Netflix takes Soderbergh's High Flying Bird

How did High Flying Bird — which you directed and which is world premiering at Slamdance on Jan. 27 — come about?

SODERBERGH: It grew out of a series of conversations I was having with André Holland during season one of The Knick. The economics of sports became one of the things that we talked about. We were both excited about the idea of a project that basically gave you a look behind the kimono of how these large-scale sports leagues function, and to ask the question how we all feel about the commoditization of athletes. We were kind of kicking that around and we said let’s think about a what-if scenario and let’s keep the time-frame fairly compressed. We talked about Sweet Smell of Success a lot, because I wanted to use that as kind of a template. And we decided that the NBA and to imagine what a contemporary version of what a lock-out would look like was very fertile ground. And he suggested we bring [writer] Tarell Alvin McCraney into the conversation. And this was years ago, I think, when Moonlight was being shot, when we all started talking about this. And Tarell said, I like it and just started working on it. I think it took him two years to write. When it came in, it was done, he had a very, very clear idea of how it should be done. We did an afternoon’s worth of polishing in New York just before we started shooting. It’s almost exactly what he wrote.

What I loved about the movie and me coming back with this movie this year, I built my name on two people talking in a room. And I still believe in the power of something seemingly so small as two people talking in a room. I still think that is how everything begins. You can look at the largest global narrative that you can find, and you can trace it back at some point to two people in a room. So that stuff doesn’t scare me, when I read a script that has a lot of people talking in it. And when it’s Tarell who is writing the words, then I’m not just unafraid, I’m super excited. It’s so lively and so fun for the actors to perform. It literally just grew out of chats that André and I were having because I knew he wasn’t just somebody who was sitting around waiting for someone to ring him up with an acting gig. I knew he was interested in other stuff and had aspirations to produce so that is how the conversations started.

When was High Flying Bird shot and tell us about shooting it all on an iPhone?

SODERBERGH: It was shot in February and March of 2018, in three weeks. It’s a very small crew and the gear that’s available to enhance this already pretty extraordinary capture-device made it even better. So, if I had to do it in a more traditional way, it would have actually hurt the film. I was able to do things because of the ease of shooting something. You can basically shoot anything you can think of, you can put the lens anywhere you want. If I were in a more traditional mode, there were things that I wouldn’t have been able to execute as well as I’d wanted, because of the size of the equipment and people necessary to move it around. It’s hard not to think, when I was 15 years old what I would be doing with this stuff. I was back in a world of scraping up a few bucks for Super 8 footage, you shoot a little bit, and you have to send it away and wait for weeks for it to come back, and maybe it would look good or maybe it didn’t. The opportunity costs were high if you wanted to do something that looked good, now they are not. You still need to know how to stage something, but it’s a pretty incredible tool.