In a new interview with Steven Soderbergh at Esquire, the director of the upcoming Cinemax television show “The Knick” discussed the “biggest reason” he got out of movies, which was, “It stopped being fun.”
The fact that it became a story at all is because of Matt Damon. He remembered verbatim a drunk conversation we had in Chicago and repeated it to USA Today. I’d talked about it before and nobody gave a shit. It wasn’t until Matt said that I had a plan to get out. The bottom line when people talk about all the reasons, you know the biggest reason? It stopped being fun. It just stopped being fun. It really wasn’t. That’s a big deal to me. It may sound like “Why do you have to have fun to go to work?” I don’t know. I like to be in a good mood. The ratio of bullshit to the fun part of doing the work was really starting to get out of whack.
I know he says that’s the “biggest reason”, but I think he gets a little closer to the heart of it when he says just a bit earlier in the interview, “I’ve made movies that people don’t go to see.”
I guess the fact it’s not any fun comes as a result of laboring on something you think is great, critics think is great, but ultimately is frustrating when general audiences stay away, but isn’t that more of seeking out the herd rather than hoping they come to you? I wonder, comparatively, just how well will “The Knick” do on Cinemax compared to something like Side Effects, which grossed $63.3 million worldwide, or Contagion, which grossed $135.4M worldwide or Magic Mike, which made $167.2M worldwide? I mean, these aren’t big budget movies and they are more than doubling their production budgets. Magic Mike was made for only $7 million.
Now Soderbergh has turned to television where he’s made Behind the Candelabra for HBO, “The Knick” for Cinemax (Magic Mike XXL while handing off directorial duties to his longtime second unit director, Gregory Jacobs.
Television seems to be where the majority of the eyeballs are today as evidenced by this past weekend’s box office results and it seems that is what will make Soderbergh happy. After all, when it comes to “The Knick” he tells Esquire, “I’m really happy. Really happy.”
Boy, sounds like making TV shows with Clive Owen sure is fun, maybe I’ll just do that instead of trying to fill this blog space 24 hours a day.
