October 7–14, 1999

movies

"It was my desire to fuck with people..."

An interview with Steven Soderbergh.

by Sam Adams

The first thing I tell Steven Soderbergh is that when I saw The Limey, a projectionist or print error caused several minutes of the movie to be shown twice, but that the film’s structure is so complicated I had to see it again to make sure the repetition was a mistake. He’s alarmed, as any filmmaker whose work was shown to critics in the wrong form would be, but it’s what he says next that best characterizes The Limey’s playful perversity:

"It was my desire to fuck with people, but not like that."

Certain to be one of the year’s most challenging releases, The Limey is also one of its funniest and most engaging. Since sex, lies and videotape inaugurated the Sundance boom, Soderbergh has been one of the deans of American independent cinema, but last year’s Out of Sight, starring George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez, showed that he can be as good in the mainstream as he is on the fringe, even if he brings some unusual favors to the party.

Unsurprisingly, Soderbergh admits making Out of Sight was a calculated career move: "Coming off Schizopolis and Gray’s [Anatomy], which I really enjoyed and really loosened me up, I was concerned that I was marginalizing myself. There was half of the film business that was inaccessible to me. And as a friend of mine kept saying, ‘If you think Hollywood movies are so terrible, why don’t you make one yourself?’"

Although Out of Sight failed to win back its $48 million budget at the box office, it set Soderbergh up for Erin Brockovich, the Julia Roberts vehicle which he’s currently cutting. But in between came The Limey, which Hollywood wouldn’t touch with a 10-foot pole.

Obviously Artisan Entertainment felt differently, since Soderbergh relates The Limey went from first meeting to final cut in an unimaginably fast nine months. Shot in a rapid, fluid style, the film’s densely layered style took an arduous eight weeks to edit: not longer than average, but you can practically hear Soderbergh wince as he talks about it.

"The first version was absolutely incomprehensible," he recalls, "even to people who worked on the film. I went too far. I deconstructed it too much — it was just too aggressive. The screening process, which was basically bringing in groups of friends, was about getting [the film] to the point where people were intrigued but not pissed off."

Surprisingly, many of the film’s most radical ideas came to Soderbergh while he was making Out of Sight, but he "either didn’t have the opportunity to try or they weren’t appropriate. So I had all these ideas bouncing around in my head, and I was looking for something that would allow me to explore them." That something turned out to be Lem Dobbs’ script for The Limey, which Soderbergh and Dobbs reworked to incorporate the director’s desire to make a fractured, subjective narrative part of the story.

The film’s splintered structure works, Soderbergh says, because "the story’s spine is so straight that I could get away with anything." That includes shooting the same conversation in three different places and cutting them all together in a way that, Soderbergh admits, logically "makes no sense at all." But far from being alienated by the bizarre shifts in location, he says he’s found that audiences "don’t bat an eye. When I was shooting it, I thought ‘I won’t be surprised if people break their necks trying to follow this,’ but they just totally go with it."

Frighteningly enough, Soderbergh recalls that there were elements of the first cut that proved too radical even for The Limey. But not to worry. Even though they probably won’t turn up in Erin Brockovich, Soderbergh is one filmmaker who never throws away an idea. "The first cut was impossible to follow, but it was a good experiment, because there were things in that cut I thought I could use some time later. But not on this film."