Forum; Steven Soderberg

from the longhorn radio network the university of texas at austin this is for i'm dave davies i wish that movie that i mention in my head here as much as the movies have made interesting there's something beyond that film director steven soderbergh whose real traction needed this to the sort of filmmaking that it was a bad lawyer limited and i think there was an aspect of idiot savant that vote to the way such as happened was incompetence the story and this is the candidate that's right at the end of the day i don't think i felt very differently about the new three tons of men a minute i felt like i didn't i could and i learned a lot this is olive green

to day forum featured remarks from filmmaker steven soderbergh mr soderbergh one critical and popular acclaim five years ago when his film sex lies and videotape won the grand prize at the cannes film festival while he was in austin texas shooting a remake of the film noir classic crisscross he addressed the university of texas at austin texas center for writers i guess i should say that the you know the views expressed here tonight don't necessarily represent those for the texas center for writers for the university i'm not going to think like me in general so this is going to be pretty freeform will talk a little bit will open up for questions i'm sure most of you here are other students are many faculty and some of you are interested in writing or are writing or involved in some field that has writing involved as if the well a potential wasn't high enough i'm about that

quote from what i'm reading right now but russian filmmaker andre tchaikovsky was pretty talented that everything he says in any case it is perfectly clear that the goal for all art is to explain to the artist himself into those around him what mammoths were what is the meaning of his existence to explain to people the reason for their chance on this planet earth not to explain at least opposed the question you have to forgive him for using masculine terms i think it's art isn't taken very seriously in this country not as seriously as it ought to be i think for fans of very important functions and i was sometimes practically but also emotionally and so in particular i think because it was born in the marketplace especially in this country doesn't tend to be viewed as

serious art and on occasion their films i think that they're very self consciously try to the art that i made a couple of natural that it's i think so it was fascinating to me not only because of its power i think it's without question that the dominant art form of this century and with that hackers an enormous responsibility that i think a lot of filmmakers either abuse or refuse to acknowledge i'm not speaking about censorship i'm speaking more i'm a lack of imagination in the way events are portrayed her emotions and that leads us into speaking about writing i had to write i wouldn't write if i didn't have to in a sense the senate confirms as a teenager and wrote and edited

these films by default those materials to do it for me and very and disciplined i'm out on the street writer i feel as though in the case of sex life which is not messerli pleasant forget anymore but looking at it now i think it's a film that is better acted than it is directed and better director than it has written a good example of that is the first in which we meet peter gallagher plays a husband i'm assuming you've seen it by humana and he's sitting at his desk at work for somebody on the phone and he's telling his friend of his that on who is about to be married and when he got married at a ring on his finger that he got an enormous amount of attention from the opposite sex and what a great thing that was the service or when he should have said

was this person marriage is a great thing there is nothing more important to me than the bond i feel with my wife i can explain to you the sort of spiritual epiphany that occurred when i get married and then that his office and through the system at that is how people behave there's no reason why that character that given moment is you know a wire say the least it would open up this person on the phone there are many examples of throughout the film but that is the first one and it was one that was obvious to me the day i sat down in the editing room so it is really think of writing and and then i'll speak briefly just about craft because i don't know which is you have the soul of an artist i don't know that they can be

taught of nowhere comes from announcing it i haven't been listening that clearly there's an indefinable something that some people have an aircraft the screenwriting which is not really writing in my opinion are you can fake your way through screenplay you cannot figure with her novel there's three things that i think are most important structure obviously subtext and surprise an apprentice printer structures very obvious although structure doesn't the silly just mean the entire piece though the structure of the scene itself is is very important as well subtext not my ideal movie would be in which nobody ever said what they thought torment or wanted to anyone else and yet you know what they thought and then and wanted that but it is a very difficult thing to learn at least it has been for me i'm still

fighting with it i think it comes only through practice i got out of high school in nineteen eighty and wrote seven screen place of my own before i wrote sex lives and written a couple others for hire none of them were critically good or i think they might have gotten a prior sex lives it just takes a long time sometimes it's people who do it will until it's done right as a real master of surprise has to do i think with witches i just explained in which peter should've said these things about how happy was to be married and then got off in faithful those sorts of reversals and and they can be big ones or they can be small and stunned north

by northwest is full of really big ones and goodwill and i don't think it's just the sort of area but also has is when a chart of every ten pages there has to be some whammy that it's not that i think it is more than to at least in my experience in our everyday lives we go through these little reversals regularly that if people reveal themselves to us over a period of time and there are these little surprises a little turns around clearly if there were everything would work out exactly the way we wanted which maybe had a different kind of health well enough but i think those three elements the craft of writing it's hard i had from for my money it's the hardest aspect of what i do and it's it's been frustrating for me sometimes to see examples of

writing know whether it's prose whether it's a phone that don't at least a ten a certain level of craft i'm a big fan of short stories are a lot of short stories and there are quite a few young writers that i like enormously however the simple task of having a plot scenes of the last weather by intent or by accident i don't know but i see a lot of work by people who are very gifted at recreating an impression on events relating an anecdote and yet that that was the simple part of it is telling a story that has a structure to it seems to be thrown away and i find that frustrating i do think telling a story is ultimately what it's about whether youre you're writing prose or making a movie

its first century will have this experience too be able to recognize that riding in not be able to produce it i know chinatown was a great script it really is and i know why it's great and it's frustrating that i cannot sit down and do that at a certain point i think you move forward on faith until you can move forward and lawyers but for those of you who don't know to paraphrase an actor so many think he said once to those of you who want to write quick and for those of you who have to write god bless you and i think i would say that about writing as well i think like but almost any art form it's it's it's almost not a choice it's it's a

life for a living if you're lucky i had written plays for the people and the script that i got right now in iran in the process of trying to reload for another directly things that i'd attended before the protective of their ideas that that are generated either for reading a book marking the hell i can to be protective of those things are a lot better than it seems to be a direct has become the best entry level job in a business this knowledge isn't really the idea of me looking myself that i don't play the guitar so it's like me poking myself at liberty large twenty twenty bucks to come singing sometimes i don't get it and i'm not just talking about technique i'm just talking about somebody with some sense of the media that all of the news and seeing fans by writers who've gone on

record as being really upset about what was done to their scripts and an assumed their phones that they collected from their screens my feeling was you know that's we are protecting this is what your screaming about this isn't much better if any better than what you were sliding so there are some butter such as a ministry i have thought about it for a long time almost a year i had a circle and dissent and that just listening is that that came out but that doesn't happen doesn't happen again convincing people to do such as ashley had a hard time

convincing them to do everything prior but he was a smart home for young white attractive people with the sort of human sexuality floating around made for just over a million dollars but they will lose a lot of money and it was financed by what was at the prime policy at columbia home video the home video form of columbia pictures snapple columbia tristar on video there's a gentleman unwary estes to put a great many smartphones through the pike one part of the deal was that it would have to get a theatrical release it and said it made an important one but it said it had to be released in order to sort of drive the video sales now i love that one billy sipple and now i don't really think this is not to denigrate women to denigrate the work i've done because of the people who collaborated with an alabama boat there

because as much as i could i mean i have a certain kind of film in mind that i might make some day that i don't feel close to making yet and so to some degree i feel as though i'm just trying to get my craft their own so that when i know what that film is i can pull it off watch insects it is just i like talking to somebody you and thinks he's the body isn't oh yeah and if it lacks it should be funnier it'll last another level of irony that it really needs to have and the cassette i really think the performance and keep it afloat it has you know it has a certain when intensity because it was written and made very quickly and so it was

still very fresh in my mind but it also suffers from the fact that i have a lot of distance from it and then would make it very differently now that i think mostly will feel oh there are comments when it came out that i mean i'd say it was in the trial and to my mind straight adaptations of parkas fiction don't work because they attend a climax with ideas instead of events and that's really bad for movies and i thought about brazil which you know to me that doesn't exist of kafka hadn't existed first and i felt like in the news will come and going back to the source oh you can sit around thinking about what people are going to say just who depend on just have to go in and i felt like ten years from now i look back and say well put under the

circumstances that the situation was and that was a pretty bold choice to make finally setting go into some trouble i mean it was a film that i wanted to make a long time i was a and i was only the comparisons are to think about them i felt the film had a spin on that was mine and that that would become apparent them are films i made just how specific that's been laws and evan interviews and people said oh now i see there's that was sort of a common thread between these three movies that i thought i was just jumping all over the place which i was in terms of the genre but not less so in terms of ideas are three of the films i think are about the only nation of providers who are uncomfortable with the world around them can't seem to make sense of it feels separate but they're just very different physically in the case of king of the hill oh i had a wonderful piece of source material to draw on that was a good adaptation i actually have to do an experiment one thing though

i i i wrote an edited version of the book in screenplay for me because i was very wary of inventing because it was a memoir and the author was gone it was not only unreadable the supreme schubel and that freed me up to start inventing and compressing and i'm making my version of passion and a lot of the thing that really opened the floodgates in a sense was the lindbergh speech at the beginning of the film in the book he likes lindbergh that that that that speech and answers because doesn't occur again once i wrote that speech came up with that idea of showing how he thought it went a lot easier i felt looked into him and then i was able to invent a lot with a lot more confidence the parents including art that were very ambiguous figures that are in the book and i liked that i certainly when i was that age i had no idea what my parents were

up at doing that i can fly finishing up their behavior his father's day is as for romney's also engine centers but i guess i hate movies in which parents or either one thing or another because i just i didn't feel that way a solo and so i just one of the moving which you weren't quite sure how to take them into farm there was there was a huge huge there was an idea between myself and some of my producers who ran my side in general but the specific question of the last scene in the film where the parents come in and and comes up with arms fire standing in the doorway and that's sort of the most fire puts his hand shoulder and sort of like small from aaron you to read that in very different ways and people say as a candidate well what's with this happy ending

luckily luckily hutch here was sitting right there and it was it was that was what happened now that meant that that is a justification that i wanted to be with them in the end and to me it was a very odd ending it was very you know he's he's gone for so much more than everybody else and then his heel and knows that if and when iraq's away and you know i felt like he was again think he was going to be serving at the sentence for a long time it didn't so it's funny you know i've had some people say about the ending is really saddened and people think that maybe it's good or rain and then osbon now

to make a fun hobby underneath which is a remake of a noir film from the forties called crisscross start the lancastrian and they're free monsters up and up the film was given to me by someone to look at and i thought it was ok film roberts is in it and i was originally just going to write and produce it but about halfway through the script i really began to like it and i decided that i wanted to make it myself and sing to follow my credo that the three make up what is generally considered the classic as pointless crisscross to me is something that will benefit from being made today it's you know it's basically a crime drama that it was told

in a non linear fashion that i have not taken too much moore said that really tinkered with it a lot they're so before time continues going simultaneously one of the moving backwards and the script and we wanted to talk you know this is six months ago says three weeks from now whatever that i i used to different fonts file for each time period and just didn't give any indication where you work and eventually i think most people understand although when i handed it in the other executives said yeah people who follows lancelot bit and not to be offensive but you understood it at that different the general public so

it'll be interesting i i miss those kinds of movies there was a time in the sixties and early seventies with accident in the go between and julia point blank were the sort of nonlinear structures were we're being explored and suddenly it just stopped on the line and i've always been fascinated by them so this is an opportunity to get into that area which is one that interests me the external trappings of them are the sort of my shout along an unusual ad doesn't really interesting what interests me about your films is the idea i've invariably i'd you have a character or characters who desire something very much or someone very much and convince themselves that they can step over on that they

previously honored just for an instant to get what they want and step back and everything will be this arm the numbers icann it that fascinates me those the greek tragedies often because the primal emotions at work and i'm attracted to that just as as a venue for the drama and so on the underneath you know and even on the showtime episode good and i'm not really following the the technical stylistic conventions that are normally associate with nor i don't think anybody other than substance hundreds of interest and often it's distracting so in this case of events even you know no way streets know where streets at a medal

nobody smokes this is it's not a it's not about that to me and making a sort of relationship drama with this crime in the center of it so i'll be curious to see if this world of this or what i'm hoping to go directly from this too the confederacy account which is an important spending most of my upbringing in louisiana is about the hows whereas in them both from a way and it's a sort of tortured history of being developed but i think this time especially among that's being adapted well as we speak for me it might've taken a crack at it myself and that'll be interesting at a great book and traditions are hard to make a grateful immigrant of the many times and the mermaid it the more impressed i am by it and every time you even think about

alter its dickens you know it's got a lot of characters that covers you know from the bottom of the social ladder to the top and i think part of the jury reading that book losing its complexity and watching as clockwork mechanism pay off in the last of the patients i'm trying to retain as much of that as possible within a two hour movie i think it can be done my impression and talking to some other people who are attached to this project previously is that tape from one reason or another were trying to change the burger do it differently or make ignatius more lives without really ever and it just doesn't work like you got it you got to do the books that you take the central like jaws you take the central continue for everything else out and start over again this is of those books so we're trying to try to make that work well in all its glory

the guest on form has been prize winning filmmaker steven soderbergh his presentation at the university of texas at austin was sponsored by the texas center for writers the views expressed in this programme do not necessarily reflect the views of the university of texas at austin or the station technical producer for for dana white here production assistant likely a new producer and host all of korea that's because so long radio network communication austin texas seventy seven wanted to do

that is for him to say it's a longhorn radio network communications building the ut austin austin texas seventy seven one estimate from the center for telecommunication services university of texas at austin this is the longhorn radio network ms ba this week on foreign filmmakers steven soderbergh i wish that movie of the year businesses lose interest especially feeling like there is something beyond the kreeger sex lies and videotape this week on foreign aid

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