Steven Soderbergh Quotations | Page 2

I'm probably more character-driven than plot-driven. It's rare for me to attach myself to an idea for a story.

"A meteor hits planet Earth" - that's a story idea but that doesn't give me any indication of what the character is.

If I'm a director and I read a script and I say yeah I really want to do this, I would never walk away because the deal wasn't very good - that I wasn't getting paid very much or that the chances that I would see anything on the back end were remote because of the financial waterfall and the way it's structured. I would never use that as a reason not to do something.

I tend to be drawn more to people than pure story ideas.

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.

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.

Castro, without question, is one of the smartest politicians that's ever walked.

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.

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.

There's definitely a way of thinking and a way of being in the South that has its advantages and disadvantages.

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.

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.

I have a friend whose theory is that you're from wherever you went to high school. I think that's mostly true.

I feel I need to really think about whether there's a way to use what skill I have to address things that outrage me, like the 13 year old girl getting stoned to death. Because I don't think making a movie is going to help that, or change that.

I actually didn't find out about a lot of music until I was older. Some people have been listening to the Beatles their whole lives; I didn't discover them until I was 18 years old.

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.

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.

I recently decided that I'm not an originator. I'm a synthesist.

The traditional models for success are just also disappearing.

I find myself in situations a lot where I have to say to someone, "This can be better," and it's hard to say that.

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.

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.

I was thinking that people have to believe you're crazy in order to take you seriously as an artist. If you're wandering the streets, talking in gibberish, nobody ever asks you to change anything about your art because there's no context for people to look at what you do.

I guess I just look at talent as a very subjective thing. I mean, if you never tried playing an oboe, how do you know you're not the most talented oboe player ever? The point is that if you don't love it, then it doesn't matter.

I try to use other songs or bands as reference points - it seems like the easiest way to get across what are really differences of taste or opinion. If you know what kind of music somebody loves, then you can kind of figure out why they do what they do.

A big part of making an album is that you want to have enough material - you want to have enough stuff for people to hear and know that it represents you. So it does sometimes turn into a situation where you're saying to the person you're working with, "Well, what do you want?" But then there are other times when I work with people and they'll turn to me and say, "How do you want to do this?" And that's actually when I work best.

Whenever you experiment with something, it's very easy to take the emotion out of it. And going back and forth between wanting to be respected artistically and wanting to move people is its own challenge.

I suppose I could try to be some avant-garde artist if I wanted to, but that doesn't interest me as much.

I have no shame in making music that maybe, if you listen to it long enough, you'll realize you've heard this or that part of it before. I'm still very excited by an amazingly written song, so that's really the thing that I work on when I make records with people.

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.

I'm a big believer that if there's something you really want to do, don't walk away because of the deal.

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.

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.

I'm a grinder. I'll beat you because I will not sleep.

You're being mean to someone who's helping you. What is that? Everyone knows who the assholes are, and I avoid them.

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.

All human interaction, you can break it down to incentives. All relationships, at some level, are transactional. They're fascinated with incentives.

The key is, how do you feel with the one asshole? They cannot be talked to. That's why they are assholes.

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.

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.

There is sadness of when you're watching someone enjoy something that you think is substandard. The ineffable sadness when someone is happy and something is not as good as it should be.

There's a difference between failures and things that are bad.

Your take on things is what is either going to make you somebody people talk about or no.

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.

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.

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.

I'm not going to spend two years of my life on something that I'm not excited about.

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.

I like a lot of different kinds of movies, I like a lot of different kinds of paintings.

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.

Nobody's talking about movies the way they're talking about their favorite TV shows.

Anytime you've got something that can take you into the political realm then you've opened up the conversation a lot.

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?"

You can't get good at anything unless you do it day in and day out, over and over.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There's nothing else exactly like it in any other art form, the orchestration of so many different elements. It's endlessly fascinating what can be done editorially. You can create meaning where there was none, you can create feeling where there was none, you can create narrative where there was none. Two frames can be the difference between something that works and something that doesn't. It's fascinating.

People like Chris Nolan are shooting isolated sequences in IMAX. Those cameras are the size of a Volkswagen.

My first three movies, I didn't start editing until we were finished shooting. That's unthinkable to me now.

I just find it annoying that in these sequences [ of the fight scenes], traditionally, there's music trying to pump you up. I don't like that, personally, as an audience member. This just reflects my taste.

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.

I've tried to get better about weighing what I think the accessibility of an idea is against the cost of executing it. I've tried to be smarter about that, because if you're not smart about that, you're going to be unemployed. But I'm still mystified about what works for people. And I'm not talking about my movies, I'm talking in general. I'm mystified by the stuff that doesn't work. I'm mystified by what's going on in the critical side, too.

Stuff I like is getting trashed and stuff that is being praised I think is terrible. I don't really feel in sync with what's happening, but at the same time, what I think keeps me afloat is that I try not to be, and don't want to be, very indulgent. I try to make the films as lean as possible, and to not spend a lot of time crawling up my own ass creatively.

I stopped reading reviews about my own movies. I read stuff about other people's movies.

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.

You should never assume anything coming from a critical standpoint. You should go into everything assuming you're going to get crushed.

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.

Men tend to define themselves by what they do, and so if you're dealing with a character who's trying to figure that out, or multiple characters, then there's something there for guys, too.

My experience over the years with working with people who are not actors or not trained actors is that you have to get to know them well enough to see what they have that's translatable onto the screen. So you're constantly calibrating to play to their strengths. And the key is to never ask them to do things that are beyond their abilities or are really far away from who they are at their core.

[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.