ongtime collaborators and now producing partners George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh have reteamed for Solaris, an SF movie that is an unusual choice for both actor and director. An update of Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 Russian SF epic of the same name, based on Polish SF author Stanislaw Lem's novel, Solaris focuses on a psychiatrist (Clooney) who travels to a troubled space station orbiting a mysterious planet, where he encounters a woman who appears to be his deceased wife (Natascha McElhone).
Produced by Titanic's Oscar-winning director, James Cameron, and helmed by Oscar-winning Soderbergh (Traffic), Solaris isn't a natural choice for either Clooney or the helmer, both of whom say they are not fans of usual SF fare. But it seems perfectly natural for the two to find themselves working together again, since Clooney starred in two previous Soderbergh films (Out of Sight and Ocean's Eleven) and they are partners in their Section Eight production company.
Clooney, who plays Chris Kelvin, and Soderbergh, who not only wrote and directed but also photographed and edited the movie, took a moment recently to speak with Science Fiction Weekly about Solaris, which opens Nov. 27. Soderbergh's comments contain some possible spoilers for the movie.
George Clooney, can you talk about how your relationship with Steven Soderbergh evolves from one movie to the next?
Clooney: It's become sexual just recently [laughs]. The partnership has been great. Both of us are at a really good place in our career, and we're in the position right now where we feel like we just want to just keep pushing things. We want to keep trying things. And if we blow it, then they'll take it all away and they won't let us do it anymore. But where we're at right now is we're in a place where we can fight for films like Far From Heaven and Insomnia and even [Welcome to] Collinwood, for that matter, and we can push to get Solaris made.
It's a compliment that Fox was even willing to do this. They read the script. They knew what they were in for. And it's certainly not a standard studio film. And that's the fun of it. Steven and I are at the point right now where we're just trying to raise the bar, not just for ourselves, but for everybody we're working with, saying, "What's your legacy going to be?"
Why is this a film that you were dying to make?
Clooney: Because, first of all, if you were in my position ... you understand that there are no good scripts out there. ... I thought when you get into the position where you get to green-light films, that it'd just be plum pickings. The truth is, it's like a script a year if you're lucky that you read and go, "God, that's great." ... [Soderbergh] was a great filmmaker with great material who wants to push himself past something further than he's ever done it. This is a movie Steven's nervous about. It's a movie that scared him in making, and it scares him in selling, which is good. It's fun. And it scared the sh-t out of me. I like it. I think it's a good air to be in, it's like in that place where you might really blow it, which is fun. It's more fun than blowing it on, like, Con Air, you know what I mean?
Do you believe in a love like Chris Kelvin's?
Clooney: Yeah. I think, probably. I think I believe. Yeah, I think so. I've certainly seen it in friends and family before. I've seen that kind of passion, not even as a love, but passion in a lot of things.
Were you surprised about the controversy about your butt and the rating? [The Motion Picture Association of America initially gave Solaris an R rating because of two brief scenes of Clooney's naked behind, then reversed itself and gave the movie a PG-13 rating.]
Clooney: Yeah, I was. ... It was sort of a non-event. I think that Fox is struggling to find things to get ink on, and it was early on, and I think that that was sort of a leak in terms of, "Let's get something going." It feels like that to me. Didn't it seem that way, sort of, though? It seemed like sort of a non-story. You see it, it's not that hardcore of a scene. We've seen worse on so many television shows. So it felt like that was one of those things where they're just going, "What do we do?" And "How do we sell this?" And "Maybe we'll sell it through sex," and all that stuff, which is fine. It's certainly closer than the original [marketing] stuff, which was sci-fi, because people who go see this—young men who show up thinking it's going to be a sci-fi film—they're going to be really pissed.
Is it better now that they think it's just going to be George's butt?
Clooney: Probably. At least they won't show. They'll be like, "I ain't showing up." You know, I think that the trick is going to be, and for those of you who like the film, the responsibility, of course, is challenging people to say, "Are you willing to come see a film for adults that requires thinking and asks questions that it doesn't answer?"
What was the budget?
Clooney: $47 [million], which is a lot, but not for a space film, not for a studio space film.
What do you think Solaris is going to do for your career at this point?
Clooney: I don't know. It's funny, you know. I have the funniest career. I've never been categorized in anything. I think mostly because none of them were enormously successful for such a long time that I sort of didn't get pigeonholed. Like most actors in my position don't get to do something as broad as O Brother [Where Art Thou?] and then do Solaris and then do something like Confessions [of a Dangerous Mind, which he also directs].
Usually you sort of get caught. They'll let you go do one, they won't let you do the other. And not from acting ability, but more I think singularly because the films weren't massively successful, they just sort of let me get away with it. So I've been luckier than most actors in those terms. And people's perceptions of me I can't really control or worry about if they think I'm a good actor or not. I look back at some of the stuff and go, "Wow, I was horrible in that." But all you do is keep trying to work with better filmmakers, you work with good scripts and just try to keep doing better.
How do you think people are going to react to this?
Clooney: I don't think we'll do very well. It'll depend on how people get on board. I think we'll do better overseas than we will here, because I think people sit still longer and listen. You can even tell when you go do a junket overseas and the director has as many questions as the actors. They pay attention a little bit more to film there. It's fine. We're a country that is sort of looking more to be entertained. And that's fine, too. The trick with this is that you'll be glad you made it, and it'll hold up past an opening weekend, and that's the trick.
Can you talk about how subdued you all were when you wrapped this film?
Clooney: It was just exhaustion. There was no joy in it. We were all just beat. And we sat down on the back of this flatbed truck and had a beer, and we sat there for about an hour. And the crew was kind of happy to be done, I think. Our sets are always like laugh riots, not just Ocean's, [but also] Out of Sight, [and] Traffic was a great set. They were fun, because it's a life's-too-short kind of world. But this one was torture every day. So we would just sit there like, "Oh, God." So we sat on the end of the thing, and I was like beat up, and Steven's like, "I'm exhausted." And then I took a golf cart and went and edited for four more hours on my film [Confessions].
Steven Soderbergh, did you take scenes or shots from the original movie?
Soderbergh: Oh, it's all me [grins]. No, well, I'm a big fan of [Tarkovsky's]. I've seen all the films several times. And there's clearly a mood that's common to all of them that I've found really appealing. But there are a lot of influences through the movie. At the same time, I was trying to—I could be wrong here, you might be able to tell me—but I feel like it's not quite like anything I've made before. It's just different. There's some things in it that feel like things I've done, but while I was making it I certainly felt that it was something different for me, which is why I think I was so anxious during the making of it. I felt I didn't have the sort of handrails, I guess, I usually have when I'm making a film. Just every day seemed uncharted, completely.
Wasn't Daniel Day Lewis at one point under consideration to play Kelvin?
Soderbergh: He was someone I thought about when I was writing it, yeah. I knew that that was unlikely, that he doesn't like to work very often, and he'd just come off a really long shoot. So that never really got very far.
You made an interesting comment that making Full Frontal gave you some tools to use in Solaris. What did you mean by that?
Soderbergh: There were two things. One was working with the actors, the way in which I didn't make any assumptions about anything before we came in to working on the scene. And I was totally content to put something on its feet and just see where it went and not necessarily be wedded to what was written and not let the visual side of the film dictate at any point what the actors were doing. Now, to take that idea from Full Frontal, which has a very purposefully unruly aesthetic, and then adapt it to something that, in my mind, in order to work, needs to have a very precise visual aesthetic, was tricky. Because it meant on the one hand being sort of completely free-wheeling, and then on the other hand having to sit down and say, "OK, if I'm making a movie in which I want each image to link to the next, how do I shoot this in such a way that will accommodate both the performances and the actors and this sort of larger visual pattern that I want to set up?" And it was tricky.
There were just a lot of days where I felt that there wasn't much margin for error. ... It was just like a binary equation. Sometimes you're working on scenes, and you think there's a couple of different ways you could do this. This one it didn't feel like that. I mean, I could have been wrong, but it felt like there was only one, and sometimes I was having trouble finding it. And sometimes, more often than any other movie, I went back and said, "We're doing that again. It's not right." I did that a lot. I was constantly setting people back, costumes, the art department. I was hard on everybody on this, and myself. I said this sentence—"This isn't right, we need to try something else"—a lot.
We heard there were four drafts of the script. Were you just stripping things away?
Soderbergh: I guess, as I continue as a filmmaker, the enemy is what you've done before. The enemy is what's standard. And so I've gotten more and more aggressive about sometimes trying things that don't work, but wanting to try them because I'm trying to shake it up. And yeah, we went through some drafts that were completely different, because I wanted to see if maybe I'm missing something. Maybe I need to go off on this tangent. And I remember feeling really panicked. Not panicked, but, you know, I had a very good relationship with my producers, and they were always very supportive and encouraging.
And I remember when I handed in, like, the next-to-last draft of the script, I remember exactly where I was in the car, I was driving down Barham [Boulevard], and [producer] Jon Landau is on the phone. I'd given them the script the night before, and he said, "Steven, it's Jon." I said, "Hi, how are you?" He said, "Look, we need to talk about the script." I mean, I'd never heard that tone before. It was always, "Yeah, I got the new script, it's really interesting." This was like, "We need to talk about the script." And I said, "Oh." ... And I went and locked myself in a hotel room for five days and sat down and wrote the draft that we shot.
How long was the whole process for you?
Soderbergh: From the first draft to shooting was March of 2000 to May of 2002, a year and a half, almost two years. Two years.
How long did it take to shoot?
Soderbergh: Forty-three days. Principal photography was 43 [days], and then I went back and shot four more days in post [-production].
Starting in May, with a release date in November, doesn't give you very much time to make a movie like this.
Soderbergh: Yeah, and I really do believe in deadlines, and I do believe in having to make decisions and stick to them and not look back. Look, if I thought the film would have been better by having another six months in post, I would have told Fox to push it. But I really didn't think it would. I'm just a big believer in going on instinct. I had enough time, barely, to do what I felt needed to be done. I was never really that worried. I think Cliff [Martinez], the composer, he really felt the brunt of this, because it took me a long time to figure out what I wanted the music to do. So he didn't have a lot of time to begin with, and then the release got moved up two weeks, so that was two weeks out of his schedule, and it's a tricky score. I think he was really feeling under the gun, but I knew that it would come together and be what we thought it should be.
How would you describe the film's aesthetic?
Soderbergh: I don't know that I could. It's literally just a feeling of that's not right, that's not it, or we're not there yet, or that's the wrong color. I certainly had ideas that I could break down about which lenses I used, depending on where we were and at what point we were in the film, and I had this sort of idea in mind of how all that was going to work. There are sonic ideas that are in play. It's really just about—it sounds really watery—but you are trying to create a feeling, an atmosphere. So the elements that go into creating that feeling, you're just eliminating everything that doesn't feel like that, basically. And that can be everything from palette, to composition, to performance, to sound. It's a process of elimination until you end up with things that feel like the essence of that sensation that you want people to have.
What kind of sonic design did you have in mind?
Soderbergh: Well, ... knowing that we're in the ship a long time, and in these rooms for a long time, trying to find a sound that seems interesting, but isn't so interesting that after a couple of minutes you're still listening to it. You know what I mean? There were a lot of discussions with Larry Blake, my post sound person. ... For a while we had sounds that were a lot more rhythmic and a lot more detailed and a lot moodier, and they were pulling me out of it in a weird sort of way. So we ended up, again, sort of eliminating things that we felt were ruining the feeling of it and it just took a while to get to that point.
What is the metaphor for Solaris?
Soderbergh: Within the context of the movie, the planet Solaris ... is basically a metaphor for anything that you don't know for sure. So it can be a metaphor for God. It can be a metaphor for death. It can be a metaphor for love. It is a mirror in that regard, which is why everybody's having so much trouble with it, and why I purposefully kept it physically sort of inert and never tried to explain it or have it be active in a way that seemed human. Because the entire movie is about whether you can surrender yourself to something that is unknown.
[Possible spoiler]
[Kelvin] makes a decision at a key point to risk dying and staying on the ship in the hopes, which arguably are unfounded, that he'll see Rheya again, versus going back to Earth, where he knows for certain he will not see her again. So just that sliver of question in his mind—"Maybe I will, and I'm going to surrender to that idea, I'm going to surrender to the possibility"—is a huge thing for him. It's the whole movie. It's the key moment in the film. Kelvin, who's an extreme rationalist, basically saying, "It's worth dying to me to maybe see her again [rather] than living the life that I'm familiar with and not seeing her again."
That's what the whole movie led to, in my opinion. That decision is a metaphor, to me, for any of us continuing to live everyday with the knowledge that none of us are getting out of here intact. I think that's a big leap that we make every morning, in my opinion—having, as I'm sure most of you have, lost people that were very close to me, often without being able to say anything to them before they were gone. There's a big sort of tacit agreement that we have. We're kind of tricking ourselves into believing there's some sort of permanence here in order to not go crazy, but it is a trick of the mind. There are people who are not here today who were here yesterday. To me it's a big thing.
Were you surprised about the controversy over George Clooney's butt?
Soderbergh: No. There wasn't enough, actually. There should have been people in the streets.
What happened with the MPAA? [Soderbergh appealed the initial R rating, and the MPAA reversed itself without requiring cuts.]
Soderbergh: We certainly felt one way, and initially they felt another way. I felt like we had due process.
How did you get them to change their minds?
Soderbergh: We just went in and made our pitch.
Did George show his butt in person?
Soderbergh: I didn't think of that.
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