Steven Soderbergh: Secret tech innovator

In a speech at the 2013 San Francisco International Film Festival, Steven Soderbergh assayed the state of filmmaking and confessed that whenever he sees his colleagues getting “weepy” about the death of celluloid, he thinks of a quote from pioneering director Orson Welles: “I don’t want to wait on the tool. I want the tool to wait on me.”

Economy – of time and of budget (and time is money in film production) – has always been a priority for Soderbergh. It was a necessity on his debut independent feature, “sex, lies and videotape,” but it’s since become a preference for the director. On March 23, his psychological thriller “Unsane” will make history as the first film shot exclusively on an iPhone to receive a wide theatrical release. If it is successful, it could very well transform an industry the filmmaker has been seeking to shake up his entire career.

When “sex, lies and videotape” won the Palme d’Or at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival, it was hailed as a low-budget wonder. Indie filmmakers today would kill for the “meager $1.2 million” and 30-day production schedule that Soderbergh was constrained by thirty years ago, but to turn out a movie with name actors that could conceivably receive wide distribution in U.S. theaters (thus justifying its expense), this was about as cheap and fast as one could do it.

Soderbergh graduated to bigger budgets with his next three films (“Kafka,” “King of the Hill,” and “The Underneath”), but he struggled to build on the critical and commercial success of his debut. He retreated to his thrifty roots with the no-budget 1996 cult flick “Schizopolis,” but, ironically, his salvation arrived via his first full-fledged studio assignment, “Out of Sight.” That movie also unperformed at the box office (relative to its reported $48 million budget), but it earned Soderbergh his best reviews since “sex, lies and videotape,” and made a killing in subsequent revenue windows.

Soderbergh’s comeback tale climaxed when he won the Best Director Oscar for “Traffic” in 2001. He could write his ticket after that, and he did so by adopting a “one for them, one for me” approach. “Ocean’s Eleven” was one for them. The $2 million ensemble experiment “Full Frontal” – which required its A-list stars to not only take pay cuts, but also drive themselves to the set and provide their own wardrobe – was one for him. Though the film was stiffed critically and commercially, it did give Soderbergh his first taste of shooting digitally. Having the time-saving ability to wrap a day’s shooting and promptly edit footage on his computer was most definitely for him.

2005’s digitally shot “Bubble” found Soderbergh attempting to conflate the theatrical and home video distribution windows with a then unheard-of day-and-date release. Though the movie is a minor work in his filmography, this experiment presaged the direct-delivery practices of companies like Netflix, which now develop and produce big-budget movies with the express purpose of releasing them via their streaming platform.

After a much-ballyhooed (and misunderstood) retirement from filmmaking, Soderbergh returned to the feature format in 2017 with the heist comedy “Logan Lucky.” It may be the economical craftsman’s last film to be shot with traditional movie cameras. In interviews for the shot-for-the-iPhone “Mosaic”and the shot-on-an-iPhone “Unsane,” Soderbergh sounds like a convert. “I look at this as potentially one of the most liberating experiences that I’ve ever had as a filmmaker,” enthused Soderbergh to IndieWire’s Eric Kohn. To hammer this point home, he recently tweeted a picture boasting that he’d assembled his first cut of his next feature, “High Flying Bird,” within three hours of picture wrap.

It appears Soderbergh finally has the tool he’s been waiting for. Now it’s time for moviegoers to find out if it’s been worth the wait.