Interview. Soderbergh. GirlfriendExperienceThe2009. FilmmakerMagazine. ScottMcCaulay.

1.     There’s a greatHistory of movies in which prostitution is a metaphor for human relationships in capitalist society. It strikes me you’ve made TheGirlfriendExperience at a time when prostitution and Capitalism are both changing. What was your thinking about prostitution as a metaphor when making this movie?/Well [laughs], let’s put it this way. As we were making the film, I didn’t consider [prostitution] as a metaphor for anything. It's about exactly what it’s about. One of the things that I felt was interesting about that world now is the effect on it ofTechnology, and the fact that somebody in the position of our protagonist can take more control over how they organise their business. That’s something that fifteenyears ago didn’t really exist. [WWW] has sort of eliminated the agency and the pimp. In terms of a businessmodel, I would think that’s a much more efficient way to make money.

2.     But at the same time, the backdrop of the film, theNewYork[City] finance industry, the recession, theGovernmentstimulusprogram, is so prominent. It’s hard not to think of these two subjects as intertwined./Well, that was kind of a happy accident. We finished the outline for the film in the springof2006, and I’ve been holding on to it until I could find a window to make the movie. By design, the people that are cast in the film are encouraged to speak for themselves and to say whatever’s on their minds. It just happened to be a weird circumstance that we shot the movie in octoberoflastyear and all anybody was thinking about was money and, secondarily, the [presidential] election. It ended up being lucky because it sort of plays to the core of the film in a weird sort of way.

3.     I remember hearing that you had been working onTheGirlfriendExperience for a while, but, nonetheless, it did strike me as a kind of “zeitgeist film.” I thought of your KStreet. Both that project and this one seemed to have a certain kind of elasticity in terms of being able to quickly absorb things going on in the broader culture. How do you create something that has that kind of space within it, or that is able to absorb things from the outside during shooting and postproduction?/It’s kind of a continuation of an idea that I started being enamored of around the time ofTraffic actually, which was this fusion of real people and real stories with a fictional story. KStreet was another attempt to ["]smash["] [combine] these twoideas together, Bubble was a continuation of it and TheGirlfriendExperience is another attempt. And Moneyball, the movie that I’m about to shoot this summer, is, I think, actually going to be themostextreme attempt at what I’ve been playing around with for almost a decade now. I guess it’s something that grows out of my frustration with the norms of cinemanarrativestorytelling and the fact that I’m convinced that the gains that can be achieved through presenting something that seems like it really is happening in front of you are more significant than the gains you get from something that doesn’t seem as real, but is better constructed. That may just be a reflection of my personal taste, but I’m pushing harder and harder to try and get some of these projects into this area where they are almost like designed documentaries. Bubble, GFE and KStreet, we literally worked from outlines that just described who’s in the scene and gave a veryveryloose description of what the scene is about. They’re all controlled improvisations.

4.     I noticed Brian[Koppelman] and David[Levien] are credited with the screenplay, and they also wrote thelastOcean’smovie. How did the process of working with them differ on this film?/This one sort of came up by accident. We were having a drink in an upscale bar in midtownManhattan and I identified a woman who was sittingacrossthe room. There was something about her affect that separated her from everyone else. I pointed her out to-Brian and -David, and they both said,“Oh, she’s aGFE.” And I said, “What’s aGFE?” And they said, Well, GFE stands for GirlFriendExperience, these sort of superhighendescorts that you don’t merely pay for sex, you pay them in essence to have a relationship with you. It’s a totally different scenario. They know what you know, they read what you read. If you read a transcript of their interactions with their clients, they would appear to be a couple. I hadn’t heard about this, and I thought it could be a perfect HDNetmovie. So, in the space of a few days, we ["]hammered out["] a little bit of an outline and then we set it aside. When we came back to it the only thing we added was the hobbyist [the operator of the escort review site]. I was looking for one more sort of complicating element that would put her in this sort of vulnerable emotional space [in order to] create a situation in which she would be open to letting someone in who normally she might not. She comes out of interacting with this hobbyist, is in a veryvery["]offkilterstate["] of mind, and she meets this guy who seems to be really nice and makes a sort of snap decision to turn her life upside down. The [screenplay]document was probably sixorsevenpages long.

5.     Was the fractured, nonlinear structure that you employ here and in so many of your films present in the script or did that come in post?/We shot basically in chronological order, but, as we were shooting, I knew that I was going to restructure the film in editing, and so I was making sure as I shot each scene that I was picking up visual materials that would allow me to layer in these sort of clues that you would eventually understand. But the exact structure of it I didn’t know until I got into the editingroom. I’d have ["]bins["] that had different subjects, and then I would do subclips within those ["]bins["] so that I could kind of look at the movie on the desktop and connect things by subject from different scenes and then start to attach them to each other and see where that would take me. So there was some sort of organising principle.

6.     Why was it important to castSashaGrey in the movie?/Well, I needed someone who felt comfortable in overtly sexual situations. Even though I knew beforehand that I was never going to shoot anything really explicit, I still needed someone who just presented an air of being relaxed in these situations and who was unselfconscious. The first meeting I had with her, I said, Look, this is how we work, and do you think this sounds like something you can do? There are these sort of controlled improvisations and, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen this Godardfilm, VivreSaVie? She said, Oh yeah, I’ve seen it and I like it a lot. I said, Well, that’s the kind of ["]vibe["] that we’re trying to get. She just seemed ["]verygame["] and she also struck me as someone who could remain herself, that I wasn’t in danger of her showing up and trying to act, which is the opposite of what I needed. And also, you know, the camera likes her. She’s kind of a new breed, I think. She doesn’t really fit the typical mold of someone who goes into the adultfilmbusiness. I found out about her because of this article in LosAngelesmagazine that ran acoupleyearsago. I’d never heard anybody talk about the business the way that she talked about it. That’s what made me think of her when we started working on the movie, and I was really happy with what she did.

7.     Aside from Sasha Grey, and film critic GlennKenny, who were some of the actors that you cast?/They were all non[professional]actors who usually had some connection to the characters they played in the film. For instance, both of the gym owners, those are both the guys who own those gyms. When she goes to talk to the guy about redesigning her webpage, that guy is a real webdesigner. Our goal usually is to just find somebody who doesn’t have to act, who really is what they appear to be.

8.     Why go to a filmjournalist to play the hobbyistcharacter?/We all knew Glenn[Kenny], and I needed somebody who has that kind of ["]verbal dexterity["], who can just sort of pontificate on the spot. And he was fantastic. I mean all that stuff, that’s just Glenn being Glenn. His review of her he ["]knocked["] off in like thirtyseconds. I told Glenn, Write your review and you need to articulate not only what’s in your mind, but what might be in the mind of the audience. What’s really fun about working this way, and I’m sure Brian and David would tell you the same thing, Is there’s a specificity to what you get that’s veryverydifficult to write on your own because everybody’s mind works differently. Everybody expresses themselves in a way that’s unique to them. [On set] there’s really no quoteunquotewronganswer [from the actors] because I ["]key off of["] what I’m getting from them. I’m not trying to bend them to conform to my idea of the movie. I’m building the movie [from] off of what they’re giving me. Sasha, to her credit, understood that method and was verydiligent about keeping a notebook and reminding herself of what was said in all of the scenes. When you’re improvising like that and you’re shooting in sequence you find yourself in a situation down the road where you need to remember what was referenced [earlier].

9.     How was using theREDcamera different this time than when you worked with it on Che?/It was more sensitive than when we used it onChe. You know, I shot TheInformant[withTheRed] lastspring, but I wasn’t really in a situation where sensitivity was as much of an issue as it was onGFE. So, for me, that [heightened sensitivity to light] was a big plus because we were shooting anamorphic and I was kind of restricted to shooting stuff at 2.8 [?]. Basically I can’t go much wider than that, ["]stopwise["], and so I really needed that extrasensitivity. It meant I could go out on the street or be in a car, still be able to shoot available light and be really pleased with what we were getting. So, [TheRed] just keeps getting better.

10. What about your approach to lighting?/There are only twoshots in the film where I pulled out a light.

11. Wow./Literally. And frankly I wish I hadn’t. They’re my twoleastfavourite shots.

12. Can I ask what they are?/There is the one scene in the restaurant where she meets with this manager that her accountant wants her to talk to, and there’s one shot near the end after she’s come home from the weekend. She goes across the street and there’s a quick shot of her having a drink in a bar across the street. In both situations, I added a little sort of redfilllight, and I look at the movie now and I hate it. Literally, everything else was available light.

13. Going into those scenes where there’s natural backlight and the actors in the foreground are completely in shadow or in profile, did you know that that’s what the effect was going to be?/What I’ve been trying to do lately, especially on these films because it’s harder to do on theOcean’sfilms, is to design the shots based on where the light is and not where I want it to be. It’s been an almost decadelongprocess sinceTraffic, and it’s a different way of working and thinking. I find the results are more interesting. And it’s not just [natural light], because sometimes you’re walking into environments that have artificial light. But again, I’ve tried to be reallyreallyrigorous about going after something that feels real, not imposing my will on the frame but adapting. For me, it’s just more exciting, more distinctive and less predictable. I’m not controlling the environment. I’m ["]keying off["] of the environment.

14. I take it TheInformant was more conventionally lit?/Yeah, a little bit. It’s still mostly me walking in and sort of saying, Okay, here’s what the place looks like and, as a result, I’m going to compose this way.

15. In terms of the colorcorrect, did you accentuate, in post, any of the color palettes that seem to be present in the film?/Not a lot. I mean, it’s a raw capture.The[RedCamera]rawcapture arbitrarily is sort of set at the daylight Kelvin level. What I’ve been doing lately is just keeping everything like that. So basically the whole movie is balanced to daylight, and what I find interesting about that is the way all the artificial light responds and mixes. All the incandescent light goes reallyreally["]warm["], and fluorescents go in many different directions depending on what kind of tubes you’re dealing with. I just like the fact that the artificial light sort of explodes with color because you’re shooting everything in daylight balance. In a couple cases, even shooting [daylight] balance for daylight stuff tended to cool off depending on what time of day we were shooting.

16. I presume you used a verytiny crew./Right.

17. But you’re StevenSoderbergh, you’re an established director, you’re working inNewYorkCity, and I’m presuming this was a unionfilm. Was there a kind of conflict between your vision of how you wanted the set to be and what you needed to have?/No, I was reallyhappy with what we ["]ended up with["]. You could fit theentirecastandcrew into twovans, and then we had onecubetruck with all of the gear in it. It was perfect. I mean, I remember GregJacobs and I moving from location to location while we were shooting and saying to each other, This is the perfect size for a film. We found the right number of people to be mobile and yet to be able to do what we wanted to do” It was really the best of all possible worlds. I felt reallyreallyhappy about it.

18. So no wardrobe van, no honeywagons? [?]/No. We had a costume designer, and [the actors] would go shopping with the costume designer, pick out their stuff, and then we would just carry it in the truck, in the cube truck. It was veryveryefficient. And we had normal days. Ten hours.

19. Anything else you want to say or add into this?/No, other than that I’m looking forward to [making more]. I owe fourmore of these, and they really are a lot of fun to make. They feed everything else. There are so many things that come out of working this way that can be applied to larger films, not only just on a practical level in terms of crew and things, but also in terms of storytelling and presentation of performance. [The process] is really fun to watch. You just never know where something’s going to go, or what’s going to come out of somebody’s mouth.