On Monday, Steven Soderbergh, the star guest of the 58th KVIFF, first presented his second film Kafka, which he shot in Prague in 1990, at the Municipal Theatre. Later in the afternoon, he moved to the Congress Hall for a KVIFF Talk with British journalist Neil Young. Young opened the interview by reminding us that Soderbergh is one of only six people to have won both the Palme d’Or and the Academy Award for directing.
Soderbergh returned to the Czech Republic for the first time since filming Kafka, and the KVIFF Talk began with his memories of this work. “We shot nine months after the Velvet Revolution, it was the last film shot under the supervision of the State film bureaucracy. I remember people were very worried about whether they would still have a job afterwards. Freelance work was completely unknown here back then,” said Soderbergh, who rose to fame with his debut Sex, Lies and Videotape.
The discussion then turned to the director’s childhood film beginnings. “About a month after I lost my passion for baseball, I saw Jaws at my grandparents’ house on vacation, and when I walked out of the cinema, I had just two questions: ‘What does ‘directed’ mean? And who the hell is Steven Spielberg?’,” he recalled. Since then, he has seen Jaws more than twenty times, and was also greatly influenced by Polanski’s Chinatown. He gained his film education already in his teens, spending time after school with film students from a nearby campus.
Soderbergh also explained why he uses pseudonyms based on his parents’ names for the editor and cinematographer professions, or why he asked Richard Lester, the director of the Beatles-inspired film “A Hard Day’s Night”, for help in the 1990s. “After Sex, Lies and Videotape, I made several films that were unsuccessful. I was lost and desperate and decided I needed to find why I enjoy films again. I realized I had to become an amateur filmmaker again. I came home and shot Schizopolis. It’s actually my second first film. And I also turned to Richard Lester, who inspired me. He helped me a lot during this period,” the award-winning director revealed.
