Steven Soderbergh has two new projects cooking… and isn’t overly concerned about the rise of artificial intelligence.
Steven Soderbergh has been blazing a trail for interesting American cinema ever since he first emerged at Sundance with Sex. Lies and Videotape at the tail-end of the 1980s. He’s pioneered new financing and distribution strategies, shot entire movies on mobile phones and made a film entirely on a cruise liner, just because he seems to like to stretching his boundaries.
A brilliant interview piece with the filmmaker has popped up over at Variety where he talks a lot about his new TV series, Full Circle, before getting into some interesting topics on the current state of film.
Soderbergh tells the outlet that he has two films currently in the pipeline, saying little apart from, “I don’t want to ruin them. They’re both genre films, and I will say that one is a comedy.”
The filmmaker does also say that comedy seems to be a direction that he’s gravitating towards, adding “comedies are really important, and when you can find a way to make people laugh and have something else going on underneath, that’s where you have a real shot at people remembering what they saw and sort of pulling it into their life somehow. A lot of the things that are sort of further down the road in the future that I’m starting to build out are comedies.”
Soderbergh also chats about artificial intelligence in the interview, claiming that he’s not worried about it right now due to just how limited the technology is, stating “I may be the Neville Chamberlain of this subject, but I am not afraid of A.I. in this specific context. It has no life experience. It’s never been hungover. It’s never made a meal for anybody it loved. It’s never been scared walking home late at night. It’s never felt insecure because somebody that it went to high school with 20 years ago has become incredibly successful. I’m not afraid of it. It’s just another tool. If it helps you finish a first draft of a script, great. But can it finish that thing and make it great on its own? Absolutely not. As of today, it is not keeping me up at night.”
Soderbergh’s comments that appear in this piece are just part of a wider-ranging and much longer interview that are very much worth reading, especially if you’re interested in a treasured American filmmaker’s thoughts on the push for films to go back to theatrical rather than streaming, the ongoing writers’ strike and one of the best answers to ‘has the MCU destroyed cinema?’ that we’ve seen of late. You can find the piece here and rest assured we’ll bring you news on those new projects when he announces them.
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