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This chapter examines the films of Steven Soderbergh. Soderbergh's twenty feature films present a diverse range of subject matter and formal styles. They range from his 1989 breakthrough hit Sex, Lies, and Videotape, about the sex lives of four twenty-somethings, to social-problem films such as Erin Brockovich and The Informant! (2009). Even the cost of making his films has shown great variety, ranging from the six-figure budget for Schizopolis (1996) to the star-studded Ocean's series blockbusters (2001, 2004, 2007) that averaged nearly one hundred million dollars to produce. The eclecticism in Soderbergh's movies would appear to invalidate a claim to the distinctive style typical of film authorship. However, the chapter argues that the variety of his work and the commercial viability of some of his films are prominent aspects of his individual style.

This chapter looks at the conflicting characteristics of Soderbergh's cinematography, narrative, editing, and performance. Soderbergh subscribes to a holistic approach in filmmaking, by experimenting and developing his skill in all aspects of film creation. As director, writer, cinematographer, editor, composer, and even actor, in these multiple roles, Soderbergh assimilated all the necessary skills needed on a film set. There is no defining element or characteristic that unites all of his films — nor any of the increasingly experimental works to follow — so much as there is a Soderberghian ethos or spirit that pervades his entire body of work. The overall result of this multi-faceted style produces what is called a ‘dialectical signature’.

This chapter considers extratextual factors of Soderbergh's filmmaking practice, outlining the issues of finance and fame that must be negotiated by the ‘sellebrity auteur’. The term sellebrity auteur is a paradoxical concept that signals the complexities and contradictions of contemporary commercial cinematic authorship, in which the sellebrity auteur injects a consideration of commerce, promotion, and celebrity into conventional theories of authorship. Soderbergh and Clooney's production company, Section Eight, is an example of this economic position in filmmaking, as it focuses on distributing challenging films to the multiplex and shielding them from studio interference. Furthermore, this concern for economics manifests itself within Soderbergh's films, as does the role of celebrity. Soderbergh has transformed his name into a valuable, reliable commodity and exploited his celebrity, as well as that of his A-list co-conspirators, in order to sustain his prolific cinematic output over several decades.

This chapter looks at the legacy of Third Cinema and find elements of ‘guerrilla’, ‘imperfect’, and ‘minor’ filmmaking within Soderbergh's vast body of work. The theory and practice of Third Cinema, oppositional to both ‘First Cinema’ (Hollywood spectacle) and ‘Second Cinema’ (European auteur film), sought to establish an alternative mode of filmmaking. Soderbergh has exploited his position as part of the ‘System’ that Third Cinema opposes in order to create challenging, flawed films that use ‘guerrilla’ techniques, alternative modes of production, and political themes that side with the oppressed. These films lie outside the rubric of both traditional Hollywood escapist fare and auteurist self-expression. The dialectical dynamism of Soderbergh's career includes these oppositional stances that require the critic to think beyond evaluative concerns and consider the sheer display of difference in much of his work.

This introductory chapter explores the difficulties of pinning down any single defining trait of director Steven Soderbergh's extensive oeuvre. Apart from the scope of Soderbergh's films, anyone attempting a critical film scholarship on Soderbergh will find themselves overwhelmed by the sheer complexity and variety of their subject matter. Soderbergh's filmography covers a wide spectrum of themes and forms that to attempt to chronicle or summarise the ‘major’ elements and thematic periods of his work would overlook the equally important contributions his more ‘minor’ films have to offer. Most of all, Soderbergh's corpus contains many paradoxical elements that defy any attempts at scholarly classification. Yet this paradox in praxis also allows for a study of his oeuvre to be made, via dialectics — a method of reasoned argument in search of truth using the conflict of opposing forces.

This concluding chapter acknowledges that there is no single analysis of Soderbergh's extensive oeuvre, as the prolific filmmaker has continued to make several more films at the time of this book's writing. Suffice it to say that given the complex, varied, multifaceted, and highly unpredictable nature of Soderbergh's body of work, this book remains but an insufficient exploration into the possibility of a grand, unifying narrative of Soderbergh's films. Rather, this book is more accurately described as an overview of American cinema, with Soderbergh as an entry point. Yet despite the persisting issues of cinematic scholarship herein, Soderbergh's films continue to provide extensive ground for study — such as in his recent forays into digital films — as the most reliable definition of his films seem to be their provocative nature.

This chapter looks at two colossal corporate meltdowns—the destruction of Vivendi Universal and the catastrophic corporate losses at AOL TimeWarner—in order to understand what happens to the movies when the synergy goes terribly wrong. At Vivendi, the crucial story is the failed attempt to turn Curious George into a company mascot on the order of Mickey Mouse. At Warners, the essential story was Steven Soderbergh’s valiant attempt to generate, via the Ocean’s 11 series, enough corporate momentum to keep the dream alive.

This chapter presents the two interviews with Steven Soderbergh that offer insights into several of the most prominent aspects of his career as a filmmaker. The first interview, Geoff Andrew talking with Soderbergh and George Clooney before a live audience in London in 2003, touches on remakes, allusion, and their collaboration with the aim, in the actor's words, “to push the things we've learned from foreign and independent films ... back into the studio system.” The second interview, conducted by David Sterritt, focuses on Che, probably Soderbergh's most ambitious film to date. After acknowledging Soderbergh's tendency to experiment and defy expectations, Sterritt in his introduction calls Che “a daring project even for him.” What follows in the interview is the director's defense of the politics of class, embedded in all his films, that came to the forefront in Che.

This chapter investigates the case of Ocean’s films – Ocean’s 11, 12 and 13 – and its Ocean’s 8 reboot. As in the case of some other new millennial reboots, Ocean’s 8 is a ‘gender reversal’ reboot of (in this case) a typically male-oriented heist genre that reinterprets collaboration to emphasise feminine bonding. In addition to marking out the film’s gender transformation, the chapter outlines the intricate textual and intertextual network that exists among the series of films – including its unofficial ‘reboot’, LuckyLogan – to describe Ocean’s 8 as an auteur-reboot, one that playfully absorbs commercial imperatives into the structure and narrative of each installment.

This chapter discusses Solaris and its three film adaptations by Boris Nirenburg (1968), Andrei Tarkovsky (1972), and Steven Soderbergh (2002). Flawed as they are in different ways, each casts light on Stanislaw Lem’s original as well as on one another, illuminating the fact that a successful adaptation from a single-track medium like a novel to a multi-track medium like a film often requires major changes regardless of authorial intentions.