Steven Soderbergh

Steven Andrew Soderbergh (born January 14, 1963) is an American film director, producer, screenwriter, cinematographer, and editor.

A pioneer of modern independent cinema, Soderbergh later drew acclaim for formally inventive films made within the studio system.

Soderbergh was born on January 14, 1963, in Atlanta, USA, to Mary Ann (Bernard) and Peter Andrew Soderbergh, who was a university administrator and educator.

Soderbergh has Swedish, Irish, and Italian roots.

His paternal grandfather immigrated to the U.S. from Stockholm.

As a child, he moved with his family to Charlottesville, Virginia, where he lived during his adolescence, and then to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where his father became Dean of Education at Louisiana State University (LSU).

Soderbergh discovered filmmaking as a teenager and directed short films with a Super 8 and 16 mm cameras.

He attended the Louisiana State University Laboratory School for high school before graduating and moving to Hollywood to pursue professional filmmaking.

In his first job, he worked as a game show composer and cue card holder; soon after which he found work as a freelance film editor.

During this time, he directed the concert video 9012Live for the rock band Yes in 1985, for which he received a Grammy Award nomination for Best Music Video, Long Form.

After Soderbergh returned to Baton Rouge, he wrote the screenplay for Sex, Lies, and Videotape on a legal pad during an eight-day cross country drive.

The movie tells the story of a troubled man who videotapes women discussing their lives and sexuality, and his impact on the relationship of a married couple.

Soderbergh's directorial breakthrough, the indie drama Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989), lifted him into the public spotlight as a notable presence in the film industry.

At 26, Soderbergh became the youngest solo director to win the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and the film garnered worldwide commercial success, as well as numerous accolades.

Soderbergh submitted the film to the 1989 Cannes Film Festival where it won a variety of awards, including the Palme d'Or.

Its critical performance led it to become a worldwide commercial success, grossing $36.7 million on a $1.2 million budget.

The film was considered to be the most influential catalyst of the 1990s Independent Cinema movement.

At age 26, Soderbergh became the youngest solo director and the second youngest director to win the festival's top award.

Movie critic Roger Ebert called Soderbergh the "poster boy of the Sundance generation".

His relative youth and sudden rise to prominence in the film industry had him referred to as a "sensation" and a prodigy.

In 1991, he directed Kafka, a biopic of Franz Kafka written by Lem Dobbs and starring Jeremy Irons.

The film returned one tenth of its budget and received mixed reviews from critics.

Roger Ebert's review stated: "Soderbergh does demonstrate again here that he's a gifted director, however unwise in his choice of project".

His next five films, which included King of the Hill (1993), were commercially unsuccessful.

Two years later, he directed the drama King of the Hill (1993), which again underperformed commercially, but fared well with critics.

Based on the memoir of writer A. E. Hotchner, the film is set during the Great Depression and follows a young boy (played by Jesse Bradford) struggling to survive on his own in a hotel in St. Louis after his mother falls ill and his father is away on business trips.

Also in 1995, he directed a remake of Robert Siodmak's 1949 film noir Criss Cross, titled The Underneath, which grossed $536,020 on a $6.5 million budget and was widely panned by critics.

Soderbergh has since called the film "dead on arrival" and described the making of it as his bottoming out.

Soderbergh, formerly a member of Writers Guild of America West, left and maintained financial core status in 1995.

He pivoted into more mainstream fare with the crime comedy Out of Sight (1998), the biopic Erin Brockovich (2000) and the crime drama Traffic (2000).

For Traffic, he won the Academy Award for Best Director.

He found further popular and critical success with the Ocean's trilogy and film franchise (2001–18); Che (2008); The Informant! (2009); Contagion (2011); Haywire (2011); Magic Mike (2012); Side Effects (2013); Logan Lucky (2017); Unsane (2018); Let Them All Talk (2020); No Sudden Move (2021); and Kimi (2022).

His film career spans a multitude of genres, but his specialties are psychological, crime and heist films.

His films have grossed over US$2.2 billion worldwide and garnered fourteen Academy Award nominations, winning five.

Soderbergh's films often revolve around familiar concepts which are regularly used for big-budget Hollywood movies, but he routinely employs an avant-garde arthouse approach.

They center on themes of shifting personal identities, vengeance, sexuality, morality, and the human condition.

His feature films are often distinctive in the realm of cinematography as a result of his having been influenced by avant-garde cinema, coupled with his use of unconventional film and camera formats.

Many of Soderbergh's films are anchored by multi-dimensional storylines with plot twists, nonlinear storytelling, experimental sequencing, suspenseful soundscapes, and third-person vantage points.

In 2006, the film was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the United States National Film Registry, being deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" and the American Film Institute nominated it as one of the greatest movies ever made.

Soderbergh's directorial debut was followed by a series of low-budget box-office disappointments.