Steven Soderbergh on His ‘Shock Comedy’ That Was Never Made: ‘Nobody Wanted to Touch’ It
Samantha Bergeson
Sex, lies, and… shock comedy? In a new interview, filmmaker Steven Soderbergh details his outrageous comedy film that never was. The “Presence” and “Black Bag” director told Men’s Health that he had a “frustrating” experience trying to get a script greenlit that was akin to “Team America” and “Blazing Saddles” in terms of being a “completely batshit crazy” story.
“I had this shock comedy that I was trying to get made that nobody wanted to touch. That was frustrating,” Soderbergh said. “It’s hard to describe, but it was deliberately outrageous and provocative. And all the people that read it that could potentially pay for it, whether it be companies or wealthy individuals, said, ‘This is too hot.’ So, that was a bummer.”
He continued, “I was really interested in making something that was like a full-on comedy, like ‘Blazing Saddles.’ Not a subtle comedy. That still appeals to me; it’s just apparent that it’s not going to be that script. But I like the idea of trying to make what would be the equivalent now of ‘Team America’ or ‘Blazing Saddles.’ Just something completely batshit crazy. … I want it to be outrageous, and to have people laughing at it, and other people going like, ‘I’m not sure you’re allowed to do that.’ That kind of thing.”
The wide-ranging auteur also revisited his films that did manage to get produced — including the underrated “The Good German,” which Soderbergh admitted is the “most reviled” feature he’s ever made.
“It would be really bad form for me to pretend to be under-appreciated. But there is no question that ‘The Good German’ remains the most reviled thing I’ve ever made, which I’m kind of baffled by,” he said. “I just… Wow. Like, people were really angry. And it was just odd, because of all the things I’ve done, that might have been the closest I got to getting what I saw in my imagination, you know? And then it just, it really made people angry. Yeah, that was interesting.”
Soderbergh added, “Other stuff I’ve made — stuff that when it came out people were unhappy with —almost everything else has gone through a kind of cycle. People are like, ‘Oh, I saw “Solaris.”‘ And, ‘”Ocean’s Twelve” is actually not that bad.’ That kind of thing. Nobody brings this movie up. Nobody has ever said, ‘Hey, I watched “The Good German” again. And actually…’ Nobody has ever written that sentence.”
Soderbergh knows that modern younger audiences are more director-driven when it comes to their movie picks: “Here’s what I know from talking to Focus Features [which distributed ‘Black Bag’], and people at A24, and Neon: Young people, 25 and under, are going to the movies, and are very director-oriented.”
Soderbergh previously told IndieWire in 2024 that, after publicly retiring in 2013, he had to realize how Hollywood has changed before returning to filmmaking.
“I would say, ‘I don’t know what I was thinking.’ But I do know what I was thinking,” Soderbergh said. “And what happened was I confused the job with some other issues within the industry or the business that I was unhappy with. And so I announced that ‘Behind the Candelabra’ was going to be my last film for a period. I put out no timeline, I just said, ‘I’m stopping. I’m going to pursue something that I’ve been doing on the side, which is painting, and I’m going to get serious about that, and spend however many years I need to spend to get better at that.’”
He added, “The heads of the studio, they [now] don’t have the kind of control and power even that they used to have. Everything evolves, everything changes. That’s the only constant. So the artist has to figure out how to navigate these changes.”
