Steven Soderbergh is back — although he never really went away. The filmmaker hasn’t helmed a movie since 2013’s Behind the Candelabra, but that didn’t stop him from directing 20 episodes of The Knick on Cinemax and serving as executive producer on Starz’s The Girlfriend Experience and Amazon’s Red Oaks.
Now Soderbergh is returning to the big screen with Logan Lucky, a heist film starring Adam Driver, Channing Tatum, Seth MacFarlane, Daniel Craig, Katie Holmes, Hilary Swank, Katherine Waterston and Sebastian Stan, revolving around the Coca-Cola 600, an annual 600-mile NASCAR race held at the Charlotte Motor Speedway in North Carolina during Memorial Day weekend.
Soderbergh sat down with Entertainment Weekly and dropped several details about the film (along with a new photo), including what drew him back to filmmaking and the unique way Logan Lucky will be distributed, via Bleecker Street and Soderbergh’s own Fingerprint Releasing. “I’m excited about it creatively because it’s the kind of movie that I like to make,” Soderbergh says in the interview. “It’s the kind of movie that I like to see. Some of these issues that I’ve had in the past with the way movies are released can be mitigated. It seemed like all green lights to me.”
In regards to the film’s distribution, the filmmaker says, “By all standards, this is a studio movie. It’s a very commercial movie with movie stars in it that’s going to go out to 2,500 to 3,000 screens. The question is, ‘Can you do what the studios normally do from a distribution standpoint with a lot less resources and with a much better economic structure for the people who made the film?’ My feeling is that it’s gotten way too expensive to release a film wide, and the way that the economic structure of a studio is set up, if you’ve what we’ve done on this movie — which is everybody’s worked for scale — you’re too far away from your money. That’s why there is no middle man. There is no one talking a cut. The money is coming directly back to the creative pool.”
Soderbergh hopes other filmmakers will follow suit: “If it works, it’s a lane for people like myself to drive in. We formed Fingerprint Releasing to do this and to be able to export this to other filmmakers. So if someone like Alejandro Iñárritu, Alexander Payne, or Sofia Coppola wants to use this model that we’ve set up, it’s sitting there ready to be used.”
He also discussed the film itself, and a hint at what to expect:
On the most obvious level, it’s the complete inversion of an Ocean’s movie. It’s an anti-glam version of an Ocean’s movie. Nobody dresses nice. Nobody has nice stuff. They have no money. They have no technology. It’s all rubber band technology, and that’s what I thought was fun about it. It seemed familiar to me, but different enough. The landscape, the characters, and the canvass were the complete opposite of an Ocean’s film. What was weird is that I was working as a producer on Ocean’s Eight while we were shooting Logan, and it was kind of head-spinning. That’s like a proper Ocean’s film. This is a version of an Ocean’s movie that’s up on cement blocks in your front yard.
You can read the full interview here. Logan Lucky opens August 18.