STEVEN SODERBERGH'S modus operandi is that no film he makes is like anything he's made before. The one exception has been the "Ocean" series, which from first ( "Ocean's Eleven" ) to last ( "Ocean's Thirteen" ) was designed to make money and did. But once Mr. Soderbergh could add that particular genre of moviemaking to his résumé — in Hollywood, the franchise is a genre — he put it aside and returned to being the consummate anti-auteurist auteur, bouncing from the guerrilla epic "Che" to the coolly soft-core "Girlfriend Experience" to the comic corporate exposé "The Informant!"
Speaking by phone from Los Angeles, Mr. Soderbergh observed that his career would have been easier if he had been able to make himself into a more marketable brand. Instead, he said with some relish, he's like that "imported mustard that you buy at Trader Joe's."
His latest movie will not be any help in the branding department. It is his smallest and most modest feature-length work, one in which his hand is nowhere evident, except in his refusal to employ the rules specific to its genre: the documentary biopic. The subject of the film, "And Everything Is Going Fine" — which has its premiere next Saturday at Slamdance in Utah — is the monologuist-writer-actor Spalding Gray.

Some months after Gray's death (a presumed suicide by drowning) in 2004, Mr. Soderbergh had heard that Kathleen Russo, Gray's widow, was interested in making some kind of documentary about her husband. Mr. Soderbergh, who had directed the film of Gray's monologue "Gray's Anatomy" (1996), told Ms. Russo he'd like to be involved.
"Kathie thought there was something to be done with all the material that was left," he said. "I knew from the first that I was never going to shoot anyone talking about him, as there would be in a conventional documentary, but I thought there might be some place for his journals, either read by other actors or as text on the screen. I paid to have 25 years of them transcribed before I became convinced it had to be, literally, just his voice."
Over the course of three years Mr. Soderbergh and his editor Susan Littenberg distilled about 15 hours of film and video recordings of Gray's performances, his television interviews and home movies of his childhood and his life with Ms. Russo and their children. The resulting 90-minute collage opens with a clip from his first monologue, "Sex and Death to the Age 14," and ends with a faded image of the infant Spalding wrapped in his mother's arms.
"Steven told me that he wanted Spalding to tell the story, as if it was his last monologue," Ms. Russo said by phone from Sag Harbor, N.Y. "And I think he accomplished that."
The title, "And Everything Is Going Fine," is lifted from a comment Gray repeated like a refrain during one of his performances and reflects the way all of his monologues immediately plunge you into a drama in process. "I looked at his work as a stream that you can step into at any moment and sort of get what's going on," Mr. Soderbergh said. He said he stepped into Gray's stream of consciousness himself when he saw Jonathan Demme's 1987 film of Gray's best-known monologue, "Swimming to Cambodia."
"When I saw 'Swimming,' I had the sensation that I assume a lot of people did: that my mind works like that too. The constant spinning and digressing and organizing seemed so genuine. I identified with the struggle to filter experience in such a way that it at least seems to make sense, which is an ongoing, sometimes futile process."
While Gray's body of work is the inverse of Mr. Soderbergh's, in that all of his monologues are part of on continuing autobiographical impulse, Gray's achronological storytelling has had an influence on Mr. Soderbergh's most formally ambitious films like "The Limey" and "Che," which collapse memory and prophecy into an extremely active present.
After reading Gray's 1992 roman à clef "Impossible Vacation," Mr. Soderbergh offered Gray a role in his third feature, "King of the Hill," partly because he wanted to know more about how Gray's mind worked. "And Everything Is Going Fine" has a clip of Gray describing the phone call during which Mr. Soderbergh asked him to be in the movie.
Mr. Soderbergh told Gray that, like the protagonist of "Impossible Vacation" (a barely disguised version of Gray named Brewster North), the character he wanted Gray to play was ruled by regret. Mr. Soderbergh also told him that the character commits suicide, which, as Gray recounted it, clinched the deal.
"What's so bizarre in all this," Mr. Soderbergh said, "was the central role suicide played in his life." Gray's mother committed suicide when she was 52, and his work is haunted by his memory of that act and his fear that he would be compelled to repeat it. "It's right at the core of the work, and it's discussed in such a wide-ranging way," Mr. Soderbergh said. "And maybe that's what frightened me when I heard about his accident."
In 2001 Gray was in a car wreck that fractured his skull and crushed his hip. "You didn't have to be a genius," Mr. Soderbergh said, "to know that Spalding's equilibrium was very precarious, and I was really scared that this would weaken his ability to sort things out in the way that he always did, by working."
Mr. Soderbergh said he shared what he described as Gray's need "to keep making art in order to get out of bed in the morning." So he felt an admittedly irrational fear that what Gray suffered would somehow "splash onto him." His anxiety was so great, he said, that he never made contact with Gray after the accident.
"I was totally absent in a way that is inexcusable to me," he said. "And this entire movie is in part an act of contrition. The irony is that I spent the better part of three years immersed in something I tried to avoid. But as Spalding would say, 'What are we to do with any of this except make a piece of art?' "
Da The New York Times, 17 gennaio 2010

sesso, bugie e videotape (1989) - da scrivere con la “s” minuscola, come e.e. cummings - è stato il caso degli anni ottanta, che il film di Soderbergh ha chiuso trionfalmente segnando la prima affermazione di un film piccolo, marginale, indipendente, sul palco del Palais du Cinéma di Cannes, dove una giuria dai gusti giovanilistici presieduta da Wim Wenders gli ha dato la Palma d’oro.

Quel premio ha segnato un trionfo non solo per lo sconosciuto Soderbergh ma anche per il lontano Sundance Film Festival, dove il film era già stato premiato, e per il cinema degli indipendenti che da quel festival lontano veniva promosso e coccolato: tanto che da quel giorno del maggio 1989 è datata la caccia al talento off-Hollywood.
Soderbergh ha studiato cinema alla Louisiana State University, ha fatto i regolamentari “corti”, ha lavorato per un po’ come montatore, ha scritto e diretto sesso, bugie e videotape, ed è diventato un luminoso esempio di “success story”. Un successo non senza amarezze: perché se sesso, bugie e videotape - che Soderbergh ha realizzato quando aveva più o meno l’età che aveva Welles quando girò Quarto potere, e il confronto tra le due ispirazioni, le due ambizioni e i due risultati la dice lunga sugli sviluppi del cinema - è stato un travolgente successo, il successivo Delitti e segreti (1991) - una rielaborazione di temi kafkiani che finisce in horror - è un pasticcio, anche perché la Mitteleuropa è al di là della portata culturale del regista di Atlanta.
Mentre è certo meno originale del film di debutto, ma ha un’anima narrativa salda e toccante, Piccolo grande Aaron (1993), che racconta secondo moduli piuttosto tradizionali la dura vita di un ragazzino modello durante la Depressione.
Dopo il sostanziale insuccesso di The Underheath (1995) Sodenbergh appare nel 1996 anche in veste di attore in Schizopolis, una satira demenziale” molto divertente che prende di mira la provincia americana.
Da Irene Bignardi, Il declino dell’impero americano, Feltrinelli, Milano, 1996

Ha vinto un Oscar per la Miglior Regia con il suo dramma corale Traffic nel 2001, anno in cui era candidato nella stessa categoria anche per il film Erin Brockovich, con Julia Roberts nel ruolo che le è valso l’Oscar per la Miglior Attrice Protagonista. In precedenza, Soderbergh era già stato candidato all’Oscar (Migliore Sceneggiatura Originale) per Sesso, bugie e videotape, il suo debutto nella regia cinematografica, con cui ha vinto la Palma d’Oro al Festival di Cannes del 1989.

Che – L’Argentino è il diciottesimo film di Soderbergh dopo Ocean’s Thirteen, Intrigo a Berlino, Bubble, Ocean’s Twelve, Solaris, Full Frontal, Ocean’s Eleven, L’inglese, Out of Sight, Gray’s Anatomy, Schizopolis, Torbide ossessioni, Piccolo, grande Aron e Kafka – solo per citarne alcuni.
Inoltre, Soderbergh ha prodotto o è stato produttore esecutivo di film dei generi più diversi, tra i quali ricordiamo Io non sono qui di Todd Haynes, Michael Clayton di Tony Gilroy e il documentario di Marina Zenovich Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired. Tra i suoi altri titoli come produttore o produttore esecutivo citiamo anche Wind Chill – Ghiaccio rosso sangue e Criminal di Gregory Jacobs, Good Night and Good Luck e Confessioni di una mente pericolosa di George Clooney, A Scanner Darkly – Un oscuro scrutare di Richard Linklater, Vizi di famiglia di Rob Reiner, Syriana di Steven Gaghan, Keane di Lodge Kerrigan, Lontano dal Paradiso di Todd Haynes, Insomnia di Christopher Nolan, Welcome TO Collinwood di Anthony e Joseph Russo, Pleasantville di Gary Ross, e The Daytrippers di Gregg Mottola.