steven soderbergh Tagged Articles at Cinematical

It's not like snapping your fingers, and it can't all be attributed to hair and make-up. So how does a marquee beauty like Matt Damon transform himself into an ordinary-looking businessman in Steven Soderbergh's The Informant!?

Damon plays Matt Whitacre, the cinematic version of a real-life character, a scientist who became the vice-president of a chemical company and then turned informant for the government in the early 1990s. Damon doesn't perform a complete disappearing act, to the point that we don't recognize him. True, he gained 30 pounds for the role and his character wears a toupee. The extra pounds make him look "doughy" and soft, which is what Soderbergh wanted, according to USA Today. Yet he doesn't look excessively obese and he doesn't walk around with his shirt off; he just looks rather ... ordinary, a normal, thickening man from the middle of the country, with a wife and children and a house and a car (make that cars).

The actor has played pretty boys many times, which is kind of inevitable when you're a good-looking guy. Still, he has the deft ability to shift his charm downward, in service of the role, even in fluffy entertainment like Ocean's Eleven, Twelve, and Thirteen. He doesn't turn all his lights off, just selected ones, just enough to dim the wattage of his stardom. All his skills as an actor are needed in The Informant!, which has an increasingly jaw-dropping story to tell. Scott Weinberg described it as a "quietly odd performance." It's also hilarious. Damon hits every note, blending into the story while retaining an innate goodness that makes you root for him even as you slowly realize you probably shouldn't. It's brilliant; I just don't know how he does it.

(By: Scott Weinberg, reprinted from TIFF 9/13/09)

If you're about to dig into a mid-'90s "period piece" about a plain nebbish at a food additive company who decides to blow the whistle on his corporation's illegal price-fixing practices, well, you better get a few interesting people to bring this sort of story to the screen. With a leading man less reliable than Matt Damon and a director less colorfully unpredictable than Steven Soderbergh, a flick like this could play like a well-meaning but hopelessly yawn-worthy docu-drama. Happily, since The Informant! boasts both of those filmmakers (and a big handful of others), it turns out to be a seriously entertaining film ... about a seriously plain man.

Damon plays Mark Whitacre, a high-ranking suit for a chemical company called ADM. Essentially, these guys create all sorts of wonderful food additives, and the focal point this time around is a corn product called lysine. Only problem is that ADM and virtually all of its executives, not to mention their competitors, are knee-deep in a global "price-fixing" scheme, which (in case you didn't know) is all sorts of illegal. But while Mark seems more than willing to narc on his colleagues, simply because it's the right thing to do, it quickly becomes evident that our semi-hero is hiding more than a few skeletons inside his own closet.

In the category of "too good to be true" comes news that blows my tiny little mind. Michael Douglas and Matt Damon will play lovers in director Steven Soderbergh's upcoming Liberace, based on the life of the famous pianist. (That's pianist, not ... oh, forget it.) I'm describing this as "news" because it was published online by People, and they wouldn't fib, would they? Actually, Jessica Barnes already covered this for us, briefly, so we know it's true. Still, it's Douglas and Damon paired as romantic partners, and that deserves a story of its own.

A French newspaper is cited as the source for People's item, and there are a few choice new quotes. Soderbergh is attending the Deauville Film Festival -- that's in France -- and said that costume and wardrobe tests have already been done on Douglas: "I swear to you, Michael amazed me. He crushed it." The director also says that Damon has agreed to play Scott Thorsen, the longtime assistant / boyfriend of the flamboyant entertainer. "Matt accepted the challenge," Soderbergh claims. Is it the challenge of kissing Michael Douglas, or pretending to be in love with him?

Soderbergh also said that the budget will allow for reenactments of Liberace's "spectacular stage act, which "often involved elaborate stunts such as flying or driving to his piano bench in a Rolls-Royce." If this all pans out to be true, and the movie actually gets made, I will be lining up to see flying pianos and the love story of the new century. How about you? Are you itching to see Liberace now that Douglas and Damon are on board?

Like Peter Cullen, the actor who provides the voice for his on screen adversary, Optimus Prime, Frank Welker is a bona fide icon of the voice recording world. Not just because he has more than four decades of work and 600 individual credits to his name. Not just because yes, he provided the voice for Megatron, one of the most famous villains in cartoon history. Rather, it's because people know and identify him just from his voice, which may run contrary to the idea of actors disappearing into their roles, but it demonstrates that what he does is so distinctive and special it transcends the limitations of the medium.

Sci Fi Squad recently caught up with Welker via email to discuss his illustrious history in voice recording, in conjunction with Shout! Factory's Sept. 15 DVD release of Transformers Season Two, Volume One. In addition to talking about bringing Megatron to life, he talks about the technical and creative challenges of voice work, and reflects on a few of the roles that linger in the memories of movie and TV fans long after the characters left the screen.

Sci Fi Squad: I'll start with the obvious first: How did you get into voice acting, and by the time you performed on Transformers, was your work as Megatron initially just another job or was the process of getting the role distinctive in your career?

The acclaimed director Steven Soderbergh may be one of the most respected men in the business, but even he seems to have trouble finding a little extra cash these days. Now we all know what happened with is true-life sports tale, Moneyball, but by all accounts that isn't the only film that he is having trouble securing funding for. But on the bright side, it turns out it was much easier to sell studios a sexy spy thriller than it was a tale of number-crunchers. According to Variety, Lionsgate has snapped up Soderbergh's next slated flick, Knockout and secured financing for the action drama with Relativity Media offering to foot the bill.

The film is being described as in the "vein of La Femme Nikita" and will star Gina Carano. Soderbergh will be working with Lem Dobbs, who also worked on The Limey to write the script. Now Carano might be a household name for fans of Mixed Martial Arts, but for the world at large, a lead role in a Soderbergh film will probably be a much better introduction for the famed fighter. The director seems to be continuing to hire 'non-traditional' actors in his films, and if Soderbergh is looking to save some cash, luckily Carano will be able to do her own stunts.

As strange as a 'Soderbergh action film' may sound, it's hardly the wackiest idea he's had lately. After the jump; status reports on two of Soderbergh's other films...

If you're about to dig into a mid-'90s "period piece" about a plain nebbish at a food additive company who decides to blow the whistle on his corporation's illegal price-fixing practices, well, you better get a few interesting people to bring this sort of story to the screen. With a leading man less reliable than Matt Damon and a director less colorfully unpredictable than Steven Soderbergh, a flick like this could play like a well-meaning but hopelessly yawn-worthy docu-drama. Happily, since The Informant! boasts both of those filmmakers (and a big handful of others), it turns out to be a seriously entertaining film ... about a seriously plain man.

Damon plays Mark Whitacre, a high-ranking suit for a chemical company called ADM. Essentially, these guys create all sorts of wonderful food additives, and the focal point this time around is a corn product called lysine. Only problem is that ADM and virtually all of its executives, not to mention their competitors, are knee-deep in a global "price-fixing" scheme, which (in case you didn't know) is all sorts of illegal. But while Mark seems more than willing to narc on his colleagues, simply because it's the right thing to do, it quickly becomes evident that our semi-hero is hiding more than a few skeletons inside his own closet.

He is, basically, the antithesis of a Comic-Con filmmaker, more interested in infusing celluloid with his personal vision than with dazzling moviegoers through visual effects. Not that director Steven Soderbergh is adverse to using advanced technology, or sprinkling computerized wizardry upon the narrative like fairy dust, or including breathless action sequences in his films. Quite to the contrary. Ocean's Thirteen, for example, fairly bursts with playful touches of meta-reality, from handwritten monetary sums dancing around a wide shot of unexpected casino winners to 60s-style split-screen montages, and contains a breathless series of escapades in which no one pulls a gun -- it's all talk.

Thus, it was distressing to hear that Soderbergh spoke with an "air of tired resignation" in an telephone conversation with The Guardian UK a while back. He said he could "see the end" of his career, with just "three or four years worth of stuff" that he hopes to be able to do, and then he "may just disappear." He now wishes he hadn't made the subtle and powerful Che; the production was so intense that he and everyone else "got scarred ... a little bit."

It's understandable that the physical demands of making Che -- the equivalent of two feature-length films -- on a 76-day schedule for the comparatively small sum of $58 million would exhaust anybody. And it may be that the last-minute script disagreements that resulted in his losing the Moneyball baseball flick gig with Brad Pitt were laying him low as well. Some people are angry at him for indulging himself and ignoring the audience, somehow squandering opportunities for other directors to make "smart movies for adults."

If you were absolutely heartbroken at the loss of Sony's Moneyball, cheer up! It's still alive and swinging. Variety reports that the project has been revived with some new talent, though now it's in desperate need of a new director.

The good news is that the man in charge of repairing it all is none other than Aaron Sorkin, who is riding high at Sony thanks to The Social Nework. Everyone's favorite screenwriter is taking a crack at Steve Zaillian's original script, and is expected to have it finished by August. Sorkin is steering it back to the film the studio wanted all along: a nice sports film that focuses on Billy Beane, the Oakland A's, underdogs, and statistics. It's also retained the services of Brad Pitt, who is still attached to play Beane.

The bad but not altogether unexpected news is that Steven Soderbergh is off the project. His draft took a more documentary approach that Sony was certain would fail with moviegoers. I guess we'll never know, but I can't really blame Sony for being afraid of an approach that used an animated Bill James character. At least the director has a million other projects he can turn to for comfort. Will it be Making Jack Falcone? Liberace? Cleo? None of the above and out of nowhere? Very possibly.

The way casting announcements and pics of a pudgier Matt Damon had come down the pike, one had every reason to think that Steven Soderbergh's The Informant! (now with exclamation point) was going to skew more serious than its newly debuted trailer sells.

It's not that there's anything wrong with telling the real-life story of a bi-polar whistle-blower (Damon) with a more decidedly comedic bent, but 'thriller', this does not scream. Then again, maybe Soderbergh just wanted to lighten things up after the epic Che and the austere The Girlfriend Experience, and if that's indeed the case, things do seem to be heading more towards the Ocean's Whatever lark end of his spectrum.

Although most sites seem to have The Informant! with an October 9th release date, the trailer and the page around it (you know, with the 40-Year-Old Virgin-like possible poster art) both state September (in line with a 9/18 date we've seen floating around elsewhere). Either way, I suspect that an appearance at one of this fall's high-profile festivals will help assure us that the film does indeed merit its especially enthused punctuation and that the Damon does indeed merit his schlub-tastic appearance.

You know things are bad in Hollywood when a production gets shut down just three days before it's supposed to start filming -- and when the production in question stars Brad Pitt and is directed by Steven Soderbergh. The last three movies those guys made together all had the word Ocean's in the title. What gives?

Well, according to Variety, Columbia Pictures chair Amy Pascal found the latest script revisions for Moneyball so different from what she'd originally greenlighted that she pulled the plug on Friday. Filming was supposed to start in Phoenix on Monday. This is the equivalent of canceling a flight while the plane is accelerating down the runway. Those script revisions must have really been something. Maybe Soderbergh had decided to turn it into a four-hour biography of Pancho Villa.

Moneyball is based on a nonfiction book that uses the 2002 Oakland A's baseball team as a case study for examining how less wealthy teams can compete with richer ones (like the Yankees) by hiring players whose statistics in certain areas -- but not the ones usually considered, like batting averages and RBIs -- indicate they'll perform well. Yes, it's a book about statistics. You can see why a movie would be a hard sell to begin with. But the book was a bestseller, appealing to baseball fans (who tend to love statistics) and readers who enjoy a good underdog story. Pitt was to play A's manager Billy Beane, whose theories about which players would be most valuable went against conventional wisdom but were ultimately vindicated.