Appearing at the Karlovy Vary International FIlm Festival, director Steven Soderbergh has offered his take on the way things currently stand in Hollywood.
Steven Soderbergh is currently in the Czech city of Karlovy Vary for its annual international film festival. The Unsane director has been holding court on all kinds of topics from Kafka to not being able to get Taylor Swift tickets, but he also offered his opinion on the current state of things in Hollywood.
As an artist who has repeatedly innovated his approach to film production, Soderbergh’s take on the state of the industry is always perceptive and often tends to be a little different to some of his peers. When asked about the current atmosphere in Hollywood, he said that it was “fractious”:
“Well, I can tell you that everybody is terrified about everything. We’re in the middle of a correction that was inevitable, It was the Wild West for a while, you know, 2010 to 2020, where it just felt like the streaming companies emerged, and tons of shit was getting made, and people were being paid too much money,” Soderbergh said. “I was aware as it was happening, and I was taking advantage of it. But I was like, ‘This is not sustainable. This can’t continue.’ So I always knew there was going to be a correction. But I also felt, or hoped, that it would be a sort of calmer, softer landing. And two things happened: COVID and then the strikes. And so the course correction has happened, but it was bumpy and fractious. And so now people I think are very anxious.”
Read more: Memento | How Steven Soderbergh helped Christopher Nolan find a distributor
Of course, the other big topic that has Hollywood sweating these days is the emergence of AI. As large language models such as ChatGTP swallow up vast stretches of the internet, absorbing copyrighted material, both studios and individuals find themselves at danger of having their work and livelihood eclipsed by this new technology. Predictably though, Soderbergh takes a different view of this new wave of technology.
“I’m not afraid of AI,” he said. “I don’t view it as a threat. I think it’s an interesting tool. But it can’t replace, ultimately, it can’t replace people in a way that is threatening. I’ve worked with all the various tools. You have to remember: if you were to say, ‘Make a film, in which everything, the actors, even though they’re known actors, the location, everything was generated, and it looks quote unquote real’, people are aware of the experiment. Audiences, I think, on some base level will never embrace a fully AI-generated movie because it feels like a threat to them. They feel like human experience has been hijacked by technology. And I feel if you showed somebody the same thing, and you told them that one was AI-generated, their reaction to it would be different.”
These are just excerpts from a much longer interview that is well worth a read. In it, Soderbergh also discusses an idea for a film that attempts to tackle global problems but in a way inspired by Taylor Swift’s Eras tour. That’s the kind of left-field thinking we’ve come to admire the filmmaker for over the decades. If you want to discover more, check the full interview out over at The Hollywood Reporter.
