Steven Soderbergh on Jaws Book, Genre Films and Streaming-Era Success

Steven Soderbergh has opened up about a giant book on Jaws, the classic Steven Spielberg thriller he first saw in 1975, that he has been working on for nearly 15 years.

“I’ve been working on this thing [the book] that is ostensibly about directing and uses as its spine an analysis of the making of Jaws day-to-day,” Soderbergh revealed during an informal conversation at the Toronto Film Festival on Thursday.

Don’t expect his how-to Jaws come to be sold at airports, however.

“This book is not for general consumption. This is for people who are interested in films, either as moviegoers or [who] want to do this job. Because if you’re going to do this job, you need to understand the job. This is the job,” Soderbergh said of his long-gestating passion project.

Do expect more than a scene-by-scene analysis of Jaws: “I’m going to walk you through the experience of making it as a jumping off point to talk about problem solving and process.”

The snag is that the book isn’t done and may never be completed, the Oscar-winning director warned. Writing about Jaws will get Soderbergh back to the first movie that had him thinking he could  ecome a Hollywood director.

He recalled seeing Jaws at a cinema in St. Petersburg, Florida, at 12 years of age and emerging back into the real world with two questions: “What is directed by mean? And who is Steven Spielberg?”

Luckily, Soderbergh picked up The Jaws Log, a book by Carl Gottlieb about the action thriller that he pored over for lessons on how to problem-solve on a film set. “I carried this book around with me, it was like the Bible. I wore out many copies,” he recounted.

And when Soderbergh got to high school and around filmmaking equipment, he began making short films. The director was speaking at TIFF as his latest film, the spooky ghost story Presence, starring Lucy Liu, Chris Sullivan and newcomer Callina Liang, is set to receive an international premiere.

He recalled his success with Sex, Lies and Videotape in 1989 changing indie cinema because Soderbergh, along with fellow directors like Spike Lee and Jim Jarmusch, had the film industry suddenly seeing dollar signs from embracing signature auteur films after an early high point during the 1970s.

“It just felt like people were ready to see something made by an individual again after having taken a breather. They wanted to see a signature. They wanted to feel like a real person was talking to them,” Soderbergh argued.

Where are those signature auteur films today? “This overlay of commercial filmmaking and a signature directorial presence lately, to be honest, that’s most apparent in horror films,” Soderbergh said. He first screened Presence at Sundance earlier this year, some 35 years after the debut of Sex, Lies and Videotape in Park City.

Soderbergh then went on to direct an eclectic collection of movies like Traffic, Erin Brockovich, Contagion, Magic Mike and Behind the Candelabra. Presence follows a family who moves into a new home only to recognize an unsettling presence in the house. The haunted house chiller is pushed to where the family appears on the brink of falling apart.

Soderbergh told the TIFF audience that horror films are a perfect delivery vehicle for directors and even argued every film he has done since Che, his epic two-part biopic of the Argentinian doctor who turned global revolutionary, had been a genre film.

“I just feel everybody wins if you’re respectful of the pillars of what that genre is. You can load this thing up with anything you’re interested in,” Soderbergh explained. The story of Presence was filmed entirely in one setting and from the visual point-of-view of the ghost, with the camera moving throughout the house as the apparition.

That has Soderbergh’s subjective camera reaching into every corner of the family’s old two-story house in a leafy suburb, passing quickly over some spaces and getting in close for longer looks at others. “It’s a simple movie idea. You’re in a point-of-view and you’re in a house and you know you’re in a point-of view, but you don’t know who’s,” he insisted.

Soderbergh said Presence is about a family, to be sure, but the genre element “is the Trojan horse to show a family in a dire circumstance made more intense because they don’t know they’re in trouble.” Presence is set for a release by Neon.

Soderbergh also addressed the future of movie stars in a streaming era, where TV series’ may not need A-listers to carry them, but theatrical releases do. “For movies to work, they need movie stars. It’s great if the story is big enough to pull people in on its own, but that’s hard, and increasingly harder to do,” he argued.

A changing business model for Hollywood has made it more difficult to measure the worth of movie stars. “It’s gotten more difficult to quantify what is bringing people to a specific film, and what makes a specific film a hit,” Soderbergh observed.

Which makes it all the more critical that directors do good work from great scripts. “At the end of the day, the only solve is good shit. You got to make good shit. You’ve got to focus on that,” Soderbergh said.