Daily Inspiration Quote by Steven Soderbergh

Soderbergh’s line lands like a shrug from the edit bay: success is noisy, collaborative, and overdetermined; failure is a clean story we tell ourselves after the fact. Coming from a director who has ping-ponged between indie minimalism and studio machinery, it’s less a Zen aphorism than a working diagnosis of how narratives get manufactured on set and in our heads.

The intent is partly defensive, partly liberating. When a film works, credit becomes a crowd scene: script, casting, camera, timing, financing, weather, audience mood, the one improvisation that stuck. Any single “reason” is usually a comforting lie. When it bombs, the industry craves a culprit because culprits are actionable: bad script, miscast lead, wrong release date. Those explanations flatter our need for control, and they protect the fantasy that next time we can engineer the outcome.

Subtext: our brains are better at blame than at gratitude. Missteps are salient, legible, meme-ready. Success often depends on invisible scaffolding and contingency, which makes it psychologically and professionally inconvenient to admit. For a director, this is also a quiet argument against auteur mythology. If things go wrong, the auteur is an easy target; if things go right, it’s tempting to pretend the vision alone did it.

Context matters: Soderbergh has spent a career systematizing experimentation, treating process as a hedge against randomness. The quote is a reminder that “figuring it out” is often post-production storycraft, not truth.