Daily Inspiration Quote by Steven Soderbergh

Soderbergh is quietly confessing a bias that runs against the auteur myth: what hooked him about Nine Queens wasn’t “story” in the reverent, screenplay-worshipping sense, but the fact that it behaves like live theater with a camera. Calling it a “performance piece” is a tell. He’s drawn to movies that are built as vehicles for actors to misdirect, seduce, and recalibrate in real time, where the plot is basically a delivery system for timing, confidence tricks, and micro-expressions. The “most fun” isn’t a throwaway; it’s his value system in miniature. For him, pleasure comes from control plus play: tightly engineered structures that leave room for human spontaneity.

The context matters. Criminal is a remake of a beloved Argentine caper (Nine Queens), a genre where the audience’s enjoyment depends on watching people perform versions of themselves. Soderbergh has spent his career toggling between formal experimentation and crowd-pleasing mechanics (Out of Sight, Ocean’s Eleven, The Informant!). A con film is perfect for that: it’s about surfaces, and cinema is the art of surfaces. When he highlights performance, he’s also preemptively justifying the remake. He’s not claiming to “improve” the original; he’s claiming a new stage for a new cast to run the same choreography.

Subtext: the real spectacle isn’t the twist, it’s the acting required to make you believe the twist was inevitable. For a director who treats filmmaking like a game of constraints, that’s not just appealing. It’s the point.