorem of what it costs to launch these films. Is there no way to bring down that massive number?  

Steven Soderbergh:

I know they’ve tried to figure this out because it’s killing them, but I haven’t seen a Nate Silver-like systemic analysis of what an ad dollar does, exactly.

Deadline Hollywood:

TV spends seem very inefficient for their high cost.

Steven Soderbergh:

Yeah, but nobody wants to be the first to challenge that, which is weird to me because it would be groundbreaking for somebody to be the one who goes, ‘I’m capping this at $15 million.’ They’re afraid, and yet they lose all the time, doing the thing they always do. It’s an extreme brand of loss aversion. It’s just frustrating because the trickle-down effect is, creatively, things are getting narrower. We did one bold thing on Magic Mike. I had this conversation with Danny Feldman at Warner Bros, when I asked things like, ‘On a $25 million spend, what does that last $8 million get you?” He says, ‘We don’t really know.’ But Danny said, and I’m sure people all over town who love this will be screaming, but Danny said, “I’ve never seen any evidence that outdoor does anything. How would you guys feel if we did no outdoor and took that $3 million and put it into more spots.” And we said, “Great.” We didn’t do any outdoor, at all.

Deadline Hollywood: 

It doesn’t seem to have hurt you at all. Didn’t you and Channing Tatum finance that movie by not taking your fees to become an investor like Todd Phillips did in The Hangover?

Steven Soderbergh:

I don’t know what Todd did exactly, but Channing and I split the negative 50-50. When he called me two years ago and said was I interested, I said there was only one way. You and I are going to pay for it, we’re not talking to anybody else, and we’re in preproduction tomorrow because we have to start shooting the day after Labor Day because that’s the slot that I’ve got and you’ve got. I flew to Cannes four weeks later and sold enough territories to cover us. Cash was coming out of our pocket, but at least on paper we were somewhat covered. That’s how we did it.

Deadline Hollywood:

Todd Phillips made one of the great director paydays on The Hangover. Is Magic Mike the most you’ve ever made on a film?

Steven Soderbergh

It will be, I think. It certainly ought to be.

Deadline Hollywood: 

What does that say about taking entrepreneurial risk when the business is shifting like it is?

Steven Soderbergh

It’s hard for me to use this as an example people should follow. I knew that as ideas go that this was Halley’s Comet. I just knew Channing in a stripper movie, that’s gold. I wouldn’t do that all the time. I had to borrow money from my accountant in the last month of post. To hold up my end, it took everything I had.”

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In writing about the new Steven Soderbergh film, Contagion, Alex Tabarrok of the Marginal Revolution points out an unintended benefit of the war against bio-terrorism that arose after 9/11:

“That is exactly right. Fortunately, under the umbrella of bio-terrorism, we have invested in the public health system by building more bio-safety level 3 and 4 laboratories including the latest BSL3 at George Mason University, we have expanded the CDC and built up epidemic centers at the WHO and elsewhere and we have improved some local public health centers. Most importantly, a network of experts at the department of defense, the CDC, universities and private firms has been created. All of this has increased the speed at which we can respond to a natural or unnatural pandemic.

In 2009, as H1N1 was spreading rapidly, the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency asked Professor Ian Lipkin, the director of the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, to sequence the virus. Working non-stop and updating other geneticists hourly, Lipkin and his team were able to sequence the virus in 31 hours. (Professor Ian Sussman, played in the movie by Elliott Gould, is based on Lipkin.) As the movie explains, however, sequencing a virus is only the first step to developing a drug or vaccine and the latter steps are more difficult and more filled with paperwork and delay. In the case of H1N1 it took months to even get going on animal studies, in part because of the massive amount of paperwork that is required to work on animals.”

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