We've all been there. You hate your job. You're gonna quit! Anything but this Satan's conference room hellhole! You'll do something completely different! You'll invent an app that... can Shazam... emotions. Oh, forget it, you'll go back to work.
This, essentially, has been Oscar-winning director (Ocean's Eleven, Traffic) Steven Soderbergh's career for the last few years. His I-quit-I'm-back-I-quit pronouncements pretty much sum up the unease of talented directors everywhere now that most cinema for adults is actually on TV.
Soderbergh first decided to quit making films after directing Contagion in 2011, saying he was going to concentrate on painting instead. Then, in a slight about turn, he made Magic Mike, about strippers (and not the paint kind, either). The comeback lasted two films before he became dismayed with cinema again, this time after every major studio passed on Behind The Candelabra (too risky, too smart, too gay), and it eventually landed on TV at HBO.
He railed against how directors were treated, the new money coming in and the migration of his types of work to TV. "The format really allows for the narrow and deep approach that I like," he said. "Three-and-a-half million people watching a show on cable is a success. That many people seeing a movie is not a success."
It's clearly true. But here's the rub for directors today: TV is not a director's medium, it's a writer's. David Chase oversaw The Sopranos' scripts, but the episodes were directed by hired hands (Chase directed just two: the first and the last). The directors are just there to do the showrunner's bidding; on films, they're God.
Soderbergh went on to direct The Knick, a high-end drama series about New York's Knickerbocker Hospital in the early 20th century, starring Clive Owen. Yet he didn't create it, and while he directed every episode, he didn't write a single one. There's no time to do both. And so, Soderbergh, caught between a studio and a Netflix place, announced his retirement once again.
That is, until now, because last month he returned again, making the kind of film the studios love him for (ie, the kind that makes them money): a heist flick with an all-star cast (Daniel Craig, Channing Tatum, Adam Driver and Katherine Waterston) called Logan Lucky. Granted, it's set in the world of Nascar, but Oceans ensured the cheque would be written.
Expect another retirement and a move back to TV any day now.
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