STEVEN SODERBERGH: I have dreams where I hit people. I also have dreams where people are chasing me. We haven’t talked about dreams.

THE BELIEVER: Do you remember your dreams every day? Are they recurring?

SS: They recur in their theme. Mostly they involve me not being able to move fast enough. Or I’ll have baseball dreams. I had one the other night. They put me on first base, and the guy hits a ball to me and I’m going to turn a table play by stepping on first base, and I throw the ball to second and it only goes halfway and it bounces. I’m going, “What the fuck?” I can’t throw. My legs feel like lead. I have those dreams a lot. It’s just garden-variety frustration. It’s residue from doing my work, feeling like, “Why aren’t I better? Why can’t I do this better?” It’s an expression of that feeling. That’s the feeling I have sometimes—my legs not moving fast enough. It’s the same thing as sitting on the set and going, “Why can’t I figure out how to make this scene come alive?”

BLVR: Do you generally blame yourself when that happens?

SS: When I’m on the set? Yeah. Everything is the director’s fault—you can quote me on that. There are no excuses. And I do have dreams where I get into fights, but again, I’ll try and hit someone and I’ll miss them, I’ll graze them, I can’t clock somebody. It’s never successful. They’re not successful dreams.

BLVR: What is the hardest thing about filmmaking?

SS: I will say, and coming from someone who’s made some of the movies and TV I’ve made, it may seem disingenuous—but the hardest thing in the world is to be good and clear when creating anything. It’s the hardest thing in the world. It’s really easy to be obscure and elliptical and so fucking hard to be good and clear. It breaks people. Because you don’t often get encouragement to do that, to be good and clear.

BLVR: Rather than, if you’re talking film—having a plot that runs backwards.

SS: Yeah. Now, luckily for me, I don’t like to do any one thing all the time, so sometimes I get to be clear and sometimes I get to be—

BLVR: Schizopolis was pretty straightforward.

SS: [Laughs] That’s what I thought. It wasn’t good but it was clear.

BLVR: That was a great movie! Nobody ever asks you about that?

SS: No. Except maybe the ones with the crazy look in their eyes when I go to festivals.

When I finished Schizopolis, I honestly thought—I need...