Retirement? Say it ain’t Soderbergh!
It was close to thirty years ago that Don Van Vliet, a.k.a. Captain Beefheart, walked away from the industry that had made him famous and decided that he just wanted to paint. Not a week after the Captain's death, Matt Damon insists that director Steven Soderbergh is ready to do the same thing.
According to the L.A. Times, Damon recently spoke about the 47 year old director, insisting "He wants to paint and he says he’s still young enough to have another career. He’s kind of exhausted with everything that interested him in terms of form. He’s not interested in telling stories. Cinema interested him in terms of form and that’s it. He says, 'If I see another over-the-shoulder shot, I’m going to blow my brains out.' "
Soderbergh has mentioned before that he wished to retire by the age of 51. Damon's timeline suggests that he could reach his goal. “After this movie we’re doing LIBRACE next summer with Michael Douglas, and then he might do one more movie after that with George [Clooney], and then after that he’s retiring."
Soderbergh first burst onto the scene with his out of nowhere success in 1989's independent film darling, SEX,LIES, AND VIDEOTAPE, before churning out a career filled with hits such as TRAFFIC, ERIN BROCKOVICH, and OCEAN'S ELEVEN.
Damon did not sound especially pleased at the thought of Soderbergh walking away and tried to talk him out of it: "After I worked with Clint [Eastwood] I went back and said, ‘Look, Clint is having a blast and he's going to be 80 years old.’ And Steven says back, ‘Yeah, but he’s a storyteller and I’m not.' ...If you're an actor or a writer or someone working in film, it's such a waste. For me, I'm going to spend the next 40 years trying to become a great director and I will never reach what he's reached. And he's walking away from it."
I would miss the guy, if for no other reason than that he and Mike Judge are the only people I know of in Hollywood who share my love of Guided By Voices. However, there is a bright side. This makes it highly unlikely that an OCEAN'S FOURTEEN would get made and, judging by the last two installments of the series, it would have been quite a cataclysmic piece of cinema.
Commenting Rules: Comments are intended to open up the discussion to our readers about the topics at hand, and as such should be offered with a positive and constructive attitude. If your comment is not relative to the above post or is disrespectful to the authors and readers, we reserve the right to delete it. Continued abuse of our good nature will result in banishment of the offender. Additionally, if you have any burning issues to point out to the GATW crew - typos, corrections, suggestions, or straight-up criticism - please email us instead of commenting here.