Steven Soderbergh made Ocean’s Eleven, Erin Brockovich, and Traffic, but his new show with Claire Danes and Timothy Olyphant is more of an experiment. With all episodes out on Max, he digs in.
Rebel, wunderkind, trendsetter, pioneer, one-man band — all labels applied to Steven Soderbergh more regularly than, say, “winner of the Academy Award for Best Director” or “youngest-ever Palme d’Or recipient.” Whatever the filmmaker’s independent-leaning bona fides (and the list goes deeper than any one person can keep in their head simultaneously), Soderbergh’s current run is a fertile, three-medium collaboration with Men in Black and Bill & Ted screenwriter Ed Solomon. In 2017, the two ever-so-slightly broke apart the possibilities of narrative and distribution with Mosaic, an interactive, app-based, deliriously entertaining murder mystery (no longer online but since re-edited by Soderbergh into a strong HBO series); 2021 brought No Sudden Move, an Elmore Leonard-esque thriller far more surprising and experiment-friendly than its streaming debut might suggest; and now they’re back with the complex, formally audacious miniseries Full Circle on Max.
In Full Circle, a child is kidnapped off the streets of New York — just not the one the kidnappers were trying to kidnap. But for the wealthy targets, the incident spills decades’ worth of skeletons from the closet — and a conspiracy across two continents, two families, and multiple generations reaping what’s been sown. The show feels equal parts Soderbergh and Solomon, the latter again imprinting his interest in secrets as crime’s great motivator — especially as those secrets uphold the public face of generational wealth — while the former’s directing-editing-cinematographer duties make it immediately identifiable after, say, one second. It blends readily identifiable actors (Timothy Olyphant, Claire Danes, Dennis Quaid, CCH Pounder) with a cast of up-and-comers; its location work puts most other New York productions to shame; and as a sprawling narrative it is more or less impossible to guess the who-what-when-where-why of its unfolding.
Lest it seem Soderbergh’s resting easy, July also saw the surprise premiere of Command Z, a project that blurs the line between film and series and — despite also shooting in New York — breaks from most anything Full Circle resembles or even suggests. No surprise for his fans: This is the director who immediately followed the 12-month run of Traffic, Erin Brockovich, and Ocean’s Eleven with Full Frontal (I’ll give you a second to look it up) and Solaris (maybe his best film; it got an F CinemaScore). Or who helped innovate the day-and-date theater/VOD split with Bubble. Or readily embraced shooting movies on iPhones. Or followed his two-part Che Guevara biopic with a lo-fi experiment starring an adult-film actress. Or who… oh, I could keep going, but once I’m finished listing examples it’ll be time to write about another film, series, app, whatever Soderbergh’s just debuted.
Safe to say it’s fruitful ground for speaking with the director, who I joined on a Zoom roundtable with two other journalists. The below represents my questions, but even sufficient time with Soderbergh is hardly scratching the surface of where we might go.
Polygon: Full Circle brings you back to television for the first time in earnest since The Knick. If there’s a connection it’s in both shows’ handheld, roving style. How much of that is about the demand of the format and how quickly you need to get it done? Do you think of film and TV as two different styles?
Steven Soderbergh: The Knick is almost exclusively handheld. There’s probably half a dozen shots that are in “studio mode,” probably because I was using a zoom. Whereas in Full Circle there are more shots in “studio mode.” That would depend on what the scene was and how long I felt I was going to be holding a shot, and then how the shot was going to develop in terms of the staging.
One example: Early in episode 3, where we see the Brown family for the first time, I start close on this bag of drugs that they’ve gotten to calm Derek [Olyphant] down. I come out with him into the living room; the four of them are talking; then Sam [Danes] goes back into the kitchen, picks up the drugs, and walks back over to Derek. I wanted to keep all that sort of moving in one shot, but I also wanted the camera to be adjusting itself vertically as we were going. That very quickly became a shot: When you’re starting 18 inches from that bag, pulling all the way into the other room, up into the corner, handheld — that would’ve just become distracting and not as elegant. So it really depended on what I wanted people to be paying attention to and what kind of energy the scene required.
As far as speed: That’s not so much of a factor to me because we can set up shots — like the one I just described — and execute them pretty quickly. The thing that takes time when you have a lot of work in a day is unnecessary coverage. And so if you can rehearse and block and stage something and know where the cuts are coming before you shoot it — and you don’t capture any redundant material, you’re not doing 20, 30 takes — you can move pretty quickly. I do like to move quickly, not just because it keeps the actors hot, but also I don’t like to burn my crews out. Let’s say we average a 9.5, 10-hour day. Part of that is because, again, people need to stay fresh. The other is making sure that I have enough time after the shoot is over to get all the material, cut that day’s footage together, and know whether there’s something we need to go back and do again as quickly as possible. So that means, sometimes, calling the 1st AD at 9 or 10 at night saying, “You need to put on the call sheet tomorrow that I want to redo these two shots we did today.”
That happens a couple of times a week at least. It’s also an awareness that if I say, “We’re shooting a 10-hour day, so call time is 8 and shooting wrapped at 6,” I’m very aware — because of how wound into the crew I am because of the jobs I’m performing — that there were people there many hours before shooting call and there will be many there many hours after shooting call. Their day is not a “10-hour day”; their day is more like a 14- or 15-hour day, even on a “short” day. So — in the aid of not grinding people to dust — I try to be very cognizant of how long things are taking and how long the days are.
Do you have an estimate of how long the shooting schedule was on Full Circle, and how that compares to a two-hour feature?
The total, I think, ended up being — with all the reshoots — around 72, 73 days. That’s the same amount we shot both seasons of The Knick; that was 10 hours. My average, typically, for a two-hour movie has been about 35 days. So it was kind of in the middle, somewhere.
