Steven Soderbergh is known to be a versatile filmmaker, but one type of film he’s thus far avoided is the superhero epic. And according to the “Ocean’s 11” director, we shouldn’t expect him to be wading into the waters of Marvel or DC anytime soon.
When asked by The Daily Beast if he gets asked to make superhero movies, Soderbergh replied “not really” but clarified he has nothing against those types of films. “I’m not a snob; it’s not that I feel it’s some lower tier in any way,” Soderbergh explained. “It really becomes about what universe you occupy as a storyteller. I’m just too earthbound to really release myself to a universe in which Newtonian physics don’t exist (laughs). I just have a lack of imagination in that regard, which is why the one foray I had into pure science-fiction (2002’s ‘Solaris’) was essentially a character drama that happened to be set on a spaceship.”
The “Sex, Lies, and Videotape” filmmaker continued, adding that the lack of realistic human behavior in superhero movies is a barrier he’s unable to breach. “For a lot of these, for me to understand the world and how to write or supervise the writing of the story and the characters – apart from the fact that I can bend time and defy gravity and shoot beams out of my fingers—there’s no f—ing,” Soderbergh said. “Nobody’s f—ing! Like, I don’t know how to tell people how to behave in a world in which that is not a thing.”
No doubt half-joking (if not completely), the Oscar-winning “Traffic” director added, “The fantasy-spectacle universe, as far as I can tell, typically doesn’t involve a lot of f—ing, and also things like — who’s paying these people? Who do they work for? How does this job come to be?”
Soderbergh again relayed that he has nothing against superhero movies but for himself as a filmmaker, he just doesn’t “know where to start.” Indeed, Soderbergh helped vouch for filmmakers Joe and Anthony Russo when they were vying for the job to direct “Captain America: The Winter Soldier,” and they went on direct the two biggest Marvel movies in history.
Soderbergh’s most recent film is an HBO Max thriller called “Kimi,” starring Zoe Kravitz and releasing this Friday, and he’s about to begin production on the third “Magic Mike” film, “Magic Mike’s Last Dance.”
