An odd couple with Oscars

By Patrick Goldstein

Dec. 1, 2002 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

Having James Cameron and Steven Soderbergh at the same table, doing a joint interview about their new movie, is sort of like watching Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant in a Venice Beach pickup game together -- two pros having some fun at a game they take very seriously.

The King of the World jokes about his five marriages and his self-taught movie education, saying “most of what I learned about film was at a drive-in. It was a long time before I heard a film in stereo.” The Prince of the Independents broods about love and death, then mocks show-biz insiders’ disdain for “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” (“It’s gonna top out at $200 million -- big deal!”).

Oscar best director winners don’t mix it up every day. Film directing is one of those jobs, like a baseball manager or a platoon lieutenant, where there can only be one boss. Explaining why he hates to visit another director’s set, Soderbergh says, “It’s like hanging out in somebody else’s bedroom.”

But when Soderbergh decided to adapt Stanislaw Lem’s classic science-fiction novel “Solaris,” filmed in 1972 by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, he struck an alliance with Cameron, whom you might recall as the director of “Titanic,” the top-grossing movie of all time. Cameron had acquired the rights to “Solaris” as a directing project for himself, but he got involved with producing the TV series “Dark Angel” and several documentary projects, including an upcoming 3-D film featuring underwater photography of the real Titanic.

When Soderbergh, 39, having just finished “Erin Brockovich,” offered to write and direct the film, Cameron, 48, instantly gave his blessings, staying on as producer. The resulting $47-million movie, which opened Wednesday, stars George Clooney as a psychologist brought in to explain the bizarre behavior of a group of scientists on a remote space station. Once aboard, Clooney’s character is mysteriously reunited with his wife, played by Natascha McElhone, who committed suicide years before.

In Soderbergh’s hands, “Solaris” is less a look at the future than it is a kind of “sex, lies, & videotape 2,” a brooding meditation on the quest for romance and redemption. Even with Clooney in the lead, the movie represents a marketing challenge. Though it has its supporters, Variety called it “a study of the deepest emotions that doesn’t engage the heart for a moment.” It’s tempting to imagine what a more visceral filmmaker like Cameron would’ve done with the same material.

But while their career arcs have led them in different directions, the two filmmakers have a strong regard for each other’s work. Up close, the two men could be cousins: They’re tall, lean and pale, with strong, aquiline noses. They voice even stronger opinions, sounding off on studio timidity, fickle critics and the arrogance of artists. Sometimes teasing each other, often finishing each other’s answers, they have an easy rapport. When asked if they’d met before embarking on “Solaris,” they both say, “No.” After a beat, however, Cameron adds dryly, “But I had heard of him.”

Steven, you’d never made a sci-fi film. So what attracted you to this material?

Soderbergh: When I was almost done with the first draft, I was thinking, why did these weird happenstances occur? Why did I pick this title out of anything [Cameron’s company] had? Why do I want to write it? I realized that it’s about love and about death and clearly something is pulling me to that. I didn’t realize until way into the process that I was working through, in some very oblique way, what had happened with my father who died very suddenly and to whom I was very close.

I spoke to him the afternoon before he had the cerebral hemorrhage that killed him, and the good news was there wasn’t any unfinished business. I would hope that of all the feelings we take with us when somebody is gone, love is the most impervious to rust. That anger and jealousy would fade and a feeling of love is somehow like a diamond.

You wrote the film on spec. Why?

Soderbergh: In case I failed I wanted to be able to walk away with no questions asked.

Cameron: I was kind of shocked by that, but I loved it. Here was a guy who was willing to do a significant amount of work based on a handshake. It put me on my honor in a way that I wish this business worked all the time. When we got his first draft, we were willing to go off and shoot the film. Little did we realize that it was just the first step in his process. Steven said, “No, guys, this is where we start the writing process.” We then went through this deconstruction process of attacking every single idea and every single concept and making sure it resonated properly.

Jim, this movie has so many themes, especially the focus on the conflicts between men and women that I couldn’t help but wonder -- why didn’t you want to direct it?

Cameron: That was the original intention. I probably wouldn’t have made it as rigorously minimalist in terms of the science-fiction visual set-pieces as Steven did, but that purity is one of the big pluses of the film. I did some similar stuff in “The Abyss,” which was also about love, separation and loss, except that I cluttered that film up too much and people reacted negatively. . A more minimalist version of that would’ve been a better film.

One of the great opportunities for a director doing a movie set in the future is, what does the future look like?

Soderbergh: Didn’t care. Didn’t care.

Cameron: [Our producers] were so shocked when they saw the first dailies. It was like, where’s the future? [laughs] It’s just a guy walking in the rain.

Soderbergh: The movie really isn’t about the future, so I wasn’t interested in what the world was going to look like. I was interested in what it was going to feel like. So purposefully, there are no establishing shots, no product that’s recognizable. I stripped all of that out because I just thought it was, in fact, distracting. It was a 75-page screenplay. I’m only interested in the people. There are more close-ups in this movie than in any movie I’ve ever made.

Is that minimalism an extension of your personality? If I walked into your home, would it look neat and clean?

Soderbergh: I have a real desire to keep things as lean and simple as possible. I have one home, one car, one child. It’s very easy for me to imagine myself, if I didn’t have someone in my life that I loved, living like Dr. Chris Kelvin at the beginning of the film, just throwing myself into my work.

Cameron: How about the economy of Steven’s writing? Here’s a psychologist in his office and he says over the phone, “I have an opening at 7 a.m. and another one at 6:30 p.m.” It’s like, you know his life just from that.

Jim, you were in the editing room a lot when Steven was cutting the film.

Cameron: He had a cut that he wanted to show after three weeks. Sucker bait. Because he then tore it all apart and anything I liked in that cut, I had to fight for. Steven has this architecture he creates -- we’re going to shoot, then edit, then shoot some more, then edit again. It was built into the budgetprocess. I’m gonna do that from now on. With me the problem is that I’d go over budget and they’d say, “OK, we can take those days away later” and I’d agree to that and then later [laughs] I’d shoot them anyway.

So Jim, since 1997, when “Titanic” came out ...

Cameron: [to Soderbergh] You see where this is going ...

Soderbergh: You want me to leave?

Steven has directed seven movies ...

Soderbergh: Which if you added them all together ...

Cameron: [laughs] I didn’t go there.

Soderbergh: No, I’m going there.

Cameron: [laughs] If you added them all together, the entire shooting schedules would still be less than “Titanic.”

But with all due respect to all your other projects, you haven’t directed a movie ...

Cameron: You can’t say with due respect, just because I haven’t played in your ballpark doesn’t mean I haven’t been busy.

OK, but why have you decided not to play in the feature-film ballpark?

Cameron: Been more interested in other....

Soderbergh: [laughs] You have to say “stuff.” It’s the L.A. Times.

Cameron: Making “Solaris” is cool and fun, but it doesn’t hold a candle to going on a deep submersible dive with an ultimate imaging system that allows you to see a real living animal that no human being has ever seen before. People think of documentaries in a very dismissive fashion, as if feature films are somehow inherently higher on the evolutionary scale. But one of the hardest disciplines I’ve ever had to learn was to be a good documentary filmmaker. And I don’t think I’m there yet. I’m struggling for mediocrity.

Soderbergh: But here’s the question on the table. “Titanic,” being the culmination in a lot of ways of your aesthetic, where you marshaled everything you learned about filmmaking and narrative -- and it worked -- did you feel free to say, “OK, I want to see what else is going on?”

Cameron: Yes, it was the most liberating experience. People have attributed [my not making another feature] to a kind of performance anxiety or stage fright. But to be perfectly honest, I’ve spent 500 or 600 hours at 6,000 feet [underwater], so I’m not really too afraid of what folks like you have to say. There are certain things that I can do when I’m 48 and still fit that I won’t be able to do when I’m 60. But I know I can still direct a movie and that’s going to be around until I cork off, which hopefully will be like John Huston, with an oxygen tube up my nose, directing from a wheelchair when I’m 85. Once you’re a director, you never stop.

There’s a line of dialogue in the film that goes, “There are no answers, only choices.”

Cameron: I want that T-shirt.

Soderbergh: Actually, it’s my political platform.

Well, it summed up what I liked most about “Solaris,” that it doesn’t tell you how to feel, the opposite of what studios want from their movies. Why has ambiguity become such a dirty word in today’s Hollywood?

Cameron: Hollywood is desperate to be loved, and that desperation to be loved causes them to follow you out of the movie theater and down the hall and put a synopsis of the plot in your pocket. It’s pathetic. Nothing must be left to chance. You can’t get to the closing credits without everything being nicely tied up with a bow around it.

Soderbergh: I don’t blame the studios for bad movies. I blame the filmmakers. Nobody puts a gun to your head and says, “Make a piece of.... “

Steven, the critics loved you when you made “Out of Sight” and “Traffic” and “Erin Brockovich,” but then you did “Full Frontal” and they abandoned you.

Cameron: You’re celebrated and then you’re trashed. It’s so predictable that it almost didn’t matter what the film was. It had to happen. You look at a sine wave or an oscillation in physics, well, that’s how energy propagates in our business. You go up, then you go down. Thank God you got “Full Frontal” out of the way. [laughs] Maybe we’re on the up curve with this one!

But you still care what critics say about your films?

Cameron: It’s like a New Yorker getting insulted. You prefer not to be, but you can handle it. Let’s face it, a bad review is an insult. The critic is basically saying, this guy is a complete idiot. The sad part of it is that reviewers are generally the best-informed moviegoers around. The praise you get from your friends or the studio is kind of mushy and inarticulate. You really want someone to say, “You know, in that scene, that line that he says really resonates at the end and has a double meaning.” And the only people qualified to do that are reviewers. [laughs] But they’re fickle ... !

Soderbergh: I don’t care.

Cameron: He says he doesn’t care.

Soderbergh: You don’t make “Schizopolis” or “Full Frontal” if you really care what critics think.

Cameron: You can’t tell me you don’t want somebody somewhere to articulate exactly how they reacted in a way that is in someway congruent with what you intended.

Soderbergh: I don’t need that to happen.

Cameron: Then why show the movie to anybody?

Someone once said to me that the same supreme self-confidence or arrogance that makes someone a great filmmaker is what causes their downfall.

Cameron: I heard Ray Bradbury do 30 minutes on that. He called it the sublime ego. Nobody writes anything or creates a work of art without thinking they can inherently do it well enough that other people are going to stop what they’re doing and look at it.

Soderbergh: The sad fact is that my job [as a director] is to use people, to suck the brain out of everybody I encounter to make my movie better. I just try to go about it in a way where they don’t feel like they’re missing their brain, that in fact it’s happened while they were asleep.

Cameron: That’s like the anesthesia that’s in the saliva of a vampire bat.

Soderbergh: [after a long, quizzical pause] Exactly.

Cameron: The second I’m off the set I don’t want to be in control of anything. I tell my wife, “You make the dinner reservations. You drive. You figure everything out.” I get paid to make decisions. I’m not gonna do them for free.

Did you tell that to each wife?

Cameron: Every last one of them. [laughs] I guess some of them couldn’t deal with the pressure of being in charge.

Soderbergh: What is the definition of insanity? You play out the same scenario each time and expect a different result?

Cameron: Well, you know what, I played out the same scenario four times and it didn’t work. And the fifth time, bingo!

Soderbergh: See, this man’s an optimist.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Divergent careers

Since 1997 -- when James Cameron was on top of his game thanks to the worldwide box-office success and Oscar domination of “Titanic,” and Steven Soderbergh had nearly disappeared off Hollywood’s radar after a string of increasingly esoteric indie projects -- the two men have taken very different professional paths.

“King of the World” -- James Cameron

Dark Angel television series (2000-02), creator-producer-director-writer

Expedition: Bismarck documentary (2002), producer-director

Ghosts of the Abyss large-format 3-D documentary about the Titanic (2002), producer-director

Solaris (2002), producer

“King of the Hill” -- Steven Soderbergh

Out of Sight (1998), director

Pleasantville (1998), producer

The Limey (1999), director

Erin Brockovich (2000), director

Traffic (2000), director-cinematographer (credited as Peter Andrews)

Tribute (2001), executive producer