Steven Soderbergh

“I'm of the minority opinion that presidents should be given more power for less time.”

“I think I'm good at amplifying an actor's strengths, and minimizing their weaknesses. And they all have strengths and weaknesses.”

“I'm very comfortable with failure. I'm very comfortable being the guy who disappoints people.”

“It's really easy to make a movie that five people understand. It's really hard to make something that a lot of people understand and yet is not obvious, still has subtlety and ambiguity, and leaves you with something to do as a viewer.”

“I love caper films.”

“When you're sent something and read it, either you can see it while you read it, or you can't.”

“If you talk to any filmmaker, and if you said to them, 'I guarantee you x amount of money per month for the rest of your life, and it's not a big amount of money, but I can also guarantee that you will work continually, you will get to make what you want to make,' any filmmaker on the planet will make that kind of deal. I would have made it.”

“Lying is like alcoholism. You are always recovering.”

“The ought to be a worldwide cultural taskforce that just stops you when you have ideas like combining The Red Desert with an armored car heist movie.”

“Getting upset about Netflix, to me, is like getting upset about the weather. It's just something that's happening, and we have to decide what we feel about it.”

“I'm trying to develop an approach to putting out a movie in wide release that makes some kind of economic sense for the filmmakers and the people that have a participation in the movie.”

“I came out of 'Che' a different filmmaker.”

“There's something really fun about watching people really good at something.”

“One of the reasons why I think virtual reality, as a narrative format, is never going to go beyond the short-form immersion space is because the bedrock of visual storytelling is the reverse angle. If you can't look into the eyes of the protagonist, you cannot hold people's attention for more than 15 minutes.”

“The great thing about the business is how Darwinian it is. We have to swim or die - if you are found wanting over a period of time, you've either got to change what you're doing or find something else to do.”

“I just produced Criminal, this remake of Nine Queens, and one of the things that appealed to me about Nine Queens is that it was a performance piece, and that's the most fun.”

“When a film like Chris Nolan's Memento cannot get picked up, to me independent film is over. It's dead.”

“Another thing that really excites me: I'd like to do multiple versions of the same film.”

“I'm in the process of working out an arrangement to make some very, very, very small films in the midst of all these films and maybe that will help. But you get tired of talking. You just want to do it.”

“Well, it's 15 years since Sex, Lies And Videotape, and if you hang around long enough you're having the same arguments with just a new set of people every few years and it gets boring.”