Steven Soderbergh on iPhone-shot thriller Unsane
Despite announcing his retirement from cinema, Steven Soderbergh has been as busy and innovative as ever over the last few years. His latest film, Unsane, is another experiment: a psychological thriller shot on an iPhone
Steven Soderbergh is one of the most active minds and boundary-pushing experimenters in mainstream American cinema. From shaking up independent film with Sex, Lies and Videotape, to remaking Tarkovsky with Solaris, to winning an Oscar for Traffic and spinning blockbusters out of Erin Brockovich, Magic Mike and the Ocean’s Eleven franchise. From 16mm experiments like The Underneath to DV freakouts like Schizopolis and Full Frontal, to being a pioneer of high-end digital cinema by taking the RED camera into the jungle in 2008 to tell the story of Che Guevara, to TV shows like The Knick and interactive murder mystery Mosaic, which first appeared as an app before being broadcast on HBO. And this is only to begin to laundry list his achievements – he has proven restless, searching, and more often than not, quite brilliant.
After announcing his retirement from film five years ago, he in fact has come back with a slew of multimedia projects, including his latest thriller Unsane. It stars British prestige queen Claire Foy in a live-wire, go-for-broke performance as a woman who finds herself haunted by visions of her homicidal stalker while involuntarily confined in a mental institution that’s running an insurance scam. It’s both a political commentary on America’s incarceration-for-profit machine and a wacked-out prowler horror. What’s more, Soderbergh – who acts as his own cinematographer – has shot for the first time on the iPhone 7.
It was our great pleasure to sit down with Soderbergh as part of a press roundtable at Berlin Film Festival. As soon as he’s in the room, he’s already noting the phones and digital sound recorders on the table, and musing about technological trends.
“See, this is the problem,” he says, in reference to the machines. “You used to be able to, if a story ran that you didn't like, say, ‘I never said that!’ Now you don't have that luxury.”
We offer that he could just label it “fake news” and claim it was doctored, which leads him on a thought about the advancement of artificial intelligence in faking video and audio. “I mean, you can really make somebody think that's real. Or convince somebody something's not real, because you show somebody something and go, look, doesn't that look real, well it's not. So how do we trust all this other stuff? It's pretty terrifying.”
The conversation quickly turns to the choice of shooting method. Is Unsane an invitation for every one of us to shoot a movie with an iPhone? “There’s nothing keeping you from doing that,” says Soderbergh. “But it's not a substitute for talent, or for the kind of application that's required if you're going to become good at anything. It's not a substitute for a point of view, or an approach. It's just a tool.
“I wanted to make sure that the project would be better for having employed this methodology than it just being incidental. If I'd shot it using the equipment that I shot Mosaic or Logan Lucky, then it would be a different movie, and for my mind, it would be diminished.
“It's sort of a process of exploring a tool and determining for yourself what its strengths are, what its weaknesses are, and whether or not something that you think is a weakness actually, if it's approached a certain way, can turn into a strength. Sometimes a thing that you think is the problem actually turns out to be the solution if you double down on what you think the mistake is.
“I don't know if you're aware of these... Brian Eno put together a series of these cards, mostly in the form of questions you should ask yourself, if you find yourself stuck creatively. Sort of like a solution box, based on his experience of working. One of the things that he talks about is, maybe the thing that you think is the problem is actually the solution, and I read somewhere, he was working on this music track, and there was this noise on the track that they couldn't get rid of. And he goes, 'we were spending a lot of time trying to get rid of this noise, but every time we pulled that noise out, it would affect everything else, and it would screw the song up'. What they realised was, what if we make the noise part of the point of the song? Why don't we embrace the noise, and do things musically to indicate that we like the noise? We want the noise to be part of the song."
We note that one thing he embraces for Unsane is how everything stays in maddening focus in the iPhone image, and also how looming and unnatural the foreground looks.
“That’s a situation where I made a conscious decision to embrace the fact that you have almost infinite depth of field. And therefore you need to stage and compose accordingly. Part of the fun of making this movie was to literally do things that I wouldn't do. Especially, it was really liberating to throw all sense of subtlety out the window because I felt that's not going to help this movie. It's not a subtle movie, and it shouldn't be. And as a result, you know, I had a lens closer to some actors in this situation than I've ever had before. That's what I felt it required.”
Soderbergh was so determined to do something different with Unsane that for a brief period, he tried to convince the Directors Guild to let him be credited under an alias. Authors, of course, do this all the time. “But authors don't have the kind of unions that the film business has. And I understood... you can imagine them gaming out the bad scenario of everyone going, great, I'm going to call myself something really inappropriate just because I can. But in my case, it was a sincere attempt to want to kind of annihilate my own name. What I realised is, I'll just have to do that for myself [in my own mind], without that crutch. I wonder, if this exact film was dropped by a 23-year-old Dutch filmmaker, what would people be saying about it? Would they be saying the exact same things they're saying about it, when my name is on it? I think probably not.”
One journalist asks, on the subject of audience expectations, to what extent Soderbergh like to set traps for the audience in the content itself? “I think every filmmaker has a line,” he replies. “The ease with which you can manipulate an audience is something you need to be careful about. I've always viewed filmmaking almost like a form of seduction. I certainly have a sense in my own mind of what constitutes a fair and appropriate form of seduction, and one that I find sort of off-putting or one that is sort of uncomfortable.”
In fact, rather than being cryptic about the way he chooses to tease out emotions, Soderbergh is one of the most open filmmakers in Hollywood about his process and his media consumption. For the past few years, he’s kept an online viewing log on his blog, extension765. We note that the last film he watched in 2017 was The Parallax View, another are-you-paranoid-enough thriller about US society, and ask what else found its way into Unsane.
“If you go back and look at sort of February, March, through June, July, you'll see some titles in there that are clearly homework for me.” Classics like Rosemary's Baby and Repulsion are obviously in the mix. There’s also a reference in Unsane to Brian De Palma’s dark satire Hi, Mom! “I watched the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, I watched the original I Spit on Your Grave, which is a very disturbing movie, but interesting. Upsetting, truly upsetting, but an interesting movie. I watched this British film, Prevenge, which I thought was kind of interesting. I was trying to get a sense of what I was trying to appropriate, and what I didn't want to appropriate. Certainly Repulsion was something I wanted to look at closely. But like I said, it all goes into the hopper, and then, sometimes I'm not even sure what I'm gonna use, until I see an opportunity to use it.”
One thing is settled: Soderbergh certainly hasn't retired. About the period when he made that announcement, he’s reflective: “That was a reaction to a set of circumstances that had been evolving over the course of several years, and that just felt like what I wanted to do. And I was serious about it. I had no projects in development, I had nothing in front of me, and I was gonna go explore the painting world. And then The Knick happened. So I decided to go to back to work, and it was while I was making The Knick I realised I was just angry, I was just frustrated by the movie business. I wasn't frustrated by the job of directing. I like the job. But I'd kind of put the two together in my mind, and it wasn't until I made The Knick that I realised they were kind of two separate things. So that's legitimate, and at the end of the day, I don't think there's anyone sitting around waiting for my paintings!”
Unsane had its world premiere at the 68th Berlinale and is released on 23 Mar by 20th Century Fox