Steven Soderbergh Quotes

On DVD audio commentaries: "Would I, growing up, like to have had access to stuff on DVDs like this? Oh God, yeah! It's better than any film school, I think."

"Well, I think a part of you has to be scared, it keeps you alert; otherwise you become complacent. So absolutely, I'm purposefully going after things and doing things that I'm not sure if it's going to come off or not. Certainly Full Frontal was one of those. That was pure experimentation, that's the kind of film that you make going in where you know that a lot of people are not going to like it because it's an exploration of the contract that exists between the film-maker and the audience and what happens when you violate that contract."

"There are certain directors - Spielberg,
David Fincher,
John McTiernan - who sort of see things in three dimensions, and I was watching their films and sort of breaking them down to see how they laid sequences out, and how they paid attention to things like lens length, where the eyelines were, when the camera moved, how they cut, how they led your eye from one part of the frame to another."

"...there've been a lot of questions about commercial films and non-commercial films, and I've never really made that separation in my mind. There's no question that when you read a piece of material, you have ideas about how it should be realised ... certainly when I read the script for Ocean's Eleven, I thought if this was realised the way it should, then it would appeal to a lot of people. Then you get involved in a film like Solaris and if you realise it the way it should be realised, then it won't appeal to a lot of people. But what are you going to do? You have to go at it..."

"I learned from
Richard Lester that as your career goes on, you learn more about how things can go wrong, but you never learn how things can go right. And it's really disorienting."

On his decision to direct
Out of Sight: "It was a very conscious decision on my part to try and climb my way out of the arthouse ghetto, which can be as much of a trap as making blockbuster films. And I was very aware that at that point in my career, half the business was off limits to me."

"If you're sitting around thinking what other people think about your work, you'll just become paralysed."

"I'm not a world-class cinematographer, but the momentum and the closeness to the actors ... I'm so close to them that I can just whisper to them while we're in the middle of a take."

"I'm process-driven, I'm not result-driven."