"In Full Frontal and K Street, I learned to take advantage of the mobility that digital provides"
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Soderbergh’s line reads like a technical note, but it’s really a quiet manifesto about power: who gets to move, how fast, and under what rules. “Mobility” isn’t just portability of gear; it’s freedom from the old choke points of filmmaking - unions of circumstance, studio schedules, bulky crews, permission structures. Digital lets him slip the leash. He can shoot quickly, lightly, and with a kind of stealth that changes what stories can look like and who can be in them.
The context matters. Full Frontal (2002) arrived when DV still carried a whiff of “cheap” and “unfinished,” and Soderbergh - already an Oscar-winning establishment figure - treated that supposed limitation as an aesthetic and tactical advantage. The roughness becomes a feature: a self-aware, semi-improvised texture that matches a film about performance, identity, and the business of selling both. K Street (2003), his HBO experiment with pseudo-documentary politics, pushes the idea further. Digital’s nimbleness doesn’t just capture reality; it invites it. You can shoot in real offices, with real political figures, on timelines that mimic the news cycle. That immediacy is the point.
Subtext: Soderbergh is refusing the romance of “film” as a sacred medium. He’s talking like a director who’s less interested in fetishizing craft than in exploiting the moment - using technology to collapse the distance between idea and execution. Mobility becomes authorship: the ability to pivot, to iterate, to stay ahead of the system that normally calcifies art into process.
The context matters. Full Frontal (2002) arrived when DV still carried a whiff of “cheap” and “unfinished,” and Soderbergh - already an Oscar-winning establishment figure - treated that supposed limitation as an aesthetic and tactical advantage. The roughness becomes a feature: a self-aware, semi-improvised texture that matches a film about performance, identity, and the business of selling both. K Street (2003), his HBO experiment with pseudo-documentary politics, pushes the idea further. Digital’s nimbleness doesn’t just capture reality; it invites it. You can shoot in real offices, with real political figures, on timelines that mimic the news cycle. That immediacy is the point.
Subtext: Soderbergh is refusing the romance of “film” as a sacred medium. He’s talking like a director who’s less interested in fetishizing craft than in exploiting the moment - using technology to collapse the distance between idea and execution. Mobility becomes authorship: the ability to pivot, to iterate, to stay ahead of the system that normally calcifies art into process.
Quote Details
| Topic | Movie |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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