Top 100 Steven Soderbergh Quotes
#1. People are sort of numb to watching violence, but sexual activity is still as strong as it ever was in terms of generating response.
Steven Soderbergh
#2. I stopped reading reviews about my own movies. I read stuff about other people's movies.
Steven Soderbergh
#3. 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.
Steven Soderbergh
#4. All human interaction, you can break it down to incentives. All relationships, at some level, are transactional. They're fascinated with incentives.
Steven Soderbergh
#5. When a film like Chris Nolan's Memento cannot get picked up, to me independent film is over. It's dead.
Steven Soderbergh
#6. Everything is the director's fault - you can quote me on that. There are no excuses.
Steven Soderbergh
#7. 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.
Steven Soderbergh
#8. The key is, how do you feel with the one asshole? They cannot be talked to. That's why they are assholes.
Steven Soderbergh
#9. 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.
Steven Soderbergh
#10. 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.
Steven Soderbergh
#11. 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.
Steven Soderbergh
#12. Ego is something that everybody, creative especially, has to grapple with. You need enough ego to keep going but not so much ego that you're deaf or blind, that you're making a mistake and can't fix the course.
Steven Soderbergh
#13. 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.
Steven Soderbergh
#15. The great thing about the business is how Darwinian it is. We have to swim or die - if you are found wanting over a period of time, you've either got to change what you're doing or find something else to do.
Steven Soderbergh
#16. 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.
Steven Soderbergh
#17. 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.
Steven Soderbergh
#18. When you're sent something and read it, either you can see it while you read it, or you can't.
Steven Soderbergh
#19. 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
#20. I grew up mostly in the South, and there's definitely something about the South that's different from the North. When people ask me where I'm from, I say Louisiana. I spent more years there than anywhere else.
Steven Soderbergh
#21. 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?"
Steven Soderbergh
#22. I recently decided that I'm not an originator. I'm a synthesist.
Steven Soderbergh
#23. 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.
Steven Soderbergh
#24. The key is, if you're not monkeying around with the script, then everything usually goes pretty well.
Steven Soderbergh
#25. I have a friend whose theory is that you're from wherever you went to high school. I think that's mostly true.
Steven Soderbergh
#26. I'm probably more character-driven than plot-driven. It's rare for me to attach myself to an idea for a story.
Steven Soderbergh
#27. 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.
Steven Soderbergh
#28. If you're not flying people around on wires, and you're only allowing them to do things that people can really do, it can't go on for very long, because eventually somebody gets the drop on the other person and then it's over.
Steven Soderbergh
#29. 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.
Steven Soderbergh
#30. 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.
Steven Soderbergh
#31. In Full Frontal and K Street, I learned to take advantage of the mobility that digital provides.
Steven Soderbergh
#32. 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.
Steven Soderbergh
#33. 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.
Steven Soderbergh
#34. 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.
Steven Soderbergh
#35. A movie that costs only $1.6 million doesn't have to be a cultural event to turn a profit.
Steven Soderbergh
#36. 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.
Steven Soderbergh
#37. 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
#38. You can't get good at anything unless you do it day in and day out, over and over.
Steven Soderbergh
#39. I'm very comfortable with failure. I'm very comfortable being the guy who disappoints people.
Steven Soderbergh
#40. I don't consider myself to be particularly gifted in the way that other filmmakers are gifted.
Steven Soderbergh
#41. 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
#42. I think I'm good at amplifying an actor's strengths, and minimizing their weaknesses. And they all have strengths and weaknesses.
Steven Soderbergh
#43. 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.
Steven Soderbergh
#44. Never done an explosion, but I have had explosive diarrhea, and that was very, very real. Good thing I have my trailer.
Steven Soderbergh
#45. 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.
Steven Soderbergh
#46. If you're sitting around thinking what other people think about your work, you'll just become paralysed.
Steven Soderbergh
#47. A real explosion is not only much more fun to shoot, it also helps the actors and creates an energy on set and ultimately in the scene.
Steven Soderbergh
#49. Usually I'm thinking about the palette. I'm thinking about the color for the most part, then I'll start thinking about composition and movement.
Steven Soderbergh
#50. 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.
Steven Soderbergh
#51. 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
#52. Jude [Law] is really good at playing an obsessive. He has a very watchable quality when he's on a quest for something.
Steven Soderbergh
#53. My father, who was the one who really got me hooked on movies, liked all kinds of films, and I saw all kinds of films at a very young age.
Steven Soderbergh
#54. 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.
Steven Soderbergh
#55. 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.
Steven Soderbergh
#56. Another thing that really excites me: I'd like to do multiple versions of the same film.
Steven Soderbergh
#57. 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.
Steven Soderbergh
#58. You can't change who you are, so I think that the only thing you can do is just never talk to people about stuff and then hope that maybe does something.
Steven Soderbergh
#59. 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
#60. Making a film that's supposed to be fun to watch is really hard - that's the weird irony of it.
Steven Soderbergh
#61. I'm in the process of working out an arrangement to make some very, very, very small films in the midst of all these films and maybe that will help. But you get tired of talking. You just want to do it.
Steven Soderbergh
#62. Reality shows are all the rage on TV at the moment, but that's not reality, it's just another aesthetic form of fiction.
Steven Soderbergh
#63. 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.
Steven Soderbergh
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. I like to make all kinds of movies. I'd do 'Ocean's Thirteen' with the right script.
Steven Soderbergh
#67. We all get outraged by things and there are things that make us angry and maybe for a while we get angry enough to actually go do something about it.
Steven Soderbergh
#68. [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.
Steven Soderbergh
#69. Truth and facts have to trump partisanship. There has to be something that's true regardless of what your angle is on it.
Steven Soderbergh
#71. Sometimes I might feel like [a movie] is kind of a weird idea and if I'm going to get enough money to execute it properly I've got to get somebody in it that is going to justify the expense.
Steven Soderbergh
#72. 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.
Steven Soderbergh
#73. Never had a cup of coffee in my life. Dr Pepper is my caffeine delivery system of choice.
Steven Soderbergh
#74. 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.
Steven Soderbergh
#75. I was lucky that I was getting exposed to a lot of different kinds of films, and I was liking them all. So it seemed logical to me that you could - as in the style of the studio directors of the 30s and 40s - jump from one genre to the next, with the same satisfaction.
Steven Soderbergh
#76. 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.
Steven Soderbergh
#77. Warner Bros. has talked about going out with low-cost DVDs simultaneously in China because piracy is so huge there. It will be a while before bigger movies go out in all formats; in five years, everything will.
Steven Soderbergh
#78. Anytime you've got something that can take you into the political realm then you've opened up the conversation a lot.
Steven Soderbergh
#79. There are people who are originals and the stuff they make really is new. It isn't based on anything else. But I've decided I'm not that-I was never that. My abilities are to synthesize a wide range of references and ideas into something that feels relatively unified and coherent.
Steven Soderbergh
#80. A movie is something you see, cinema is something that's made.
Steven Soderbergh
#81. Your take on things is what is either going to make you somebody people talk about or no.
Steven Soderbergh
#82. My first three movies, I didn't start editing until we were finished shooting. That's unthinkable to me now.
Steven Soderbergh
#83. I'm a big believer that if there's something you really want to do, don't walk away because of the deal.
Steven Soderbergh
#84. 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.
Steven Soderbergh
#85. The traditional models for success are just also disappearing.
Steven Soderbergh
#87. The brief flashbacks are sun-kissed, summery and optimistic. It's the only place in the movie you will see red, yellow, orange, or any vibrant colors.
Steven Soderbergh
#88. 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
#89. I'm always a little unnerved when I see a show that's set in the past that implies in any way that things were nicer then.
Steven Soderbergh
#90. I'm not going to spend two years of my life on something that I'm not excited about.
Steven Soderbergh
#91. You should never assume anything coming from a critical standpoint. You should go into everything assuming you're going to get crushed.
Steven Soderbergh
#92. We [people] are a species that's wired to tell stories. We need stories. It's how we make sense of things. It's how we learn.
Steven Soderbergh
#93. 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.
Steven Soderbergh
#94. There's a difference between failures and things that are bad.
Steven Soderbergh
#95. It's a weird thing to say, but it would appear to me axiomatic that if you understood fully what I was doing and appreciated it, you would like it.
Steven Soderbergh
#96. 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.
Steven Soderbergh
#97. My working life is me doing what I want to do. This is that. I've made movies that people don't go to see.
Steven Soderbergh
#98. 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.
Steven Soderbergh
#99. 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.
Steven Soderbergh
#100. I like a lot of different kinds of movies, I like a lot of different kinds of paintings.
Steven Soderbergh
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