Director and Twitter novella authorSteven Soderbergh was the keynote speaker at the San Francisco International Film Festival last weekend, and he had a lot to say about the state of the film industry - namely, that no one in the business can seem to pick the right movies, or market them correctly. He, according to Deadline, initially requested that there be no photographs, audio, or video of his speech, soon enough - as with most things in this Internet age - it was plastered all over Twitter and various blogs.
"We had a test screening of Contagion once, and a guy in the focus group stood up and he said, 'I really hate the Jude Law character. I don’t know if he’s a hero or an asshole.' And I thought, Well, here we go," Soderbergh explained. "There’s another thing, a process known as running the numbers, and for a filmmaker, this is kind of the equivalent of a doctor showing you a chest X-ray and saying there’s a shadow on it. It’s a kind of fungible algorithm that’s used when they want to say no without, really, saying no. I could tell you a really good story of how I got pushed off a movie because of the way the numbers ran, but if I did, I’d probably get shot in the street, and I really like my cats." Sassy!
The full speech is long, but worth a read:
I get this wave of – not panic, it’s not like my heart started fluttering – but I had this sense of, am I going insane? Or is the world going insane – or both? Now I start with the circular thinking again. Maybe it’s me. Maybe it’s generational and I’m getting old, I’m in the back nine professionally. And maybe my 22-year-old daughter doesn’t feel this way at all. I should ask her. But then I think, no: Something is going on – something that can be measured is happening, and there has to be. When people are more outraged by the ambiguous ending of The Sopranos than some young girl being stoned to death, then there’s something wrong. We have people walking around who think the government stages these terrorist attacks. And anybody with a brain bigger than a walnut knows that our government is not nearly competent enough to stage a terrorist attack and then keep it a secret because, as we know, in this day and age you cannot keep a secret.
