Top 100 Steven Soderbergh Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “My father, who was the one who really got me hooked on movies, liked all kinds of films, and I saw all kinds of films at a very young age.”

— Steven Soderbergh

52. “There’s a technical reason why I think that frame rate is weird and it has to with your brain’s ability to scan beyond a certain rate. The point is I find it looks weird.”

— Steven Soderbergh

53. “I actually didn’t find out about a lot of music until I was older. Some people have been listening to the Beatles their whole lives; I didn’t discover them until I was 18 years old.”

— Steven Soderbergh

54. “Traffic is about drugs. As detailed a portrait as I can muster about what is happening in the drug world, from top to bottom, from policy to how things move on the street.”

— Steven Soderbergh

55. “I was lucky that I was getting exposed to a lot of different kinds of films, and I was liking them all. So it seemed logical to me that you could – as in the style of the studio directors of the 30s and 40s – jump from one genre to the next, with the same satisfaction.”

— Steven Soderbergh

56. “I never leave the writer behind, because you rewrite the movie in post, or at least I do. I always do, and I feel like anybody who doesn’t at least explore that possibility is short-changing themselves. Editing is the most fun and most exciting part of the process.”

— Steven Soderbergh

57. “I think that music is a very difficult art form in which to be avant-garde. When we sit down to listen to a piece of music, I think our implicit hope is that we’re going to find it beautiful, or at least emotional, on some level.”

— Steven Soderbergh

58. “There’s a difference between failures and things that are bad.”

— Steven Soderbergh

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

— Steven Soderbergh

60. “I find myself in situations a lot where I have to say to someone, “This can be better,” and it’s hard to say that.”

— Steven Soderbergh

61. “Once I had a potentially heart attack-inducing eight double espressos in one day. I think my assistant secretly swaps my coffees for decaf as she doesn’t want me to die of caffeine overdose.”

— Steven Soderbergh

62. “To me the director’s job is to leave it in better shape than you found it, literally.”

— Steven Soderbergh

63. “Making a film that’s supposed to be fun to watch is really hard – that’s the weird irony of it.”

— Steven Soderbergh

64. “I’m sure some people will say, ‘Why do this?’ And my response is, ‘Why wouldn’t you?’ The film business in general is using a model that is outdated and, worse than that, inefficient.”

— Steven Soderbergh

65. “I try to use other songs or bands as reference points – it seems like the easiest way to get across what are really differences of taste or opinion. If you know what kind of music somebody loves, then you can kind of figure out why they do what they do.”

— Steven Soderbergh

66. “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.”

— Steven Soderbergh

67. “I like to make all kinds of movies. I’d do ‘Ocean’s Thirteen’ with the right script.”

— Steven Soderbergh

68. “I’m not going to spend two years of my life on something that I’m not excited about.”

— Steven Soderbergh

69. “The traditional models for success are just also disappearing.”

— Steven Soderbergh

70. “I have no shame in making music that maybe, if you listen to it long enough, you’ll realize you’ve heard this or that part of it before. I’m still very excited by an amazingly written song, so that’s really the thing that I work on when I make records with people.”

— Steven Soderbergh

71. “There are people who are originals and the stuff they make really is new. It isn’t based on anything else. But I’ve decided I’m not that-I was never that. My abilities are to synthesize a wide range of references and ideas into something that feels relatively unified and coherent.”

— Steven Soderbergh

72. “It’s pretty clear to me that working as a director for hire agrees with me. I like it. The films that have come out of that, I personally like better than the ones that didn’t.”

— Steven Soderbergh

73. “I had more fun making Traffic than either of the Ocean’s films.”

— Steven Soderbergh

74. “Your take on things is what is either going to make you somebody people talk about or no.”

— Steven Soderbergh

75. “There’s definitely a way of thinking and a way of being in the South that has its advantages and disadvantages.”

— Steven Soderbergh

76. “Usually I’m thinking about the palette. I’m thinking about the color for the most part, then I’ll start thinking about composition and movement.”

— Steven Soderbergh

77. “If you’re a painter and you want people to know who you are and recognize your work, you’ve got to build some long-term value.”

— Steven Soderbergh

78. “Every time you make something that somebody likes, your impulse is to remind them that if you hadn’t made some of these other things that they hated, you wouldn’t have been able to make the thing that they liked.”

— Steven Soderbergh

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

— Steven Soderbergh

80. “Some filmmakers, you know, have their style and then they kind of go looking for the movie. I’m not like that. I don’t have one style that I want to take from movie to movie.”

— Steven Soderbergh

81. “What are the stories you want people to tell about you?”

— Steven Soderbergh

82. “Whenever you experiment with something, it’s very easy to take the emotion out of it. And going back and forth between wanting to be respected artistically and wanting to move people is its own challenge.”

— Steven Soderbergh

83. “Everything is the director’s fault – you can quote me on that. There are no excuses.”

— Steven Soderbergh

84. “We’re all standing on the shoulders of what other people have done. But you’re supposed to take that and add your own sauce. It can be intimidating, believe me.”

— Steven Soderbergh

85. “But my sense in talking to people when I travel is that the film business is not that dissimilar from a lot of other businesses.”

— Steven Soderbergh

86. “I tend to be drawn more to people than pure story ideas.”

— Steven Soderbergh

87. “Maybe I’ll paint, do photography, just something else. I can see that.”

— Steven Soderbergh

88. “I’m still very affected and moved by their music – maybe in a way that’s different from someone who grew up around it.”

— Steven Soderbergh

89. “When I look around the world and think why is everything working or not working, it’s because it’s entrenched ideology. You can’t solve a problem if you’re sitting down with people who say, “All these ideas are off the table because of what I believe.””

— Steven Soderbergh

90. “My working life is me doing what I want to do. This is that. I’ve made movies that people don’t go to see.”

— Steven Soderbergh

91. “I don’t consider myself to be particularly gifted in the way that other filmmakers are gifted.”

— Steven Soderbergh

92. “If you think that because you’re Che, when you go into Bolivia, when people find out it’s you, that they’re going to have the same kind of reaction that the Cubans had to Castro, then you’re high.”

— Steven Soderbergh

93. “Warner Bros. has talked about going out with low-cost DVDs simultaneously in China because piracy is so huge there. It will be a while before bigger movies go out in all formats; in five years, everything will.”

— Steven Soderbergh

94. “I can make a movie about Lee Harvey Oswald and make you feel what he feels and make you understand why he believes what he believes. That doesn’t mean I think you should go out and shoot JFK.”

— Steven Soderbergh

95. “Nobody’s talking about movies the way they’re talking about their favorite TV shows.”

— Steven Soderbergh

96. “I know why we can’t have a frank discussion with our policymakers – if you’re in the government or in law enforcement you cannot acknowledge that drugs are anything but inherently evil and morally wrong.”

— Steven Soderbergh

97. “I make every movie like it’s the last one. “If this was the last movie, what decision would I make?” That’s how I make my decisions.”

— Steven Soderbergh

98. “A lot of people go to the movies wanting the movie to be about feelings, and it’s really not about that. Or rather it’s about feelings in the abstract.”

— Steven Soderbergh

99. “When we look at what’s going on in the world and we see the immense level of conflict that seems to always be happening – you can always trace it back to competing narratives.”

— Steven Soderbergh

100. “I come from a generation that was surrounded by popular music, but I don’t know if anybody’s ever going to move the ball forward as far and as fast as the Beatles did.”

— Steven Soderbergh