From the Archives: Steven Soderbergh – The Girlfriend Experience0

by Ryan Stewart

“Movies don’t matter anymore.”
-Steven Soderbergh

“If I’m such a commodity, how come nobody went to see The Good German,” Steven Soderbergh asks at one point during our conversation. He’’s being half-facetious and half-serious when posing the question. At 46, Soderbergh has already earned every professional accolade a film director can, including the Palme D’Or for his debut, Sex, Lies and Videotape, and the Oscar for his drug war opus Traffic. His frequent collaborators now include George Clooney, Julia Roberts, and Brad Pitt (who is starring in his forthcoming adaptation of the controversial state-of-baseball tome Moneyball). Yet Soderbergh remains a stubbornly anonymous filmmaker, difficult to nail down in terms of style or subject, removed from the public eye, and without a cult following that can be roused to seek out his smaller, more experimental films.

The one adjective that sticks is prolific — Soderbergh has directed twenty films in as many years, produced several others and racked up a library of television credits, an output that’s rivaled only by his latest collaborator, porn ingénue Sasha Grey. At 21, Grey has nearly 200 blue movie titles under her belt, as well as various music and art projects and a swelling public profile that’s quickly becoming indistinguishable from stardom. She was a name even before she and Soderbergh teamed up last fall to make The Girlfriend Experience, a slice-of-life indie drama that documents the travails of an emotionally distant, high-dollar Manhattan hooker named Chelsea, who offers a sophisticated brand of personal service that transcends mere copulation.

When Soderbergh called up SuicideGirls last week, we talked sex, money, movies and baseball.

Read our exclusive interview with Steven Soderbergh on SuicideGirls.com.