The Guardian catches up with the hardest working man in show business, Steven Soderbergh, to chat about The Girlfriend Experience and the upcoming Moneyball. Screening the former at the Tribeca Film Festival, Soderbergh describes the low-budget Experience as “a very myopic view of a very small cross-section of people who are doing a certain thing in October of 2008.” The movie, which centers on a high-end escort played by porn star Sasha Grey, has the director seeing the world in XXX-ray vision.
"Porn is beyond everywhere now," he says. "Everybody on television looks like they're in porn, you know? I mean, the people that give you the news every day look like porn actors. The degree of coiffing that's going on is kind of disturbing." But Soderbergh insists his film offers something you just can’t get from Anal Cavity Search 6. "With Sasha, you can within seconds see her do anything you can imagine with her clothes off," Soderbergh acknowledges. "What you can't see is what it's like to be her boyfriend, to hang out with her and be emotionally intimate with her. So my whole theory is that's the fantasy for those who've been double-clicking – that they want to spend 77 minutes being her boyfriend."
Soderbergh populated the film with non-actors playing characters very similar to themselves, and that practice will continue with Moneyball, adapted from Michael Lewis’s nonfiction account of the Oakland A’s front office strategies. Although Brad Pitt will star as general manager Billy Beane, "at least 50-60% of the film is going to be populated by real people playing themselves," Soderbergh says. ("There are a lot of very nervous people at Sony right now," he adds.)
All that and The Informant, too; the whistleblower story starring Matt Damon will open this fall. And then there’s the 3-D Cleopatra musical in the works. "What's going to happen is that at a certain point I will just stop. I don't have, like, two speeds. I'll just stop."