Background and career
Steven Andrew Soderbergh ( SOH-dər-burg; born January 14, 1963) is an American filmmaker, cinematographer, and editor. A pioneer of modern independent cinema, Soderbergh later drew acclaim for formally inventive films made within the studio system. Soderbergh's directorial breakthrough, the indie drama Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989), won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, as well numerous other accolades and was a worldwide commercial success. His next five films, including the critically lauded King of the Hill (1993), found limited commercial success. He pivoted into more mainstream fare with the crime comedy Out of Sight (1998), the biopic Erin Brockovich (2000), and the crime drama Traffic (2000), for which he won the Academy Award for Best Director. Soderbergh found further popular and critical success with the Ocean's trilogy and film franchise (2001–2018), Che (2008), The Informant! (2009), Contagion (2011), Haywire (2011), the Magic Mike trilogy (2012–2023), Side Effects (2013), Behind the Candelabra (2013), Logan Lucky (2017), Unsane (2018), Let Them All Talk (2020), No Sudden Move (2021), Kimi (2022), Presence (2024), and Black Bag (2025). His film career spans a multitude of genres but his specialties are psychological, crime, and heist films. His films have grossed over US$2.2 billion worldwide and garnered fourteen Academy Award nominations, winning five. Soderbergh's films often revolve around familiar concepts which are regularly used for big-budget Hollywood movies, but he routinely employs an avant-garde arthouse approach. They center on themes of shifting personal identities, vengeance, sexuality, morality, and the human condition.
Soderbergh was born on January 14, 1963, in Atlanta, Georgia, to Mary Ann (née Bernard) and Peter Andrew Soderbergh, who was a university administrator and educator. Soderbergh has Swedish, Irish, and Italian roots. His paternal grandfather immigrated to the U.S. from Stockholm. As a child, he moved with his family to Charlottesville, Virginia, where he lived during his adolescence, and then to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where his father became Dean of Education at Louisiana State University (LSU). Soderbergh discovered filmmaking as a teenager and directed short films with a Super 8 and 16 mm cameras. He attended the Louisiana State University Laboratory School for high school before graduating and moving to Hollywood to pursue professional filmmaking. In his first job, he worked as a game show score keeper and cue card holder, then found work as a freelance film editor. During this time, he directed the concert video 9012Live for the rock band Yes in 1985, for which he received a Grammy Award nomination for Best Music Video, Long Form.
After Soderbergh returned to Baton Rouge, he wrote the screenplay for Sex, Lies, and Videotape on a legal pad during an eight-day cross-country drive. The film tells the story of a troubled man who videotapes women discussing their lives and sexuality, and his impact on the relationship of a married couple. Soderbergh submitted Sex, Lies, and Videotape to the 1989 Cannes Film Festival where, at age 26, he became the youngest solo director to win the Palme d'Or, the top prize. Its critical performance led it to become a worldwide commercial success, grossing $36.7 million on a $1.2 million budget. Sex, Lies, and Videotape is considered to be the most influential catalyst of the 1990s Independent Cinema movement. Film critic Roger Ebert called Soderbergh the "poster boy of the Sundance generation". His relative youth and sudden rise to prominence in the film industry had him referred to as a "sensation" and a prodigy. In 2006, Sex, Lies, and Videotape was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the United States National Film Registry, being deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant", and the American Film Institute nominated it as one of the greatest movies ever made.
Soderbergh's directorial debut was followed by a series of low-budget box-office disappointments. In 1991, he directed Kafka, a biographical film of Franz Kafka written by Lem Dobbs and starring Jeremy Irons. The film returned one tenth of its budget and received mixed reviews from critics. Roger Ebert's review stated: "Soderbergh does demonstrate again here that he's a gifted director, however unwise in his choice of project". Two years later, he directed the drama King of the Hill (1993), which again underperformed commercially, but fared well with critics. Based on the memoir of writer A. E. Hotchner, the film is set during the Great Depression and follows a young boy (played by Jesse Bradford) struggling to survive on his own in a hotel in St. Louis after his mother falls ill and his father is away on business trips. Also in 1995, he directed a remake of Robert Siodmak's 1949 film noir Criss Cross, titled The Underneath, which grossed $536,020 on a $6.5 million budget and was widely panned by critics. Soderbergh has since called the film "dead on arrival" and described the making of it as his bottoming out. Soderbergh, formerly a member of Writers Guild of America West, left and maintained financial core status in 1995. Soderbergh directed Schizopolis in 1996, a comedy which he starred in, wrote, composed and shot as well as directed. The film was submitted to the Cannes Film Festival to such a "chilly response" that he reworked the entire introduction and conclusion before releasing it commercially. In the movie's introduction, he said: "In the event that you find certain sequences or events confusing, please bear in mind this is your fault, not ours. You will need to see the picture again and again until you understand everything". He starred in Schizopolis as Fletcher Munson, a spokesman for a Scientology-esque lifestyle cult, and again as Dr. Jeffrey Korchek, a dentist having an affair with Munson's wife. The film switched languages multiple times mid-scene without subtitles, leaving large parts of it incomprehensible. It was viewed by a critic as a "directorial palate cleanse" for Soderbergh. During the months following his debut of Schizopolis, he released a small, edited version of the Spalding Gray monologue film Gray's Anatomy. Soderbergh would later refer to Schizopolis as his "artistic wake-up call". Soderbergh co-wrote the script for the 1997 horror-thriller Nightwatch with Danish filmmaker Ole Bornedal. Nightwatch is an English-language remake of Bornedal's own film of the same name, which was produced three years earlier in Denmark.
Soderbergh's reemergence began in 1998 with Out of Sight, a stylized adaptation of an Elmore Leonard novel, written by Scott Frank and starring George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez. The film was widely praised, though only a moderate box-office success. The critical reception of the movie began a multi-movie artistic partnership between Clooney and Soderbergh. Clooney and Soderbergh next teamed for the latter to start its first production company, Section Eight Productions, a refurbishment of the old Maysville Pictures office, at Warner Bros. Pictures, although Clooney worked for the Maysville office and Soderbergh worked for the New York office. Soderbergh followed up on the success of Out of Sight by making another crime caper, The Limey (1999), from a screenplay by Lem Dobbs and starring actors Terence Stamp and Peter Fonda. The film was well-received and established him within the cinematic niche of thriller and heist films. He ventured into his first biographical film since Kafka in 2000 when he directed Erin Brockovich, written by Susannah Grant and starring Julia Roberts in her Oscar-winning role as a single mother taking on industry in a civil action. In late 2000, Soderbergh released Traffic, a social drama written by Stephen Gaghan and featuring an ensemble cast. Time compared him to a baseball player hitting home runs with Erin Brockovich and Traffic. Both films would be nominated at the 2001 Academy Awards, making him the first director to have been nominated in the same year for Best Director for two different films since Michael Curtiz in 1938. He was awarded the Academy Award for Best Director for Traffic and received best director nominations at the year's Golden Globe and the Directors Guild of America Awards.
In early 2001, he was approached to direct Ocean's Eleven, a reboot of the 1960s Rat Pack-movie Ocean's 11 written by Ted Griffin. After Griffin wrote the screenplay, Soderbergh signed on to direct. The film opened to critical acclaim and widespread commercial success. It quickly became Soderbergh's highest-grossing movie to date, grossing more than $183 million domestically and more than $450 million worldwide. Rolling Stone credited the movie with "[spawning] a new era of heist movies". In the same year, Soderbergh made Full Frontal, which was shot mostly on digital video in an improvisational style that deliberately blurred the line between which actors were playing characters and which were playing fictionalized versions of themselves. A year later, he was asked by executives at Warner Bros Studios to direct the psychological thriller Insomnia (2002), starring Academy Award winners Al Pacino, Robin Williams, and Hilary Swank. Despite their insistence, Soderbergh declined, preferring to see it directed by up-and-coming director Christopher Nolan.
