Steven Soderbergh

Overview

Born
January 14, 1963 · Atlanta, Georgia, USA
Birth name
Steven Andrew Soderbergh
Height
6′ (1.83 m)

Biography

Family

Spouses
Children
Parents

Trademarks

Use of ambient-music scores by Cliff Martinez
Frequently casts Don Cheadle, George Clooney, Matt Damon, Topher Grace, Luis Guzmán, Eddie Jemison, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Julia Roberts and works with producer Jerry Weintraub.
Frequently uses jump-cuts
Often acts as his own cinematographer under the pseudonym "Peter Andrews"
Often includes a company named "Perennial" in his films (e.g. Traffic (2000), The Limey (1999), Out of Sight (1998) and The Underneath (1995)).

Trivia

During his early days in Los Angeles, he rented an above-garage room from the Gyllenhaal family: director Stephen Gyllenhaal, screenwriter Naomi Foner and their young children, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Jake Gyllenhaal.
In 2001, he became the first director in 62 years to have twin Best Director Oscar nominations for Erin Brockovich (2000) and Traffic (2000). The last director to do that was Michael Curtiz with twin nominations for Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) and Four Daughters (1938). Soderbergh topped Curtiz by going on to win the Oscar for Traffic (2000).
Became the youngest winner ever of the Palme d'Or at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival for Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989), his feature film directorial debut. He was 26.
Has directed three actors to Oscar nominations: Julia Roberts, Albert Finney and Benicio Del Toro. Roberts and Del Toro won the Best Actress and Best Supporting Actor Oscars, respectively, for Erin Brockovich (2000) and Traffic (2000).
Is the only director to have had two films (Traffic (2000) and Erin Brockovich (2000)) receive Best Director nominations in the same year for the Academy Awards, the Golden Globes, and the Directors' Guild of America.

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.