Steven Soderbergh talks (a bit) about the Oscars and George Clooney

From: coming soon

We were getting ready to attend the Critics Choice Awards in a few hours on the same day we were doing this interview.

CS: I don't really understand how George is handling this week, because he has events and awards shows pretty much every night.
Soderbergh: Oh, and this isn't going to be the end of it. He's going to have to go to the Oscars, and nobody enjoys it! (laughs) I mean, nobody! It gets expensive, and I wish everybody would just get together and go, "You know what? Let's just list when the films are being screened and just leave it at that." It's just crazy, and it's Harvey's fault.

CS: Him and a couple other producers, I'm sure. Then again, something like "A Separation," the Iranian film--I don't know if you've seen it--a movie like that might never get seen without these things.Soderbergh: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. That's the upside potentially, but it's a very specific form of psychological torture.

CS: There's gotta be a middle ground basically between where we are now and where things were before.
Soderbergh: Yeah, it'd be nice, but I don't know. Each year, it just feels desperate.

From NJ.com

A studio release, “King of the Hill,” left audiences cold; a series of uncompromising independent films — “Kafka,” “The Underneath,” “Schizopolis,” “Gray’s Anatomy” — came and went without a ripple. And then he got an offer to direct a crime picture called “Out of Sight.”

“It was, literally, the most self-imposed pressure I’ve ever felt,” he says. “Because I knew if I didn’t pull it off, I was done. I’d already blown my first big studio movie. I couldn’t seem to make art films any arthouse wanted to play. This was really it. And George (Clooney) felt the same way, because at that point in his career — well, both of us were perceived as not exactly having fulfilled our potential. So it was great we found each other.”

Full of rich performances and tricky narrative flourishes, the movie caught the attention of critics and studios, too.

“It wasn’t a hit, financially,” Soderbergh admits. “But after it came out, no one ever again questioned whether George was a movie star, or I could handle a film of that kind. And that was the point where I thought, okay, let’s just go — and this period of very intense work started.”

Soderbergh isn’t bragging when he defines the period as intense — since then, he’s directed 17 movies (and produced 19 for other directors, including Clooney). Although he does have a personal life (he has two daughters, and has been married to entertainment reporter Jules Asner since 2003), clearly the man likes to work

. . .

And “U.N.C.L.E.”? That actually stung a little more, as Soderbergh had put even more time into the project and had, at one point, lined up Clooney to star as one of the spies.

“That played out in a slightly more civil way, I suppose, because I have a relationship with Warners,” Soderbergh says. “But we were going back and forth and, in the end, I pushed them because I didn’t want to be back in the position where I had an entire crew waiting and ready to go to work, and the studio said, ‘Well, if you’re really going to push us to answer now, the answer is no.’ ”

No hard feelings, Soderbergh insists.