Old man doesn't yell at clouds
So much timeless advice from Steven Soderbergh, it's refreshing to see someone so experienced continue to be reflective an curious. Or, in his own words, "I feel like the cockroach of the industry, like there’s no version of this that I can’t work in, no matter how nuclear it gets.”.
Genres arbitrage attention and de-risk discovery:
“Right now, in terms of what’s attracting people and what generates chatter, if I were starting out and I had any interest and proclivity at all, I’d be looking toward the horror-thriller genre to make my move,” [...]“‘Sex, Lies’ was just my ripoff of [Mike Nichols’ 1971 film] ‘Carnal Knowledge,'” Soderbergh said. “It was designed to be small because it would be cheap. If you’re starting out now, your best bet is to be working in a genre space if you want to get something financed. And some of the most interesting filmmaking is happening specifically in the horror genre lately.” [...]
Soderbergh views genre as a path to your work being seen; the structure it supplies is also liberating.
“I’ve said, and believe, the evidence is all around us, [genre] is just such a great delivery system for whatever ideas you’re interested in,” said Soderbergh. “Everybody wins. For an audience who likes that genre, if you’ve been respectful of the pillars of that genre, it’s operating on this kind of superficial level, they can read it there. And then there’s all this other stuff you can pack underneath that to keep it from being single-use plastic.”
Dig your own moat:
Soderbergh also sees signs that, despite the doom-and-gloom about the state of movies, there is reason to believe a new generation of indie filmmakers also will have a new generation of arthouse audiences to embrace their work. [...]He believed the use of outdated metrics are one reason traditional moviemaking feels like it is evaporating. He pointed to the success of Metrograph - the New York City independent theater that found a younger urban audience with adventurous programming, and has moved into distribution - as an example of what is possible.
“Metrograph is a group that I’ve stayed very, very closely in touch with because that’s a scalable model - a university town of 25,000-to-30,0000 people can support a Metrograph,” said Soderbergh. “We need to change the metric of what a success is and stop using the studio model because the bottom line is Metrograph is very successful. So the question now is: Can we do 20 of them? Because that’s a real business.”
Status: disappearing down a Metrograph rabbit hole.