Steven Soderbergh Quotes

I think I'm good at amplifying an actor's strengths, and minimizing their weaknesses. And they all have strengths and weaknesses.

When a film like Chris Nolan's Memento cannot get picked up, to me independent film is over. It's dead.

To me the director’s job is to leave it in better shape than you found it, literally.

If you're sitting around thinking what other people think about your work, you'll just become paralysed.

We [people] are a species that's wired to tell stories. We need stories. It's how we make sense of things. It's how we learn.

I want to thank anyone who spends part of their day creating...anybody who spends part of their day sharing their experience with us-I think this world would be unlivable without art and I thank you.

You’re supposed to expand your mind to fit the art, you’re not supposed to chop the art down to fit your mind.

There are three major social issues that this country is struggling with: education, poverty, and drugs. Two of them we talk about, and one of them we don't.

The ought to be a worldwide cultural taskforce that just stops you when you have ideas like combining The Red Desert with an armored car heist movie.

What are the stories you want people to tell about you?

When things go right it's hard to figure out why, but when things go wrong it's really easy.

We're all standing on the shoulders of what other people have done. But you're supposed to take that and add your own sauce. It can be intimidating, believe me.

In the land of ideas, you are always renting.

In nature, if a cell gets too big, it divides. You can't come up with a set of rules that's going to work for 350 million people. You're just not.

Traffic is about drugs. As detailed a portrait as I can muster about what is happening in the drug world, from top to bottom, from policy to how things move on the street.

There's a difference between failures and things that are bad.

Never had a cup of coffee in my life. Dr Pepper is my caffeine delivery system of choice.

The brief flashbacks are sun-kissed, summery and optimistic. It's the only place in the movie you will see red, yellow, orange, or any vibrant colors.

We all get outraged by things and there are things that make us angry and maybe for a while we get angry enough to actually go do something about it.

Some filmmakers, you know, have their style and then they kind of go looking for the movie. I'm not like that. I don't have one style that I want to take from movie to movie.

There is sadness of when you're watching someone enjoy something that you think is substandard. The ineffable sadness when someone is happy and something is not as good as it should be.

The key is, if youre not monkeying around with the script, then everything usually goes pretty well.

If you think that because you're Che, when you go into Bolivia, when people find out it's you, that they're going to have the same kind of reaction that the Cubans had to Castro, then you're high.

I don't consider myself to be particularly gifted in the way that other filmmakers are gifted.

A Movie That Costs Only $1.6 Million Doesn't Have to Be a Cultural Event to Turn a Profit.

I just produced Criminal, this remake of Nine Queens, and one of the things that appealed to me about Nine Queens is that it was a performance piece, and that's the most fun.

In Full Frontal and K Street, I learned to take advantage of the mobility that digital provides.

I look at other filmmakers and see skills in them that I wish I had but I know that I don't. I feel like I have to work really hard to keep myself afloat, doing what I do. But I find it pleasurable.

Making a film that's supposed to be fun to watch is really hard - that's the weird irony of it.

You should never assume anything coming from a critical standpoint. You should go into everything assuming you're going to get crushed.

If you're a painter and you want people to know who you are and recognize your work, you've got to build some long-term value.

People are sort of numb to watching violence, but sexual activity is still as strong as it ever was in terms of generating response.

A real explosion is not only much more fun to shoot, it also helps the actors and creates an energy on set and ultimately in the scene.

Lying is like alcoholism. You are always recovering.

A movie is something you see, cinema is something that’s made.

I make every movie like it's the last one. "If this was the last movie, what decision would I make?" That's how I make my decisions.

A lot of people go to the movies wanting the movie to be about feelings, and it's really not about that. Or rather it's about feelings in the abstract.

Another thing that really excites me: I'd like to do multiple versions of the same film.

That's why my attitude, even on my larger-scale movies, is to make them cheap. The less these things cost, the better for everybody.

I come from a generation that was surrounded by popular music, but I don't know if anybody's ever going to move the ball forward as far and as fast as the Beatles did.

Once I had a potentially heart attack-inducing eight double espressos in one day. I think my assistant secretly swaps my coffees for decaf as she doesn't want me to die of caffeine overdose.

Everything is the director's fault - you can quote me on that. There are no excuses.

It's a weird thing to say, but it would appear to me axiomatic that if you understood fully what I was doing and appreciated it, you would like it.

I'm probably more character-driven than plot-driven. It's rare for me to attach myself to an idea for a story.

Jude [Law] is really good at playing an obsessive. He has a very watchable quality when he's on a quest for something.

Maybe I'll paint, do photography, just something else. I can see that.

I can make a movie about Lee Harvey Oswald and make you feel what he feels and make you understand why he believes what he believes. That doesn't mean I think you should go out and shoot JFK.

All human interaction, you can break it down to incentives. All relationships, at some level, are transactional. They're fascinated with incentives.

Reality shows are all the rage on TV at the moment, but thats not reality, its just another aesthetic form of fiction.

I'm a grinder. I'll beat you because I will not sleep.