Stephen Soderbergh is 55!
Today marks the 55th anniversary of the winner of the Palme d'Or and the Oscar, a talented filmmaker and lover of experimentation, Steven Soderbergh. He manages not only to work in completely different genres, filming everything from documentaries and low-budget independent films to high-grossing Hollywood films, but also successfully combine several professions at once, be it a director, screenwriter, cameraman, editor, producer, actor and even composer.Stephen Andrew Soderbergh was born in 1963 in Atlanta, Georgia, the second of six children, Mary Ann Bernard and Peter Soderbergh. The family soon moved to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where the future director's father took a job as dean of a local university. There, young Stephen began to take his first steps in the field of cinema. Simultaneously with his high school studies, he enrolled in animation courses and began making short films. After graduating from high school, Soderbergh went to Hollywood to pursue a career as a screenwriter, where he worked as a freelance editor for some time. However, literally a year later, he returned home, where he got a job in a video studio, while continuing to write scripts and shoot short films. The first major directorial project for today's birthday boy was a documentary about the concert of the rock band "Yes", for which in 1986 he received a nomination for the prestigious Grammy award. This made Soderbergh again go to try his luck in Hollywood.  The director's debut full-length film, the psychological drama Sex, Lies and Video, which explores the complexities of contemporary relationships between men and women, brought him not only fame, but also his first awards. Tape 26-year-old Soderbergh unexpectedly became a hit at the Cannes Film Festival and received three awards, including the main prize - "Palme d'Or". This was followed by an Independent Spirit Award for Directing and an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay. Now the tape, the script of which was written in two weeks, and less than one and a half million dollars was spent on production, is called one of the most important for independent cinematography in the United States. Largely due to its financial success and public reaction, the film was able to draw attention to auteur cinema, which until then was not taken seriously by the studio system in Hollywood.  After a bright takeoff in Soderbergh's career, several not highly appreciated by critics and viewers followed projects, such as "Kafka", "King of the Hill", "Downside". In 1996, the director decided to return to independent filmmaking and filmed a theatrical monologue by actor Spalding Gray, who explores alternative medicine for eye disease, and the experimental comedy Schizopolis, in which Soderbergh also acted as an actor. The next notable, commercially successful and well-received project after the film "Sex, Lies and Video" was the thriller "Out of Sight" with George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez in the lead roles. which received two Academy Award nominations for adapted script and editing. And although the film did not manage to get the coveted statuettes, two years later Steven Soderbergh still had a chance to go up on stage for the long-awaited award.In 2000, the director released two films at once. The first was the social drama Erin Brockovich, based on the true story of a single mother from a small California town who filed a lawsuit against a local corporation. This was followed by the crime thriller "Traffic" about the lives of people involved in drug trafficking. Both of these films were nominated for Best Picture at the Oscar. This is how Soderberga became the first director since 1939 to be simultaneously featured in the same category for two different works. Despite the fact that he himself was sure that he would go home with nothing, academics still appreciated the work of the master, awarding him for directing Traffic.  In 2002, one of the most financially successful projects in the career of the hero of the day was released - Ocean's Eleven, a remake of the 1960 film of the same name. The crime comedy, which brought together all the color of Hollywood, led by George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Matt Damon, later acquired two sequels, and the whole trilogy earned more than $ 1.12 billion in worldwide box office. A tireless fan of experiments, constantly striving to amaze the audience, in the next few years Steven Soderbergh will release a dozen projects that are completely opposite in genre and style, including shot without a script and with the participation of non-professional actors "Bubble", black and white "Good German ", A dilogy about the life of the Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara," Call Girl "with the porn actress Sasha Gray, the high-budget thriller" Contagion ", the spy thriller" Knockout ", a documentary about the stand-up comedian Spalding Gray, the comedy about male strippers" Super Mike " and the psychological thriller Side Effect.  It seems that Soderbergh is subject to absolutely everything. But, despite a successful career and a variety of projects, in 2013 he announced that he was going to leave the cinema industry. However, the director did not leave the profession completely, to the delight of fans. He turned his attention to television, where he also very successfully realizes his boundless talent. Thus, the biopic about the notorious pianist and entertainer Liberace received two Golden Globes and an Emmy, and the medical series Knickerbocker Hospital not only made the audience fall in love with it from the very first shots, but also became a real benefit performance for actor Clive Owen. And yet, it turned out to be impossible for a real fan of his work, Stephen Soderbergh, to completely quit cinema. Last year, he nevertheless returned to the world of big cinema with another adventurous comedy called "Logan's Luck", and among his future projects there are at least several feature films, one of which, the horror "Mad", is filmed by the director on the iPhone. The Topic of Article: Stephen Soderbergh is 55!. |
