anderswolleck

Early on in his career everyone knew that Steven Soderbergh was an innovative and brilliant filmmaker. But no one had any idea that he would eventually have such an effect on the business side of making films. Bubble is the first film in a series of six that will be shot on high definition video and be released on three platforms at once, theatrical, DVD and to air on HDNet.

Bubble is about three people who work at a doll factory in a small town in rural West Virginia. One is an older woman named Martha [Debbie Doebereiner] who obviously has a crush on a young factory worker named Kyle [Dustin James Ashley]. But when a young and sexy single mother named Rose [Misty Dawn Wilkins] comes to work to the factory Martha doesnt like her.

Buy the DVD of Bubble

Daniel Robert Epstein: So is Warner Bros dodging your phone calls about releasing the DVD of Oceans 13 at the same time as the theatrical release?

Steven Soderbergh: If we do Oceans 13 I'll be talking to Warners about doing it. It would be the first big film to do so.

DRE: What will happen to the back end?

SS: See, this is my whole point. All of this stuff needs to be redesigned. The whole thing from top to bottom, the risk reward ratio. How people are compensated up front and how they are compensated in the back. Its in bad shape and someone needs to sit down and figure it out.

DRE: What should be done?

SS: There should be a true partnership between people who make material and the people who finance. That means that a lot of people who are being over compensated up front would have to be willing to take it on the back and that's fine. It's good to take it on the back if the people that you're dealing with can be trusted to pay you. The great news for me personally is that Warner Bros is actually one of the few studios that pays people when they owe them money. I've made movies with Universal and only one of them made any money and I was paid. I didn't have back end there. I had these triggers that if the film hit certain performance levels then I got a bonus and I got my bonus. The economics right now are just totally out of whack.

DRE: Why was Bubble the film to do this experiment with because while I loved the film, it doesnt seem like a film that can carry a large audience?

SS: Oh I don't think it will either. But the point is to find out what's going to happen and one of the things that I'm going to talk to [producer] Todd Wagner about is how do we want to quantify the success or non-success of this experiment. We should really figure out how we're going to judge how we did. In the case of HDNet, I need to find out from Todd if there's going to be a way to figure out if they get a spike in subscriptions during this period or is that not the way that their business really works. If 100,000 people call up on the 26th of January and order HDNet then that would tell us something, but I have a feeling that it wont be that dramatic.

DRE: How will this reconfiguration affect the kinds of movies being made?

SS: Everyone wins if you are able to redesign the economics because you would see better movies. I think that upfront there should be a salary cap in the film business. I don't have a problem with the artists making money. If the movie makes a billion dollars and you went in for a small fee upfront you should get a portion of that. If the salary cap was $5 million for an actor a lot of people could potentially come up with $5 million to pay an A-list actor. That actors decision is going to have to be based on what the best scripts are. The problem now is that someone else is always going to have more and that's going to sway the actor's decision about what to do, but if you level that playing field they only have to make the decision on the best material.

DRE: Thats worked out very well for you.

SS: Yeah George [Clooney] and I do it all the time. It's the only way that you could get the Oceans films made. They all took the deal of 40 percent of their quote and then did the same on the second one. Lets face it, it's still a lot of money.

DRE: But the problem is, most movies bomb.

SS: They don't do well because they cost too much to make and they cost too much to sell. That's the other thing to figure out; we have to sell them cheaper.

DRE: I cover a lot of art films here in New York. The article goes up on the internet and most of the people that read the article cant see the movie. Whats great about this project is that finally people can read about this movie and see it that day.

SS: Exactly. That's biggest selling point for us. The movie is going to open, it's going to be reviewed, there's going to be articles about it so there are potentially large numbers of people who might be intrigued. Normally they have to just wait around to see it on DVD. Now they dont have to.

DRE: How do feel about the people that will say youre ruining the experience of going to the theatre?

SS: I know my buddy M. Night [Shyamalan] is upset with the idea of DVDs coming out so soon after the theatrical release. But the analogy is, lets say that there is this amazing art exhibit that's in a museum where I don't live and I'm not going to get to go see. So when the big coffee table book comes out am I supposed to not buy it because I didn't get to see it in the museum? I would like to have it. I would like to see those paintings knowing that I may never see them in a museum. I'd like to buy the coffee table book. Is that so wrong?

DRE: You also didnt shoot Bubble on 65mm film that would look amazing in a movie theatre.

SS: No, but even if I did, content trumps venue to me. A good movie is a good movie and if it doesn't work I don't care if you see it 40 feet high or on your watch. A good story is what works.

DRE: How do you sell this concept to the exhibitors?

SS: They need to be brought into this and made partners. There are ways in which they are complicit in the erosion of attendance and then there are ways in which they are not. Todd and Mark [Cuban] have talked about sharing revenue if exhibitors will agree to show the movies that are coming out on DVD the same day as well. That might be the way to handle it. But the bottom line is that I go to a lot of movies and most of my experiences are not positive.

DRE: How much did Bubble cost?

SS: 1.6 million.

DRE: Will all six of these films use non-actors?

SS: They're all going to be different. My desire with these films is to have a basic story idea and place the people into the film rather than doing what we normally do, which is taking over the environment. This makes it so we can work a little slower with a smaller crew. My goal is to have six films that take place in wildly different areas of the country with different social strata and just come up with a little box of movies that are just a snapshot.

DRE: On the Bubble poster it says Another Steven Soderbergh Experience.

SS: Yeah I just thought that it was funny. I guess that it was a jokey way of getting you into the right way of thinking about the movie which is Don't show up with the slide-rule thinking that this is going to fit. You've got to be a little more open than that.

DRE: How is working with untrained actors different from professionals?

SS: It is completely different because they're not worried. You realize when you're watching Debbie [Doebereiner] that if you had a professional actor doing that it wouldn't be the same. There's such a lack of pretense that it's compelling to me. To watch them is really fascinating because you just didn't know what was going to happen, but you knew it was going to be interesting. It's funny, Clooney grew up in Kentucky and when I showed the film to him he said I knew so many people like this.

DRE: Martha is a very religious character, do you feel this film is a comment on organized religion?

SS: Not really. I had that scene in the church because that's a part of a lot of people's lives who are in the area. It is a little bit of a misdirect because Martha has these episodes where clearly she goes somewhere. Initially that you're meant to think it's a place where good things happen or it's transcendent but in fact it's a place where anything can happen and it's not a place she necessarily has access to. These are people who have no mechanism to discuss these deep subterranean feelings that they're having. They're not therapized so in her case that pressure builds up and then comes out.

DRE: Would you ever think about using non-actors on bigger budgeted films?

SS: When you see the results of creating an environment where there aren't as many distractions as you usually get on a film set that makes you want to try and do that on other films. But sometimes it's just not possible. I'm editing The Good German now and this is a movie that that you couldn't put non-actors in and shoot with a ten person crew. You have to find the right fit for each project.

DRE: How did you find the doll factory?

SS: Coleman [Hough], our writer found it. I told her I wanted a triangle set in a factory. She emailed me one day and said she found this doll factory. At one point we were talking about an animal testing facility but I felt that was too much.

DRE: The first half of the film sets up this amazing dynamic between the three characters. I was a little surprised when the murder happened. Was that always the kind of story you wanted to shoot?

SS: Yeah, there was always a murder because it was about what that line was and how one can cross it. There are all these true crime shows and you're always surprised at the people who decide that this is a good idea. Some of them don't think about it and it happens very spontaneously, but it's fascinating to me.

I picked Colman to write the script because I knew I needed someone who was not only was a good writer, but Coleman is also great at going to a place like this and talking to people. People like her. They open up to her. I needed someone who was going to be able to gain the trust of the people that we were going to work with. As I was trying to figure things out on set she was always talking to the actors and would say things to me like Misty [Dawn Wilkins] just told me this great story about working in a nursing home. We have to figure out how to get the nursing home story into the movie. I filed that away and one day we were shooting scenes in the lunch room and I'd go, Okay, now today is the day that you're going to tell the nursing home story.

DRE: How was it working with [Guided by Voices] Bob Pollard as the music composer?

SS: He's awesome. I'd asked Bob to write some cues for the bar scene but I had a different score on the movie. But then the people who's music I wanted to use didn't want me to use their music. This was very late in the game and I had to regroup. Bob had given me some acoustic songs for the bar scene and I thought I would lay those over some other scenes. I put them over the opening and I really liked it. So I called Bob and told him that I needed him in the studio right away. He sent me a disc of the next two albums that he's going to put out and I gave him a list saying, Do these six songs, these three need to be up tempo and these three mid-tempo. There was something about one guy with the guitar teaming up with one guy with a camera.

DRE: How was it directing The Good German after Bubble?

SS: It was definitely interesting. The Good German is a real murder mystery set in 1945.

DRE: How did you select the cast?

SS: Tobey Maguire, Cate Blanchett and George Clooney were the best people for these parts, but it'll be interesting. This is a movie where everyone deferred their pay again because it is in black and white.

DRE: Why did it have to be black and white?

SS: I'm incorporating archival footage into the movie and there's just no other way to make it match.

DRE: Will it premiere at Cannes this year?

SS: I hope so.

DRE: In Sidney Lumets book, Making Movies, he really stressed the idea of two films for them and one film for him. You really seem to take that concept to heart.

SS: No, they're all for me, even the Oceans movies. I don't spend two years of my life on stuff that I'm not into. I love those films.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck