Steven Soderbergh ready for the final few acts of his film directing career
The unpredictable Steven Soderbergh has another hit on his hands. Hollywood's maverick master tells James Mottram why the stripper film Magic Mike is one of the last films he will ever make
Steven Soderbergh turns 50 next year - meaning the director who began his career in 1989, winning the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival with Sex, Lies, and Videotape, will have been making films for almost half his life. And if you believe his press over the past 12 months, revealed after his regular star Matt Damon proved as "discreet as a 14-year-old girl", as Soderbergh so delicately termed it, he wants to deliver three more films then become a painter - maybe for good.
When we meet in the library of a London hotel, the bespectacled director seems determined to see it through. "If I finish everything that I'm supposed to finish, that's 25 to 26 movies" - 28 actually, if you count his epic biography Che as two movies and include the not-for-public-consumption theatre project The Last Time I Saw Michael Gregg - "plus six hours of TV, a couple of books … that's plenty. That's enough for people to sift through."
So why this sudden career handbrake? "I just need another chapter. I need to feel different."
For anyone who's paid attention to Soderbergh's career, this need to reinvent is not unusual: he has frequently juxtaposed his more commercial fare with low-budget "palette-cleansers" (Schizopolis, The Girlfriend Experience), remakes (Solaris), shorts (Eros), black-and-white art-house (Kafka, The Good German) and even two documentaries on raconteur Spalding Gray. "I've always said to some degree that whatever you're working on should annihilate what you'd done before," the filmmaker says - only this time he wants to rebuild himself from scratch.
While that's all very well, he probably didn't count on Magic Mike - the first film in his final trio of movies - becoming a runaway hit. The story of a troupe of male strippers - think The Full Monty meets Showgirls - has already taken US$113 million in the US and a further US$50 million around the globe. While it may still rank behind the glitzy Ocean's Eleven and its two sequels, not to mention Traffic (which won Soderbergh an Oscar for best director) and Erin Brockovich, all of those cost upwards of US$50 million. The budget for Magic Mike was just US$7 million - making it his most profitable film by far.
Admittedly, it's not hard to see where the audiences are flocking from: like Bridesmaids, the film is ruthlessly tapping into the female market - with women keen to see big stars such as Channing Tatum and Matthew McConaughey show off their six-packs for the camera.