Steven Soderbergh’s Manhattan studio is littered with decapitated doll heads—souvenirs from Bubble, his most recent feature film, which was shot digitally and released simultaneously in theaters and on DVD, causing an uproar among studio executives fearful of losing their grip on the industry. Also in Soderbergh’s studio are an in-progress painting of onetime James Bond incarnation George Lazenby and a massive magazine collage composed of celebrity faces and bodies that Soderbergh has carefully excised from gossip magazines. The objects illustrate Soderbergh’s predilection for the perverse, his enduring obsession with cinema from the 1960s and 1970s, and the way he’s elicited staggering performances from actors like George Clooney, Julia Roberts, and Brad Pitt by lifting them out of their Hollywood context, but it does beg the question: how does the man who single-handedly reinvigorated independent cinema in the 1990s with Sex, Lies, and Videotape manage simultaneously to edit his latest feature The Good German, plan a sweeping Che Guevara biopic, and crouch on the floor of his studio, meticulously slicing images of Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston out of Us Weekly with an X-Acto blade? The answer, of course, is that behind Steven Soderbergh’s modest, bald, bespectacled facade lies an individual bursting at the seams with a staggering surfeit of talent, vision, and motivation. His Schizopolis—a cult favorite released in 1996 about a speechwriter for a self-help organization, his wife, a dentist, and a seductive exterminator—could serve as a metaphor for his entire career: unpredictable, offbeat, and obsessed with sampling and mixing disparate genres, be it a tense political drama like Traffic or the Ocean’s 11/12 franchise’s celebration of wry A-list criminals.

This interview began with an email exchange in which Soderbergh outlined the various topics he’d be most interested in talking about. The short list included pornography, Chris Rock, how the Olympics relates to the killer instinct, and the cost of panda bears as compared to the cost of getting off (in the legal sense). We met twice, on America’s most important holidays—Valentine’s Day and President’s Day—for a free-form chat that ended up spanning several hours and generating a short film (see Wholphin No. 2, available at wholphindvd.com).

—Scott Indrisek

I. “IT WOULD TAKE YOU
TWENTY MINUTES TO GET RID
OF ALL THE VOMIT.”

THE BELIEVER: If you were going to make a gay cowboy movie—since it’ll be a genre for sure—two gay cowboys, who would you pick?

STEVEN SODERBERGH: Right now?

BLVR: Yeah.

SS: Crispin Glover. And Danny Glover! The Glovers. I’d cast two Glovers.

BLVR: I think Benicio del Toro would make an amazing gay...