An impeccably dressed man drags on a cigarette at LAX, the smoke matching the color of his close-cropped hair. The Whos The Seeker plays on the soundtrack as he gets into a cab. At his motel, he notices the return address on the back of an envelope. Suddenly, hes standing in front of that same address. Then hes on a plane. Then hes in a car, staring at a picture of a young woman who appears onscreen as a girl a split-second later, the flashback looking like a purplish, streaked Kodachrome image from decades earlier. And then, in quick succession: motel room, plane, the girl, a different flashback, back to the motel, the young woman in a car, the picture, back to the motel again. Wind chimes and the sound of humming play over these images, suggesting that everything is happening days, weeks, years apart, and yet, somehow, all at once.
This is how Steven Soderberghs The Limey starts, not with a bang, but with a disorienting montage that gives us our star, his character, and his purpose all in one dizzying swoop. The actor is Terence Stamp, the handsome Brit who came to represent Londons Swinging Sixties. The role is Wilson, an ex-convict whos flown from England to Los Angeles. The young woman is his daughter, recently deceased and the reason why the older man is here, in search of answers. His journey through the City of Angels will find him in the company of thugs, mugs, hit men, acting coaches, and a record producer played by fellow Age of Aquarius icon Peter Fonda. We will follow him through the beginning, the middle, and the end of his quest for vengeance. Just not, as the chronologically chopped-up opening informs us, necessarily in that order.
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Time has been particularly kind to Soderberghs addition to the cinematic annus mirabilis that was 1999 which, considering how fast and loose the movie plays with the concept of time, feels slightly ironic. Moving nimbly between the past and the present, this pulpish revenge story (written by Soderbergh collaborator Lem Dobbs) proved that the directors comeback film, the adaptation of Elmore LeonardsOut of Sight (1998), was not a fluke. It would also end up being the second entry in a roughly three-year, five-movie run that would revitalize his career and win him an Oscar. Lem and I pitched it to Artisan in the summer of 98, the filmmaker says. We were shooting in October and delivered the movie nine months after the first meeting. It all went very fast and then came the feeling of terror when we first screened it. . . .
Sitting down a few weeks before the release of a newly remastered Digital 4K Ultra HD edition celebrating the films 20th anniversary, the 56-year-old director recalled The Limeys making and near unmaking during a postproduction panic. He also weighed in how it helped spur on a creative rebirth, why he needed his early failures to find out who he was as a filmmaker, the current Whats cinema? debate, the legacy of the Sixties, why 1999 ended up becoming a landmark year for American movies, Netflix, Los Angeles, Parasite, and a lot more. The interview has been condensed for clarity and, in the spirit of the film, completely re-edited at the last minute.
Does it feel like its been 20 years since you made The Limey?
[Pause] Yes. It does, actually.
In what way?
It was a lot of movies ago . . . a lot of hours on the floor. I hadnt seen it, end to end, in maybe 19 years. Watching the 4K remastering for the upcoming release it was surprising. Because you forget stuff. It was sad, because Peters gone. But when we were shooting it, everywhere you looked, youd see a legend. Terence and Peter, obviously, but then you had Barry Newman, Joe Dallesandro, Lesley Ann Warren. It brought a lot of that back.
The way you fuck with Peters legacy feels especially poignant when you watch it now.
Fucking with his legacy was consistent with who Peter was he was the first person to poke holes in any sort of mythology that he felt was ridiculous or unearned. One of the things I like about The Limey is how much of Peter is in it. Wed be running a scene, there would be no marks for him to hit, and Id just sort of let him go and have multiple cameras running. That way, if he ended up doing something off the cuff and great, I didnt have to go back and ask him to do it again. His spirit really comes across in the film.
Was it always going to be him and Terence Stamp in these roles?
Terence was mentioned really early on . . . and as I recall, the list of people you could pair with him successfully was pretty small.
Meaning, people you could pair with him that could hold their own against him?
More like they really needed to be matched by their iconic baggage. Terence and Peter both had a reputation for going their own way and just doing whatever they wanted to including, for periods of time, being away from it all. It turned out that they complemented each other perfectly.
We were shooting driving stuff on the Pacific Coast Highway, and I saw them greet each other for the first time since, what, 1968? And the first thing out of Peters mouth was, Do you remember where we were?
Terence replies, Taormina.
Thats right, Fonda says. And then I cant remember who said it, but one of them asked, I wonder whatever happened to her. And I said, Ok, guys, youve gotta unpack that for me a bit. It turned out they had been at a film festival where they met the same young woman, and were playing against each other in an effort to woo her.
Which one of them ended up winning her over?
Neither of them! That was the funny part. But they just jumped right back to that moment in time immediately.
I would play this game with Terence, because he literally has no fixed address but hes seen everything, done everything, lived everywhere. So Id just turn to him and go, The best necktie shop? And hed pause and go, Oh, theres this place in London . . . I mean, whatever you asked him the best French restaurant, the best this, the best that he knew it. He had an answer immediately.
The script was written as a linear narrative, right?
It was.
At what point did you start thinking of switching up the chronology?
Well, it was generated out of a sense of panic.
Panic from? . . .
From screening the movie for the first time in a linear version and realizing that it just didnt work.
So there was a cut of it that was linear?
Oh, yeah, and it. Just. Didnt. Work. [Editor] Sarah Flack and I had to sit down and kind of start over. [Pause] Actually, we literally had to start over. There was no kind of.
Can you walk me through the thought process once you realized it wasnt working in an A-to-Z narrative?
Given its premise, it seemed there was some possibility to recraft it into a memory piece. To make that work, we ended doing a couple more days worth of shooting, to gather more abstract material to layer in: the plane, Peter sitting in the cabin and looking at the wind chimes. All these sort of contemplative shots we needed that material to make this version play.
But it was worrying. It was happening at a time when I finally felt like Id got my foot, to some extent, into the movie business with Out of Sight. Coming out of the Richard Lester thing [Getting Away With It, a combo journal/book-length interview with the Hard Days Night director] and Schizopolis I felt energized. And with Sight, I felt like Id got back into a rhythm. I wanted to keep busy, keep the momentum going, keep making a movie every nine months. So to put this movie together, show it to a room full of friends and then go, Oh, this is really not working. . . .We spent a few days just thinking, what is salvageable here? What can we do with what we have? It was . . . unnerving.
I think it was [producer] Stacey Sher who called me in the middle of this and told me that Out of Sight had just won the National Society of Film Critics award for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay. And I just went, Uh, uh-huh, OK, and hung up. [Laughs] I mean, I could not have cared less at that moment. What should have been this incredible moment just became subsumed by this dark cloud of concern.
Unless the National Society of Film Critics is going to come to my house and recut it . . .
. . . and help me solve this thing, what good does it do me right now?! I mean, if I thought they would have come over and done it, Id have offered. I was open to all options at that moment.
But we kind of fought our way through it, and looking back at it . . . Sarah has a better memory of this now, but I just recall us totally starting it over. There were all these conversations about layering in these shots, how we were going to establish things, all of that. A lot of trial and error. When youre asking people to embrace this sort of polyphonic structure, you have to judge how much is too much. We had a lot of in-progress screenings because we thought, well, to know if this works, someone has to see the whole thing. Its like: Heres an image that we use FIVE times. You have to be certain, should it be five times? And where precisely should they occur? You use a recurrent, pregnant moment at the wrong point you might as well stop the whole film. Youve thrown everything off. But then you know its throwing people off, so you can go back and say, Ok, we were good here, lets start again. There was a lot of discussion.
I mean, we played fair. It works, in the end. But its pretty aggressive in how nonlinear it is.
Its not a passive movie.
No! You really gotta fucking pay attention.
Looking back with the hindsight of 20 years, you can chart how you go from one love scene in Out of Sight into a whole movie like that with The Limey and right into Erin Brockovich (2000), which is very much a classical studio film. And then you get Traffic (2000), which plays like an anthology of several Erin Brockovich narratives rolled into one. . . .
That is an accurate description, yes [laughs].
So did doing something like The Limey give you the confidence to do something straight like Erin Brockovich? It almost feels like more of a risk. Theres nothing to hide behind.
Yeah, confidence is the key word there. Its why I think that period was really important for me. I mean, the run were talking about here from Out of Sight to the first Oceans 11 movie [in 2001], which all sort of overlapped and happened in very quick succession I came out the other end of that feeling like Id finally found a way to work in the system but could still push things in one direction or another. People kind of forget, because they look back on the movie very fondly now, that Out of Sight was not a success. Critically, yes. Financially, it wasnt. Theres the perception that it was not the box-office failure that it actually is and frankly, I have no desire to correct that perception at all [laughs].
Just print the legend.
Exactly. So the sensation was being let out of a cage, albeit one that I had built myself. I was self-aware enough that, having gone through the Sex, Lies, and Videotape phenomenon and then ended up in the forest of experimentation that followed, I knew I had to stop and tell myself: You should enjoy this. Most people dont leap from mountaintop to mountaintop. There are always valleys. And that you do what you can, you finish it, and you quickly move on to the next thing. Ive been pretty happy with the range of stuff Ive managed to do since then.
Theres a lot of range, but aesthetically and storytelling-wise, theyre all over the map. Theres a shared sensibility but . . .
Well, what youre describing kind of came out of that period between Sex, Lies and Out of Sight. . . .that was really when I had had this unexpected success right away, then was trying to come to terms with what kind of filmmaker I was. Letting go of the writing part of it was a big help.
How so?
I wrote to get my foot in the door, but in having a frank conversation with myself, I realized, Youre not really a writer. Youve written, but by the standards by which I judge writers, then, no. Lem Dobbs is a writer. I am not. Its a trap that young filmmakers fall into. I have to write and direct everything I do. Well, thats fine, only . . . if youre not Paul Thomas Anderson, dont put yourself through hell for no reason. Theres a reason he only makes movies every what, four years or so? To go to the well to write original screenplays its fucking hard. And I realized my well wasnt very deep. The best use of my skill set as a filmmaker was to work with writers instead of being a one-man band. That changed everything for the better.
The other thing was just realizing that Im really a synthesist. Some guys are originals. Look at Spike Jonze theres nobody like him, you never know whats coming next, its always inventive and smart and funny. Hes just unique. And it would be a waste of my time and other peoples money to think that I was Spike Jonze. I cant do what he does. I can tell a story, however. I can work with actors on performances, and I can find a visual approach that supports those two things. It was freeing to figure this out, because that kind of approach allows for continual self-reinvention. You can slough off any skin you were wearing, from here to there.
So, yeah, that period from 89/90 to 97, in which I made five movies in a row which people did not like and did not see it was actually very necessary to me. They were steps for me to come to this place where I could have that run. Luckily, I never face-planted off a 30-foot board, you know? It was more like I got pushed into a pool and it didnt look very good [laughs].
Did you feel like there were certain . . . lets say unrealistic expectations thrust on you coming out of the success of your debut? Were the switch-ups from alternate-history thrillers to coming-of-age movies to heist films partially because you wanted to get rid of the notion of you as that Sex, Lies, and Videotape guy?
I wish I could say there was some grand design I had regarding my choices and me trying to beat expectations out of people. I wish I could say I was trying to get people to stop assuming I was one thing or another. But I was just trying to find my way. It was just me sitting on a set at age 30 and going, What the fuck am I doing? This is really where the book with Richard [Lester] comes in. . . . I thought, what if I go back and use Richard Lester again as a source of inspiration. It really saved me.
Did you feel like you had nothing left to lose at that point?
I felt like, You have to do this shit for yourself. No one is encouraging you to go off and do something different or take a gamble on something. Everyone wants you to keep doing the thing that youve done successfully. I knew I was swimming upstream a bit by not re-creating Sex, Lies which I knew couldnt be re-created! It was a total anomaly. So, yeah, I had to do some auto-critiquing. There were some hallucinogens involved [laughs].When I went back to Baton Rouge in the mid-Nineties, in a very conscious attempt to get back to the source of it which was growing up in Louisiana with these filmmaker friends of mine and making a movie the same way I made my short films. I wanted to recapture the enthusiasm of the amateur.
Lets go back to The Limey. What made you think of using the Poor Cow footage, with Terence, as part of the film and his backstory?
That was all Lem. I wasnt aware of that film, and it wasnt available here. He had, like, a fifth-generation videotape of it. He was the one who said, Hey, this could be interesting. . . . Take a look at this. When I saw it, I just went, Well, thats kind of perfect! Hes a petty thief, hanging out with these guys. . . . We added the daughter, so we sort of cheated a bit. But its just one more thing that proved that Terence was the right person for this. I mean, is there a lot of Michael Caine footage from the Sixties too? Sure. But Terences baggage is different than Caines.
Its one of the few L.A. movies that really captures a wonderful view of the smog from on high. . . .
You know, you could see the sea from here . . . if you could see it. [Laughs] Yeah, I dont think Lem and I ever articulated this, but Im not sure The Limey works in any other city. Something about the people in Los Angeles and the fact that this guy is coming here . . . I dont know that we could have done this in, say, Chicago or San Francisco or Miami. There are certain Los Angeles films from the Sixties and Seventies that . . . we werent trying to re-create them so much as channel them, maybe. Theres this movie called The Outside Man, about a Parisian guy who comes to L.A. and gets involved in some shit. I think it stars Jean-Louis Trintignant. I just remembered the way that movie looked, though I may have remembered it wrong which Im a big fan of, actually.
Of wrongly remembering things?
Yeah. Ive done it before.
When?
Well, when we did the love scene in Out of Sight, I kept saying, Oh, this is the same thing as Dont Look Now. Then after the film came out, I went back to watch Dont Look Now and was like, Oh, this isnt what I was doing at all! [Laughs] I totally misremembered that sequence. But it turned out better because of it. And with The Outside Man, I have this memory of the way that the Southern California sun hit the architecture in the movie that I kept thinking, Thats it. Thats the look of The Limey.
Were you and [cinematographer] Ed Lachman having these kinds of conversations when you coming up with that specific look?
We were talking about paintings and photography. A lot of visual references that werent necessarily movie references. And we used a lot of the great writing thats come out of L.A. as starting points as well. That terse, hard-boiled stuff.
Those flashback sequences, where the light is streaking down, do have kind of an impressionistic look.
Funny enough, that did come from a movie thing. Like a lot of people at the time, we were enamored of that effect when it was employed in Saving Private Ryan, where you throw the shutter out of sync and the film is being pulled through the gate, which its not supposed to do. Both Ed and I were like, Oh, thats a cool effect. I wonder if we could find a way to use that somehow. . . . That soon turned into, Well, the flashbacks may need some sort of gimmick so lets do that! Those were the days when you didnt know whether the effect worked until you got the footage back from the lab, too, so . . .
For anybody whos spent any amount of time in L.A., its very evocative of the sort of clash of aesthetics and lifestyles. It represents something in the collective cultural psyche, such a clash of people and ideas. And when you can really use a time and a place as a character, its a great thing.
Would you do a serious period L.A. film? Or after Full Frontal, are you pretty much done with that place forever?
Yeah, Full Frontal . . .thats very much a Thanks, goodbye movie about Los Angeles. I literally finished shooting it, got on a plane, moved to New York, and went, OK, thats it for me [laughs]. I dont know. The thing Im about to do in the spring [Kill Switch] is set in Detroit in 1955. I think that will be a fascinating aesthetic to play with.
Do you think that we collectively lionize the legacy of the Sixties too much? The whole notion of what that decade meant and Fondas line about puncturing the myth, where it really was just 66 and early 67 feels like a big part of the films DNA.
[Long pause] I dont think our feelings about the art that came out of that era is misplaced or unearned, honestly. We were not imagining the fact that something was happening that really pushed the boundaries of expression. I can say that what was happening in the movies in the 1960s has been, and continues to be, a huge influence on what I do. I still am inspired by and want to blatantly rip off a lot of films from that period.
But looking back on the era, what I think what we can now acknowledge is that its not just enough to tear down a system. You have to have a system ready-made to replace it and that has a real shot at making it work. There were a lot of people deservedly saying, We hate this fucking system and it has to change. And when people were able to successfully dismantle some things, there was nothing there to take its place. A sort of ennui began to set in, and then economic forces began to see an opening and quietly, gradually began to bring things back to where they were. Then you get the 1980s.
Richard Lester talked about shooting Petulia in San Francisco right as the hippie thing was hitting its peak, and seeing businessmen cross the bridge, pull over, change into their hippie clothes and then go into the city. You know its over when you see that, he said. And he was right. Every idea that works gets co-opted. Including social revolution.
Do you think thats still true today?
Of course, but its not a hard and fast rule. Im still fascinated by seeing where movements like, for example, whats happening in Hong Kong are going to go. People are like, Were just going to keep doing this. Theyre not giving up. Theyre in a slightly different position than, say, Occupy: Wall Street was, because they have a structure they can point to and say theyd like to see employed. Whereas over here, a lot of us are like, Yeah, we live in a democracy, but its like the BAD version of one. . . . Can we figure out how to do the good version of this, please? Which is . . . [laughs]. Its an open question.
The Limey is celebrating its 20th anniversary in the same year that Being John Malkovich, The Matrix, Fight Club, Election, Magnolia, Three Kings, and a slew of other great American films are marking their 20th anniversary. What was it about 1999, in your opinion, that gave birth to this bumper crop of films?
I just read that Brian Raftery book [Best. Movie. Year. Ever], and its like, Fuck . . . what a list. Id forgotten just how many seminal movies came out that year. But why was it such a flashpoint year? It was just chance. I mean, it was the culmination of a lot of different shifts that happened on the heels of the American independent-filmmaking wave that happened after the late Eighties, and resulted in a decade of young filmmakers finding their way into this system that used to be closed off to them. 1999 turned out to be what I was always hoping for, which was this fusion of independent-minded filmmakers, the resources of the studios,and an audience willing to go wherever these people would take them. It just kind of all came together, and then within 10 years, was more or less gone.
The funny thing is, The Limey might be one of the few films from 1999 that could get made today. Fight Club doesnt get made in 2019. Election doesnt get made in 2019. But The Limey might have a shot.
I think thats true. A modestly budgeted genre film you could probably do it now. I mean, thats kind of what Im trying to do with Kill Switch, so well see. Even the closest thing back then to what we might consider a 2019 movie, The Matrix look, forget what you know now. Do you give $90 million to two filmmakers with an original story and an idea that no one is sure can even be technically accomplished, and whose only calling card was the decidedly nonscience-fiction movie Bound? In terms of pure risk, Warners was pushing it. And they won that bet.
I dont know if youve been aware of a conversation that happened a few months back, in regard to a well-known veteran filmmaker and a certain comic-book behemoth that now makes blockbusters . . .
[Warily] Uh-huh.
The result was a lot of brouhaha about what is and isnt cinema. So my question is this: Was all of this questioning of the medium and the term actually a good thing for the art form? Do you think that it actually forced people to think about the purpose and parameters of what we define as cinema?
Well . . . I talked about all of the stuff five years ago.
Youre referring to the State of Cinema speech at the San Francisco Film Festival in 2014, right?
Yeah. And I dont think anythings really changed. When I described cinema as an approach . . . it has nothing to do with the capture medium, or the venue or location in which its viewed. To me, its purely an artistic attitude and a point of view. So, maybe Im not thinking about it in the same way that a lot of the people who are having this discussion are thinking about it. I mean, its a little like getting upset about the weather. It is what it is.
Really, Im just trying to figure out what lane I should be driving in. I just want to keep making the things I want to make, and have them succeed so I can keep making other things. Im trying to look at things through both a microscope and a satellite 30,000 feet up in the sky. Im looking for that part of the Venn diagram where what I want to make and what people are interested in intersect. I can only make what I can make.
In a way, it seems like youre one of the few filmmakers who may be best suited by the Netflix model. If you look at something like High Flying Bird and The Laundromat, theyre films that you would have considered the middle in 2004 or 2005; you have enough clout to make them with people who are recognizable but arent necessarily the Oceans 11 cast; and technologically, youve figured out how to make things look decent and keep the costs low . . .
And both of those films, Id argue, have very little hope on 3,000 screens and then get enough eyeballs to justify putting them on 3,000 screens! Thats not even taking into account what it takes to get people to realize they exist in the first place. If those are two movies that I want to make, I have to figure out how to give them a home and where the people giving me money to make them consider them a win, and not, Well, lets never fucking do that again.
I mean, of course I want my movies seen in a theater. . . .We all want our fucking movies seen in a theater! Thats a given. But High Flying Bird is a very niche movie. Its going narrow and deep about a subject that not everybody is interested in. So if 8 million people saw that on Netflix, at what, eight dollars a ticket? Theres no universe in which that movie makes that kind of money.
There are still outliers.
And those outliers give me hope. I mean, something like Parasite youre talking about a film thats not a fantasy spectacle, that can take up some specific cultural real estate, and has to be made by that filmmaker. If I made that movie, shot for shot and in English, were not talking about it. So when people are like, its hopeless, my response is: This guy made this movie in South Korea, its fucking blowing up everywhere, most people roundly consider it to be the movie of the year its still fucking possible! Great art solves a lot of these issues. At the end of the day, if theres going to be some flying wedge that breaks things open, its going to be movies like Parasite that just hit at the exact moment they need to. And as long as there is a filmmaker out there who is willing to chart that course, these movies will find their audience. You cant conjure that. You can only hope youre around to witness it firsthand.
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