Steven Soderbergh: Success dies like videotape

Steven Soderbergh knows more about success than most. At 26, he was the youngest director to win Cannes' prestigious Palme d'Or, for his adroit debut sex, lies and videotape. Back then, in 1989, he was briefly the hottest director on the planet. "Success is like this mysterious person you meet at a party," he later told me. "You feel like you have this connection, you spend the night together, and you wake up the next morning and they're gone. Failure is like the house-guest that won't leave. As a result, you can learn more from it. Success just feels like lightning struck. You could stand on the roof with a rod for the next two years and lightening wouldn't strike. You just can't conjure it."

With his new film, The Good German, Soderbergh still knows this to be the case. In one respect, little has changed for the 44-year-old director since his debut. Wearing a leather jacket, T-shirt and jeans, he looks much the same - even if he has long since parted company with his mop of curls. Bespectacled and bald, he has the air of a scientist about him - an appropriate image, given that he views his films as "experiments". Of late, the studio system has been his laboratory - though with each film, he seems determined to conduct ever more radical research.

Since winning a Best Director Oscar in 2001 for the drugs drama Traffic, one of three back-to-back $100m-grossing hits along with Erin Brockovich and Ocean's Eleven, Soderbergh has come back down to earth with a bump. Nearly all of his subsequent films have been lashed by the critics: the no-budget film-industry satire Full Frontal, his Solaris remake, and ,particularly, the over- indulgent sequel Ocean's Twelve. Only the small-town murder story Bubble escaped censure, though it was never released in the UK, and its unique distribution pattern in the US - a simultaneous theatrical, DVD and pay-TV release - caused uproar among cinema exhibitors. "I didn't have any hopes that it was going to change anything," he shrugs, now.

Likewise, box-office receipts have not been ideal. While Full Frontal and Bubble were never expected to perform, Solaris made back less than a third of its $48m budget, and Ocean's Twelve, while pulling in a respectable $125m, was still considered a failure as it barely broke even. Much the same could be said for the bulk of the films churned out under the banner of Section Eight, the production company formed by Soderbergh with George Clooney in the wake of his 2001 Oscar. Flops such as Criminal, The Jacket and Rumor Has It far outweighed the odd critical and commercial hit, such as Clooney's 1950s newsroom tale, Good Night, and Good Luck.

The Good German, an adaptation of the bestselling novel by Joseph Kanon, is another to add to the pile. In telling this story of a US military correspondent (Clooney), who is drawn into a murder plot involving his former lover (Cate Blanchett) when he returns to Berlin at the end of the Second World War, Soderbergh set out to recreate the style of 1940s Hollywood films. Shot on the Warner Brothers back-lot, this meant using old-school techniques, such as fixed lenses (no zooms allowed) and boom mikes hanging over actors' heads (no wireless). The result is a movie-buff's movie: the finale - a recreation of the aerodrome-set conclusion to Casablanca - just one of dozens of spot-the-reference moments.

Soderbergh was drawn to Kanon's novel because his father, Peter, a university professor, had written about the Holocaust and owned an extensive library of material on the subject. "The Holocaust was something we talked about all the time. We felt that the human race would never live it down." It was Soderbergh's father who was also responsible for first stimulating his son's interest in film, enrolling him in an animation class when he was 13. It proved to be his only formal film tuition, which is perhaps why he - like many of the characters in his films - has always rebelled against the system.

While Soderbergh calls The Good German "one of the most experimental things I've done", coming from the man who gave us the unhinged 1996 comedy Schizopolis, that's saying something. Yet he has a point. "There's a significant risk of alienation because of the aesthetic of the film, because so much of the audience isn't steeped in the cinema of 60 years ago," he says. "A lot of people don't want to watch anything in black-and-white, much less a movie made in 1945. Others like movies from that era, but don't like them being 'sullied' or 'twisted'."

Certainly, the US critics felt this way, uncomfortable with scenes laced with sex, violence and swearing - elements at which films back then could only hint. "Soderbergh has tried to resurrect the magic of classical Hollywood ... by sucking out all the air, energy and pleasure from his own film-making," wrote a New York Times critic in one of the kinder reviews. "They were angry," says Soderbergh. "They felt my recreation of that aesthetic was bogus. And the moral ambiguity of the whole thing bugged them." Soderbergh says that his interest in critical opinion only stretches to how it affects "the economic life" of the film. "In this case, we were DOA."

Intended as a platform release, whereby the studio would gradually increase the number of screens it played on as word-of-mouth spread, The Good German was never in more than 50 cinemas at any one time. Costing $32m, it has made back just over $1m so far, making it one of the most expensive flops of Soderbergh's career. Not that he has regrets. "From the beginning, I've always felt that it is as important not to repeat your successes as not to repeat your mistakes," he says.

But the fate of The Good German has a familiar ring to it. After sex, lies and videotape, his much-anticipated follow-up was 1991's Kafka. Blending biographical details of the writer's life with a fictional story, like The Good German it was black-and-white drama that attempted to emulate obsolete film-making styles - in this case, German Expressionism. Needless to say, it infuriated critics expecting something akin to his debut. "I knew I was due, because the response to sex, lies... was out of proportion to what the film was, a certain amount of trimming."

It led him into his bleakest period, on the margins of the industry, an era that only ended when he came back as a gun-for-hire on 1998's Elmore Leonard adaptation Out of Sight, his first collaboration with Clooney. By the time he won his Oscar three years later, he had sought shelter at Warner Brothers, the studio that houses Section Eight. Like a modern version of the old-style contracts into which directors were once locked, Soderbergh admits that it's "partially true" that he made Ocean's Twelve to satiate the studio, in exchange for bankrolling his company's money-losing projects. He has just completed the third (and final) part, Ocean's Thirteen, due in the summer, with Al Pacino joining the all-star cast, presumably as another sweetener to Warner for funding The Good German. "We're going out strong," he promises. "This one, the set-up, is very clean. Al has fucked over one of the guys, and the other 10 show up to take him down."

It is, indeed, the end of an era. Ocean's Thirteen looks set to be one of the last Section Eight productions, after last summer it was announced that Soderbergh and Clooney were closing the company. "It was too much work," says Soderbergh. "Maybe we didn't understand what was involved. I just can't be a producer any more." Perhaps, by concentrating on directing, the man who famously said, 'It's all downhill from here," when he won the Palme d'Or, is due to peak once more. One thing's sure: you can never discount his ability to rise from the ashes.

'The Good German' opens today, 'Ocean's Thirteen' on 8 June

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