The Good German

[MacGuffin]

You Can Make 'Em Like They Used To
By DAVE KEHR; New York Times

IN 1989 an unknown 26-year-old filmmaker from Louisiana delivered what might have been the final blow to the shaky edifice known as the Hollywood studio system. Steven Soderbergh's "Sex, Lies and Videotape," an independently financed tale of love and adultery, won the grand prize of the Cannes Film Festival, the Palme d'Or, as well as an acting prize for one of its stars, James Spader.

Acquired by the fledging distribution company Miramax, the film, made with a reported budget of $1.2 million, went on to gross almost $25 million in the United States, a spectacular figure that put Miramax on the map and established American independent film as a force to be reckoned with. As they watched their ancient hegemony crumble away, the studios rushed to establish their own "independent" divisions.

Now, 17 years later, Mr. Soderbergh is back with a movie that means to make amends. "I often think I would have been so happy to be Michael Curtiz," Mr. Soderbergh said. Mr. Curtiz, the contract director, made more than 100 films for Warner Brothers, including "Casablanca" and "Yankee Doodle Dandy," between his arrival in Hollywood from Hungary in 1926 and his death in 1962. "That would have been right up my alley," Mr. Soderbergh said, "making a couple of movies a year of all different kinds, working with the best technicians. I would have been in heaven, just going in to work every day."

"The Good German," which Mr. Soderbergh directed for Warner Brothers, reimagines what it would be like to make a movie under the studio system of old. Based on the novel by Joseph Kanon — a thriller with a conscience about an American war correspondent (George Clooney) who returns to the rubble of postwar Berlin to find the German woman (Cate Blanchett) who was once his lover — the movie, which opens in limited release on Dec. 15, is both set in 1946 and, in a sense, filmed there as well.

During the production Mr. Soderbergh was committed to remaining as true as possible to the technique of the era. By reproducing the conditions of an actual studio shoot from the late 1940s, he hoped to enter the mind of a filmmaker like Mr. Curtiz, to explore the strengths and limitations of a classical style that has now largely been lost.

"For weeks, for all of us, it was like living in a time warp," Mr. Soderbergh said by telephone from Los Angeles, where he was finishing filming "Ocean's Thirteen," the third in a series and an unabashedly commercial movie that will be one of Warner Brothers' major summer releases.

There have been many attempts to recapture the look of old Hollywood over the years, most of them disappointingly superficial: films that begin in black and white but quickly bleed into color, while never straying far from a contemporary vocabulary of close-ups and meandering Steadicam shots. Not only does "The Good German" stick to its monochromatic principles throughout, it uses other elements of '40s style that may not be apparent at first.

The strongly accented camera angles, the dramatic nonrealistic lighting, the way actors move against each other within the frame and the way the camera travels across the set — these are all elements of a vocabulary that has been lost in the post-television era. In "The Good German," Mr. Soderbergh is trying to bring this vocabulary back.

"We set up our little guidelines," he said. For one, he banned the sophisticated zoom lenses that make life easier for today's cinematographers, returning to the fixed focal-length lenses of the past. "I did some research and found some script continuities for a couple of Michael Curtiz films," he recalled, referring to records of the lens and exposure used in every shot, in case retakes were necessary. "I found that he restricted himself to at most five lenses, usually three or four. I talked to Panavision, and they happened to have some older lenses that they'd made that didn't have all the new coatings on them and also were a focal length that isn't really used anymore. One of them was a 32 millimeter, a wide-angle lens that nobody uses anymore but was one that Curtiz used a lot."

For audiences the shorter lenses mean a wider field of vision, expanding the camera's range beyond the tight close-ups and two-shots that define today's television-influenced filmmaking. With the wider range, groups of three, four or more characters can appear together on screen, minimizing the need for cross-cutting, which creates a different kind of interaction among the actors and a more expressive sense of the fictional space they inhabit.

They also used only incandescent lights, Mr. Soderbergh said, and no wireless microphones at all. Where many, if not most, filmmakers use "body mikes" to capture the intimate whispers of dialogue, Mr. Soderbergh recorded his sound the old-fashioned way, through a boom microphone held just over the actors' heads by a technician standing out of camera range.

"The rule was, if you can't do it with a boom mike, then you can't do it," Mr. Soderbergh said. "Which was helpful to me because, in talking to the actors about this very externalized performance mode I was going to ask them to assume, it helped to be able to say, 'You have to talk louder, you have to project more, because I'm not getting a good enough track.' "

Unlike the Method mumble currently in style in American movies, the dialogue in "The Good German" is spoken in crisp, clearly enunciated stage English, emphasizing presentation over interpretation.

"I don't feel like I'm a real quiet actor in terms of my projection in the first place," said Tobey Maguire, who plays a crucial supporting role as an American serviceman with sinister black-market connections. "So I didn't really think much about that part of it. But what was fascinating to me is how he was cutting the movie in his head. There's really no fat on the film. He really didn't do 'coverage.' He only shot the parts of the scene he was going to use, and if he wasn't going to use it, he didn't shoot it."

"The pace was unbelievably fast," he added. "So that was great."

If there is a single word that sums up the difference between filmmaking at the middle of the 20th century and the filmmaking of today, it is "coverage." Derived from television, it refers to the increasingly common practice of using multiple cameras for a scene (just as television would cover a football game) and having the actors run through a complete sequence in a few different registers. The lighting tends to be bright and diffused, without shadows, which makes it easier for the different cameras to capture matching images.

The advantage for directors is that they no longer need to make hard and fast decisions about where the camera will go for a particular scene or how the performances will be pitched. The idea is to pump as much coverage as possible into the editing room, where the final decisions about what goes where will be made.

The danger for a director is that with so much material available, the original vision may be drowned or never really defined; and the sheer amount of exposed film makes it possible for executives to step in (after the director has completed his union-mandated first cut) and rearrange the material to follow the latest market-research reports.

During the studio era it was more typical for directors to arrive on the set, block out their shots and light them with the use of stand-ins; the actors were then summoned from their dressing rooms and, after a brief rehearsal, they would film the lines needed in the individual shot. The crew would then break down the camera and move it to the next setup, as determined by the director.

"That kind of staging is a lost art," Mr. Soderbergh said, "which is too bad. The reason they no longer work that way is because it means making choices, real choices, and sticking to them. It means shooting things in a way that basically only cut together in one order. That's not what people do now. They want all the options they can get in the editing room."

While the editing process now routinely takes months, "I had a pretty polished cut of 'The Good German' two days after we wrapped," Mr. Soderbergh said. "It was shot to go together very, very specifically."

"The geography of the scene — to me, that's the job," Mr. Soderbergh added, "carrying all of that around in your mind. Sure, I've used multiple cameras on other pictures. On 'Traffic,' which was from the get-go designed to be a run-and-gun movie, we were using two cameras a lot, but even in those situations you can make choices in terms of the placement of the camera, and how you think the stuff will cut together." And because Mr. Soderbergh works both as his own cinematographer (under the name Peter Andrews) and editor (as Mary Ann Bernard), he can make spontaneous decisions: "There's no gap between figuring out what we want to do and executing it."

"The Good German" has turned out, in its way, to be a highly experimental picture, but one that grew out of economic necessity. "They bought the novel in 2001, thinking the role of the reporter might make a good vehicle for George Clooney," said the screenwriter, Paul Attanasio. "I got the novel in April of 2001, and I think we sat down for the first time in May. From the beginning Steven was talking about it as a film noir, which if you've read the novel, is not really what it is. The decision to make it as a film of the period came later, when he got down to deciding to make the movie."

Mr. Soderbergh added: "For a while I thought about doing it normally. And then I realized that actually the most economical way to do it would be the way we ended up doing it, shooting it in black and white, so we could incorporate all of the stock footage we had found. Because if we'd shot it in color and tried to go to Germany, it would have cost two and a half times what it did. Luckily the studio went along with it. Our budget was for $32 million, and they felt the number was not dangerously high."

Mr. Soderbergh's team combed the studios for stock film of postwar Berlin; one trove was Paramount, where he found some of the background scenes used for "A Foreign Affair," a Billy Wilder film set in Berlin in 1948. But it was left to Mr. Soderbergh's longtime production designer, Philip Messina, to build the rest of Berlin in Hollywood — or Burbank, to be more precise, where they took over some standing sets on the Universal back lot and dressed them in appropriate rubble.

"There's very little computer graphics used to extend the image, and mostly what you see on the screen is what we were able to accomplish practically," Mr. Messina said. "The heaps of rubble were made from steel armatures with carved foam on top of them and rocks stuck on them. We moved them from the back lots to the sets and used them over and over, like a kit of parts we were constantly rearranging."

Louise Frogley, who has worked as Mr. Soderbergh's costume designer since "The Limey" in 1999, assembled the wardrobe much as it would have been done in the '40s, first raiding the costume warehouses at Warner Brothers, and later traveling to the Sturm costume factory in East Berlin, where military uniforms of various periods are copied and reproduced for films.

"It's in an old sugar factory, and each floor is a different army, a different military setup," she said. "We found quite a lot of original police uniforms. All sorts of things came up: I didn't realize that the uniforms the police wore were the same as they used under the Nazis, but they shaved off the swastikas."

Ms Frogley continued: "The civilians were much easier to dress. George Clooney was great, because he really gets how people wore their trousers high during that period, instead of pushing them down to their hips like they do now."

Both Mr. Messina and Ms. Frogley are already at work on Mr. Soderbergh's next project, a two-part biography of Che Guevara that will star Benicio Del Toro and be shot entirely in Spanish (another notion unlikely to thrill the Hollywood establishment, which likes foreign-language films almost as much as it likes black-and-white ones). Such leapfrogging is typical of Mr. Soderbergh's methods: he likes to keep working constantly and is happy to use the down time on one movie to get a head start on the next. In 2006 alone he has served as an executive producer on two films (Richard Linklater's "Scanner Darkly" and Scott Z. Burns' "The Half Life of Timofey Berezin"), completed and released "The Good German" and filmed "Ocean's Thirteen."

Studios may no longer be in the business of providing long-term employment for filmmakers, but Mr. Soderbergh seems to be functioning as a studio all by himself.

"You hope that there's a way of putting a film like this across," he said of "The Good German." "And just not for yourself. If a movie like this can get made and actually bring in a little bit of money, it means that someone else can make one too. I'm just hoping that we can find a way to the audience so that the person in line behind me who's trying to get Warners to do something off track can point to 'The Good German' and say, 'You know, that worked, let's try this now.' "

[MacGuffin]

Clooney Nostalgic at `German' Premiere

One blast from the past provided the setting for another. Hollywood's legendary movie palace, the 84-year-old Egyptian Theatre, hosted Monday night's world premiere of director Steven Soderbergh's black-and-white film-noir homage, "The Good German."

"Well, it's perfect," star George Clooney told AP Television on the red carpet. "Especially for a film noir film, to be coming out at the Egyptian," he continued. "It's a beautiful theater. The sound system is amazing. ... It's fun to see it here."

"The Good German" is a heavy-duty saga of an American journalist (Clooney) lured into a murder mystery in postwar Berlin. Soderbergh used actual 1940s lenses and a single camera, attempting to replicate both the limitations and technical and artistic triumphs of the era. References to director Michael Curtiz's classic "Casablanca" abound.

"The thing is, we've seen movies in black and white before," noted co-star Robin Weigert (Calamity Jane in TV's "Deadwood"). "You know, Woody Allen, George's movie ("Good Night, and Good Luck"). But this is a whole other type of black-and-white film, that you really haven't seen. You haven't seen images like this for 60 years, you know what I mean. And it's really striking, when you start to watch the movie, how different that look is."

Co-star Cate Blanchett fit right in with the Egyptian theme, wearing a strapless beige Versace dress with gold metallic trim.

"He's incredibly collaborative, and enormously generous to other actors," Blanchett said of Clooney. "He's really invested in other actors' careers, and you can see that by the way he casts films that he directs. He's interested not in what an actor is perceived to do publicly, but he knows what they can do privately. And he does that off-camera."

"German" marks the continuation of Clooney's eight-year association with director Soderbergh, with whom he has collaborated on such films as "Out of Sight," "Ocean's Eleven" and "Solaris."

"I learned a lot about cameras," Clooney said of working with Soderbergh in "The Good German." "Watching him work this way, without any long lenses or zoom lenses or anything like that, which is fun because I'm doing a film now that takes place in 1925, where they didn't have access to that."

Clooney was referring to "Leatherheads," a romantic comedy he's directing that's set in the world of 1920s football. "The Good German," which also stars Tobey Maguire, opens in limited release Dec. 15 and then nationwide Dec. 22.

[Ghostboy]

I saw this last week. It's okay. I think it would have been better if it had pushed the period technique to the extreme - either that, or avoided it altogether. The script is intermittently great, but the chemistry between Clooney and Blanchett on which the whole plot hinges is as dead as a doornail. Bogey and Bergman they most definitely are not.

[modage]

love that soderbergh.  he's consistently inconsistent.  i thought this was coming out THIS friday because thats what the poster said and it only came out like a month ago.  but it looks like it's been pushed back to the 15th, which makes sense considering there have really been no promotional materials for it until very recently.

[Ghostboy]

The Good German...The Good Shepard...the bad timing...

[Pozer]

the good german shepard.  that's had to have been noted.

[Kal]

the good german shepard.  that's had to have been noted.

[MacGuffin]

Steven Soderbergh's Shades of Grey
Source: ComingSoon

This is the second time in '06 that ComingSoon.net has interviewed filmmaker Steven Soderbergh, the first time being for his experimental HD film Bubble, shot in West Virginia with complete unknowns.

Now, he's back for his fifth film starring actor George Clooney, an adaptation of Joseph Kanon's novel The Good German, which takes place at the end of WWII as the Allied nations converge on Berlin to figure out what to do with the spoils of their victory. In the film, Clooney plays U.S. war correspondent Jake Geismer, who returns to Berlin only to find that his former lover Lena Brandt (Cate Blanchett) is caught up in the post-war trials as both the Americans and Russians will do whatever it takes to get their hands on her scientist husband.

Clooney and Soderbergh's last "experimental film" was the futuristic remake of Solaris, but for this one, they took a time machine to the past, making the film as if it made in the '40s, in black and white using the same filmmaking techniques, combined with never seen archival footage from the era.

Ladies and gentlemen, once again, Mr. Steven Soderbergh...

Comingsoon.net: Did screenwriter Paul Attanasio know that you were going to do this movie in black and white while he was writing it?
Steven Soderbergh: No, that came later. There were a couple of different ways to go. I think the assumption initially was that it would be normal, color. We'll go to Germany and we'll do it like a regular movie, and then that started to seem less interesting to me and also expensive, like more expensive than I thought. It should be strangely enough, but the way we ended up doing the film was one of the more economical ways to do the film. Then this idea from being able to use archival footage in some way or footage from other films that were made from that period became appealing and then that started to dictate the black and white.

CS: Did you decide to leave modern aspects like language and sex scenes out because they wouldn't have been done in movies of that era?
Soderbergh: If you're just literally imitating that aesthetic in every particular, including the way people speak and the fact that those filmmakers were working under the haze code, then to me it really is just a pastiche. You're not pushing the ball forward or sideways or anywhere, you're just literally making a copy of something. Like for instance "Far From Heaven" or like "The Last Picture Show," we thought the most interesting version of the movie is, this aesthetic from sixty years ago. When we say it's modern, people were saying f**k in 1945 and they were feeling each other up and there were moral issues that were difficult and ugly. The problem is again, people making movies in this country were censored. So that, combined with a desire to have attention between those two things, attention between this aesthetic that's very glamorous, very romantic inherently and an approach to narrative and characters that is the antithesis of that which is interesting to me. I wanted that battle to be played out through the song, because I thought that would be interesting, that would be interesting to watch. It would not be a passive experience to watch a movie in which that battle's taking place. Honestly, until we get into these situations, it's not something I've ever articulated to anybody involved in the movie or would have. That's the result of thousands of hours of work and conversations about how do you want it, or how do we want to do it or how should people talk. And you have to remember, our sense of how people behaved sixty years ago is largely shaped by the movies that were made sixty years ago.

CS: Can you talk about the archival material and how you incorporated it into the film?
Soderbergh: We got some of it from here, we got some of it from Germany, but we got most of it from Russia strangely enough. There was a Russian archive that had an enormous amount of material from Berlin from the summer of 1945. It was a real find for us and the trick was organizing it and filing it and then trying to fit it into the script, identify the areas where I needed it. It was very laborious, but we had so many different people working on that for years. It was a very elaborate system of what the shot was, what time of day, what part of the city, were there cars in it, were there people in it. It was really boring.

CS: In essence, this is a story about torturers getting away with something as the American bring scientists who did else evil elsewhere onto American shores. Can you talk about this
Soderbergh: I just think there were no good options here. There was no good choice. There really wasn't. This is what happens in a post-war environment. I think the Americans in this case didn't have a choice. I suppose you could have gone to the American public and said, "Hey, look, we want to bring these people over to build these rockets, because if we don't, they're going to go to Russia, but there's this thing – a lot of them ran slave camps. How do we all feel about that?" But we don't live in that world. We just don't. There was an operation, and it was called "Overcast" in its initial incarnation, and then it got called "Paperclip." It was a mandate to do exactly this, to find these people, clean up their past, get them to Utica and "Let's start building stuff." Like I said, I don't know what other options there were.

CS: About your collaboration with George, are there things that you're still learning about him and what did you learn from him in this particular film?
Soderbergh: I want to say he's getting better and better, but it makes it seem like he wasn't good when we started and that's obviously not the case. I was one of the people when I saw him on "ER" and I went, "That guy is a movie star." That was just my gut reaction when I saw him on that show. When "Out Of Sight" came up, and that was a movie I had to pursue, part of it was my belief that this guy's ready to pop and I really wanted to do "Out of Sight" with him. I just felt like I want to get on this train. Like I said, I just think he's getting better, and you look at the choices he's made since "Out Of Sight." It's a pretty incredible range of material to go from "Out Of Sight," "Three Kings," "O Brother" to "Solaris," to "Syriana," that's a pretty impressive array of performances. He gets this rap like you know "George is always George", but I don't think that's true at all.

CS: Do you feel that you have to convince him to do low budget movies like this or is he just as excited to go into them because of your relationship?
Soderbergh: Oh, no, no. He does that anyway. When he does a movie for the Coen brothers or when he did "Three Kings" or doing movies like "Syriana," he's not making a lot. He doesn't care about that. I mean I'm sure he feels very pragmatic about it. He's like, I have money, what I want is a series of titles on the shelf of movies that I made that I can look back on and feel good about.

CS: How does the collaboration between you and George work exactly?
Soderbergh: We are alike in ways that are helpful to getting work done, and we're not alike in ways that are helpful to making the work better. So it's a good mix. We both have a similar attitude about how you do your work and we both like to work a lot. Creatively, we're very much in sync and the ways we're not perfectly in sync are helpful; you know what I mean? (Long pause) He's less pretentious.

CS: What does it take to get you to say "yes" to a project?
Soderbergh: It starts with the story. It starts with the content. That's how this started. I just thought, "This is a good story, an interesting story, one I really hadn't seen before." (It's) the exoneration of Nazi scientists by the Americans. This was not something I'd really read about and so I was really interested. By the way, there's a great, great documentary that PBS did a year ago, a little over a year ago about this subject. I think it's called "In Search of Nazi Scientists." Anyway, if you can find it, and I'm sure it's available, it's great. So that's how this started. It has to work on these sort of parallel tracks. It has to work as something that's referential, but it also has to work as something that's original as well, or then it really is just an exercise and an imitation of something.

CS: Some directors have an obvious through-line to their work, but you don't seem to have that. Do you personally think there's anything thematically or stylistically in your films that you keep going back to?
Soderbergh: Well, I try not to look back. I don't know that I'd ever think about it. It's certainly something I wouldn't think about until I stopped because I think this is not an intellectual medium. There are a couple of examples and I won't state them, but I think for the most part intellectuals don't make very good movies. It's an emotional medium and I think you can really outsmart yourself. So, analysis of that kind is just something I think can be dangerous. It's a business in which a great number of people have managed to move bag and baggage into the third person. You have to watch out for that. Part of that process is thinking about, "Well, what is my career like and how do people think about me?" That's just something I don't want to get into.

CS: With that in mind, why did you decide to do two Che Guevara projects ("Guerilla" and "The Argentine") back to back?
Soderbergh: Well, "Kill Bill." Those were two movies. What's the quickest thing I can say? I think the reason for it being two films will be apparent to anyone who sees them. I think the biggest issue is going to be how far apart to put them out. I would like them to go out a week apart. That specific thing hasn't been done yet. The Clint Eastwood movie just got moved up, but I don't know that anybody has ever made two movies that were released a week apart. I think that would be really cool, but we'll see.

CS: Are you incorporating any of the stuff from "The Motorcycle Diaries" into them or does it all of it take place after that?
Soderbergh: It's after.

The Good German opens in New York, Los Angeles and Toronto on Friday, December 15 with further expansions in December and January.

[modage]

I saw this last week. It's okay. I think it would have been better if it had pushed the period technique to the extreme - either that, or avoided it altogether. The script is intermittently great, but the chemistry between Clooney and Blanchett on which the whole plot hinges is as dead as a doornail. Bogey and Bergman they most definitely are not.

yeah i agree with ghostboy.  and its unfortunate because the movie goes for broke stylistically (and possibly breaks).  i liked the juxtaposition of the old fashioned filming with more modern touches (sex, profanity) but the script just comes off a little flat.  and it looks like with no nominations and oceans 13 stuff already surfacing this will barely be a blip on anyones radar.

[A Matter Of Chance]

I actually felt sad as I was watching this movie. It seemed like Soderbergh wanted so badly to make Casablanca, but no matter how hard he tried it would never be 1942 and he could never get that script so he made the next best thing and tried hard to make it look like it could have been made back then. Guy's pining so bad.

That having been said, you know when you're watching a movie about making movies, and the movie they're making is just kinda boring and flat and stock? This is what this felt like to me, as a movie. Which is a pity because I thought Cate Blanchett was phenomenal.

[MacGuffin]

'I like the blood and gristle'
Steven Soderbergh is a double agent of a film director, shuttling between arthouse and multiplex. As he tells Ryan Gilbey, he has plenty of bruises to show for it
Source: The Guardian
 
When he accepted the Palme d'Or in 1989 for his debut Sex, Lies and Videotape, Steven Soderbergh told the audience: "It's all downhill from here." He didn't get it quite right. A corkscrew rollercoaster would have provided a better analogy. His commercial fortunes diminished with each film he made after his Cannes win, until Out of Sight arrested the decline in 1998. The double-whammy of Erin Brockovich and Traffic made it a distant memory. The 44-year-old Soderbergh has squeezed more peaks and troughs into the six years since Traffic won him the Oscar for best director than most film-makers manage in an entire career. At this precise moment, the response to his latest film The Good German is much on his mind. Clearly it's trough time again.

The film itself is powered by a typically oddball idea: it's set in the aftermath of the second world war and incorporates only those techniques available to film-makers in 1945. It is, however, suffused with an ambivalence and earthiness that would have been unthinkable then. The movie is about one Jake Geismer (George Clooney), arriving in rubble-strewn Berlin as a war correspondent but more interested in seeking out his German lover, Lena (an unrecognisable Cate Blanchett), who has turned to prostitution in the years since they last saw one another.

The Good German was selected for the Berlin film festival, and the night before we meet, Soderbergh watched it again in the company of a 2,000-strong festival audience. "I became aware of just how extreme an experiment the film is," he says, shifting in his seat and talking over the loud squeaks of his leather jacket. His hair is shorn close to his bony scalp, and his features seem too prominent for his thin face. "We were sitting there watching this ... weird ... movie. Not weird in a bad way, hopefully. But this strange process occurs as you watch it and go through different layers of feeling. My hope is that halfway through, the aesthetics fall away and you just deal with the narrative."

The 1940s cinematic style - monochrome photography, screen wipes, noirish voiceover - makes the departures from that era doubly shocking; whenever anyone swears or has sex or receives a graphic beating, it's as though obscene graffiti has been daubed on a print of The Third Man. Which is all very pungent, but begs the question: why?

"It's an elaborate 'What if?'," says Soderbergh. "What if Michael Curtiz had the freedoms in 1945 that I have today? If the Hays code hadn't existed, what would movies have been like? Hopefully, that's a fun thing to imagine." What has prevented The Good German from generating the same excitement as, say, the stylistically similar Far From Heaven (which Soderbergh executive-produced), is that once the novelty wears off, it really isn't much fun at all. But if there's one director on the planet who can take bad notices on the chin, it's Soderbergh. When it became clear to him that no one could see the good in The Good German, he was straight on the phone to Warner Bros advising the distributor to scrap the planned wide release, repackage the film for the arthouse, and hit the college towns. "I don't want to spend $15m chasing $2m," he shrugs.

You've got to love his transparency. Here he is promoting his new film, and he's openly discussing his strategy for making it a partial flop, rather than a complete one. Even more admirably, he can zoom back to appreciate the consequences of what may come to be regarded as an expensive folly. "I feel bad for Warners," he says. "I don't like losing money for anybody. More importantly, the person coming in behind me, to pitch something that's off the beaten track - well, sorry, but that's not going to happen. We just shut the door on that for a while. That's really sad. Not for me: I got to make the movie, I'm happy. But the two or three people behind me will have to go elsewhere."

Soderbergh currently enjoys a position of luxury in the industry, but it hasn't always been like that. After hitting the buffers with his 1995 thriller The Underneath, he purged himself with the free-form Schizopolis, one of the most masochistic works ever committed to film: a portrait of mental, marital and artistic breakdown in which Soderbergh cast himself and his real-life spouse from whom he was separating acrimoniously. After that picture, which he now describes as a "rebirth", he felt free to reinvent himself with Out of Sight. That picture was crucial in kick-starting the second, most fruitful phase of Soderbergh's career, and in bringing him together with George Clooney, later to become his semi-regular leading man and co-founder of their (now disbanded) production company, Section Eight.

"We found each other at the right time," Soderbergh says. "We needed each other. We were both looked at as people with potential who hadn't delivered. It was a trick of the mind for George and me to show up on set each day and be creatively free when we both knew what the stakes were. If we didn't pull it off - if he didn't prove he was a movie star, if I didn't make something audiences could enjoy - we were in big trouble."

Even once Soderbergh was back on track with confident, playful work like Out of Sight and The Limey, he was not one to parrot the party line on the enchanted world of film-making. The DVD commentary tracks for both those films feature sustained and bitter arguments between Soderbergh and his respective screenwriters, who berate him for every perceived distortion or compromise. "I get sick of everyone saying everything's great all the time," he says, seething slightly. "I like to hear about the blood and gristle of the creative process. I hate these fucking interviews where it's like there's sunshine shooting out of the director's mouth. So I try to be very careful about the syntax I employ. I don't want to suggest, 'We've done an amazing thing here'."

True to his word, he doesn't dispense any glowing adjectives about The Good German. He thinks Solaris contains some good moments but concedes he didn't pull it off. He's critical of his second film, Kafka, which he is re-editing for DVD. And don't get him started on The Underneath - "horrible ... beyond salvation" - which is now less a film and more Soderbergh's personal punch bag. Generally, he's in favour of letting history decide. "All my pleasure is in making movies. Twenty years from now we'll figure out which ones are great and which ones aren't."

While Soderbergh has yet to make his masterpiece, it's generally agreed that he is one of the key figures in obliterating the distinction between independent and Hollywood cinema. "I don't see much difference between the indies and the studios. The rules are the same. Wherever you are in the industry, no one will encourage you to do anything other than what you've successfully done before."

The pattern of his career since remaking Ocean's Eleven in 2001, and transforming it into his own personal - or rather, impersonal - franchise suggests a conscious shuttling between the experimental and the mainstream. He can recharge his creative batteries with arthouse doodles like Solaris or Bubble, an ultra-low-budget guerrilla production shot on HD and released simultaneously in cinemas and on DVD. Then he can maintain his commercial reputation with the glossy indulgences of the Ocean's series. Ocean's Thirteen, which opens in June, is by his reckoning "the funniest so far, in terms of jokes per minute".

But he strongly disputes the suggestion that he alternates between one for himself and one for the studios. "They're all for me!" he hoots. "Whether it's Bubble or Ocean's Eleven, it's still a lab experiment. Those Ocean's films are hard, man. They're so elaborate. And comedies are hard to begin with. If a comedy's not working, it's dead on the screen, and no amount of film-making skill can disguise that. Whereas you can fool people with dramas because the reaction is all interior." I ask if he's guilty of that. "I think I've made movies that seemed better because they were dramas. They work on the audience like sleeping gas." Not an ideal quote for the poster of The Good German, but you take the point.

The funny thing is that Soderbergh's unusual period of entitlement, an atmosphere that made the The Good German possible, is about to end. "I'm concerned because after this third Ocean's, that's it. And looking at what I've got lined up, there's nothing comparable in commercial terms - nothing that can buy me mistakes the way that series has."

Next up are two films about Che Guevera, Guerrilla and The Argentine, starring Benicio Del Toro. "They could be commercial," he says unconvincingly. "They're certainly not esoteric. But I don't have anything that's a 'tent pole' movie, nothing I can look at and say, 'It'll be fine'." His confidence seems to wane momentarily. "The important thing is not to panic."

[grand theft sparrow]

In 5, 10, 20 years from now, a small group of people will start championing this film as one of Soderbergh's most underrated films.  They'll say it was released before or after a point when it could truly be appreciated, and how Warner Bros. just dumped the film, and how it's the audience's fault that it wasn't picked up on.  All in all, they'll say it's one of Soderbergh's better films, one or two even daring to put it near or at the top of his filmography.

That small group of people will be wrong.

I'm a big-time Soderbergh apologist.  Even when a film of his doesn't quite sit right with me (like Bubble), I feel like it's my fault (taking his intro to Schizopolis to heart, I guess) and I feel like, with some time, I'd get into it.  But this was just a misfire on just about every level.  The criticisms levied at Grindhouse should be directed towards this instead because this story had a chance at being a really tight film (with only minor adjustments made to the script) that was completely undone by the 1940s style gimmick.

It's essentially a big joke that everyone seemed to be in on but Clooney.  I think if he didn't give up trying to be Bogart after his first 5 minutes on screen, I would have turned it off by the halfway mark.  But Cate Blanchett was doing Marlene Dietrich karaoke (as opposed to Ingrid Bergman).  Tobey Maguire didn't belong in this movie at all and I can't help but feel that Soderbergh was maybe having so much fun pretending he was Michael Curtiz that he wasn't aware that he was sabotaging the telling of the story.  By the end, I just didn't give a shit.  I had no way of getting into it because I couldn't get past the way it was filmed.  The only things missing were fake scratches on the print.

However, Soderbergh Peter Andrews is becoming a better DP as he goes on.  This movie does look damn good in spite of the 40s studio lighting and all.  But it's not enough. 

Soderbergh ought to remake this in 20 years, a la The Man Who Knew Too Much.

[ElPandaRoyal]

I have to say I really liked this one. I couldn't help but be a real sucker for the history of filmmaking exercise that Soderbergh put on. I loved the style and the sort of anachronisms of it (language, sex...) taking into consideration the period it was evoking in term of film history. I saw it mostly as a labour of love from an enormously gifted filmmaker which compensates for the ocasional lack of direction of the script. Unlike what happened for example in Ocean's 12 and 13, where I could see any real interest for the movies other that they having fun. "The Good German" is no fun, it's love - something everybody here at xixax has for movies. And I really loved the way the characters integrated in this 1940's movie, loved those shifts in point of view, loved the light, and the whole tone of it all.

So, to make some sense of this whole boring speech, all I meant to say was: it might not be a perfect movie, but I was reallt absorbed by it, and enchanted by it.