‘Sex, Lies, and Videotape’ at 35: Steven Soderbergh Remembers Helping Put Sundance on the Map Ahead of His New Horror Film ‘Presence’

On a January day in 1989, Steven Soderbergh, a novice filmmaker whose previous gigs included holding cue cards on variety shows and directing a concert film for the rock group Yes, made his way to the front of a makeshift theater in Park City, Utah. He was at Sundance — or the U.S. Film Festival, as it was then known — to introduce “Sex, Lies, and Videotape,” a piercing look at relationships that he shot for just over $1 million.   

“It wasn’t a normal theater — it was like a cafeteria or something, and they’d brought out folding chairs,” remembers Peter Gallagher, one of the film’s stars. “And Steven is describing the film, and he ends his spiel by saying, ‘If anyone wants to talk to me about distribution, I’ll be around after the screening.’ And people thought, ‘Oh, isn’t that sweet.’”   

By the time the credits rolled on “Sex, Lies, and Videotape,” though, nobody was dismissing the film or the man behind it as “sweet.” How could they? At that point, the movie had seduced the audience with its eroticism, humor and wounded heart. The 26-year-old filmmaker, who just wanted someone to buy his movie (and who was volunteering as a driver between screenings), was clearly a blazing talent. “My expectations were low,” Soderbergh admits. “I assumed nobody would want to release it in theaters and it would show up on video some day and be a glorified résumé piece. But as the week went on, the screenings went from being half empty to the point where we were turning people away. It was my miniature version of ‘Ten Days That Shook the World.’”  

“Sex, Lies, and Videotape” would go on to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes, earn Soderbergh an Oscar nomination for its screenplay, and put Sundance on the map after the film became a box office breakout. Soderbergh’s success ignited the independent film revolution of the ’90s, setting the stage for a new ensemble of auteurs like Quentin Tarantino and Wes Anderson. As a group, Soderbergh and the others would redefine moviemaking while encouraging generations of aspiring directors to max out their credit cards to realize their visions. By the time Soderbergh returned to Park City a year after the premiere to serve on the festival’s jury, the place was swarming with studio executives hunting for the next “Sex, Lies, and Videotape.”   

“The energy shifted,” Soderbergh says. “I had this parakeet’s near-eyed view on how everything changed overnight.”   

The Soderbergh who sits in front of me in his cluttered Tribeca office nearly 35 years later is an Oscar-winning veteran responsible for classics like “Traffic” and “Erin Brockovich.” His bald head is a far cry from the Barton Fink-like eruption of curls he sported in those “Sex, Lies, and Videotape” days, but he still has the same youthful desire to push the boundaries of moviemaking. “I’m always chasing something,” he says, betraying a ravenous energy and intellect. This is an artist who clearly loves to work, and who remains undeterred by the challenges of realizing his ambitious visions in an industry that is more interested in churning out disposable pieces of entertainment. “On set, I feel like I belong here. Like I’m built to do this.”   

It’s a few weeks away from Soderbergh’s return to Sundance, where he will celebrate the anniversary of “Sex, Lies, and Videotape” as well as premiere his film “Presence,” a haunted house thriller starring Lucy Liu. The movie is shot from the perspective of the spectral entity at its center.   

“I wanted to find a different way to tell the story,” Soderbergh says. “Everything is revealed through the glimpses of this family that this presence sees. And the whole ghost genre element is a Trojan horse to show a group of people in danger of falling apart.”  

It caps a dizzyingly productive 12 months for Soderbergh, whose thirst for discovery has led him to release two miniseries, “Full Circle” and “Command Z,” along with “Magic Mike’s Last Dance,” the third installment in his male-stripper saga. Soderbergh doesn’t just direct his projects — he produces, edits and usually serves as cinematographer. He jokes that he juggles all those roles because he’s “cheap.”   

But colleagues say that it’s the secret to his prodigious output. “He has streamlined his process,” says David Koepp, the writer of “Presence.” “He’s so effective and efficient that things that take mere mortals forever to do barely take him any time at all. He’ll shoot all day, go home and edit all the footage that night. That takes an astonishing level of mental agility.”   

Still, the jumping from one project to another, the desire to have his imprint on so many facets of the movies he makes, the insatiable need to stay active — it makes you think that Soderbergh has something left to prove.   

“I’m convinced that I can find some kind of language to tell a story in a way that completely alters the audience,” he says. “It’s hard to articulate, but I feel like there’s a grammar that’s so primal that its tractor beam will be undeniable. It will have the power and simplicity of a child’s drawing, but there will be all this experience behind it.”   

I’m not sure I know what Soderbergh is talking about — and truthfully, some of his wonkier digressions are hard to parse — but I suspect he has an idea of how to pull it off.   

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“Sex, Lies, and Videotape,” the story of a yuppie couple whose marriage implodes after a videocamera-wielding college buddy shows up on their doorstep, has been described as semi-autobiographical. That’s true, in a psychological sense, even if the particulars were invented. “Nothing in the movie actually happened, but I was riffing off a relationship that I destroyed through dishonesty and deception,” Soderbergh says. (In the ensuing decades, Soderbergh has married and had kids — a change in lifestyle that has altered his approach to his art. “I’m not one of those people who is staying late at the office because they don’t want to go home,” he says. “I can’t wait to get back there.”)   

The film’s quartet of characters — prudish housewife Ann; her cheating husband, John; her sexually confident sister, Cynthia (who’s sleeping with John); and Graham, a drifter who films confessionals where women reveal their innermost desires — represent different parts of Soderbergh. Graham, an observer who sees the world through a camera lens, has the most obvious connection to the filmmaker, but Soderbergh related to the pure id that John embodies, as well as Cynthia’s impulsiveness and Ann’s bafflement over the amount of real estate sex commands in people’s minds.  

“I cut my personality up into four quarters, which allowed the whole story to come sprinting out in just a few days,” Soderbergh says of the frenetic writing of the film.   

Soderbergh struggled to convince people that he wasn’t making a sex romp when he was casting the movie. He had written Ann with Elizabeth McGovern in mind, but her agent wouldn’t even show her the script because the title suggested it was something sordid. He also auditioned David Duchovny, pre-“X-Files,” but couldn’t envision him in any of the male parts. “Sometimes you see someone you know is about to emerge, but they’re just one degree off for the film you’re making,” Soderbergh says.   

Ultimately, he tapped James Spader, a rising star who had appeared as a preppie jerk in “Pretty in Pink,” to play Graham, giving the production legitimacy. He then enlisted Gallagher, who had recently starred opposite Peter O’Toole in “High Spirits,” for the part of John and took a bet on Laura San Giacomo, an unknown, to play Cynthia. San Giacomo took the job after Soderbergh promised she wouldn’t have to do any nudity.   

But the biggest risk Soderbergh took was casting Andie MacDowell, a model whose film debut, “Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes,” ended disastrously with Glenn Close redubbing MacDowell’s dialogue in post-production. But Soderbergh sensed that MacDowell understood the pain that Ann suppresses.   

“Annie had this idea she needed to be a good girl, and that’s why she had a hard time sexually,” MacDowell says. “I’ve known a lot of people like that from the South who are so afraid of not being seen as good.” She adds, “I’m completely indebted to Steven for my career. I couldn’t get a job back then.”  

“Sex, Lies, and Videotape” may have been Soderbergh’s first narrative feature, but the lack of experience didn’t show. “He was calm beyond his years and technically savvy beyond his years,” says MacDowell.   

The biggest problem that the crew faced was the locals. “We would be shooting a scene in James’ apartment in Baton Rouge, and the guy upstairs would leave his radio blaring or a woman would set up a table outside and run kitchen appliances using an extension cord,” MacDowell remembers. “One guy blew leaves when we were trying to shoot a scene. The whole idea was we’d have to give them money to stop.”

Much of “Sex, Lies, and Videotape” involves people in rooms — kitchens, dens, therapist offices, restaurants — talking about their neuroses. To hold the audience’s interest, Soderbergh kept the camera moving, sliding up to characters at slightly off-center angles, as if to communicate their discomfort. To give the movie a greater dynamism, he also intercut scenes, so Ann reveals her disdain for physical intimacy to her shrink at the same time we see John and Cynthia engaged in vigorous fornicating.   

Soderbergh, who had little formal training, proved adept at working with actors. “He was so good at getting you to make little adjustments,” recalls San Giacomo. “We were doing one scene where I’m working in a bar, and he said, ‘Play with your bracelet while you say that line.’ That one tweak made the difference.”   

Soderbergh can’t believe it took him 30 days to make the movie (“I could do it in 10 today”). He’s also a tough critic of his work. “There are things I did that were not as high level as they should have been and scenes I staged poorly, but they’re masked by great performances. If I went back and tried to fix them, I would end up ruining things that work. Sometimes you have to walk away.”    

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When he accepted the Palme d’Or, becoming the youngest winner ever, Soderbergh said, “It’s all downhill from here.” The statement was prescient, as his career plummeted. Follow-ups like “Kafka” and “King of the Hill” had admirers but failed at the box office. Worse, Soderbergh’s passion for filmmaking started to fade. While shooting “The Underneath,” the 1995 crime drama, he felt “disconnected” and, for the first time, uncomfortable on the set.   

“I asked myself, ‘How can I not love this job?’” Soderbergh remembers. That crisis of confidence ultimately spurred an artistic resurgence. After making some low- to no-budget passion projects like the surrealist comedy “Schizopolis” and the Spalding Gray monologue “Gray’s Anatomy,” Soderbergh began to regain his stride. But it was 1998’s “Out of Sight,” a critically acclaimed crime comedy that crackled with the white-hot pairing of George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez, that demonstrated to Hollywood that he had regained his touch.   

In the coming years, he developed a talent for alternating between lower-budget, more experimental works like “The Limey” and “Bubble” with more commercial fare like the “Ocean’s Eleven” franchise. He remains impressively versatile, moving seamlessly from heist flicks to comedies to historical epics to legal dramas. But these movies share connective tissue with “Sex, Lies, and Videotape.” Like the characters in Soderbergh’s first film, the grifters, salesmen and exotic dancers who populate the rest of his cinematic universe struggle to maintain a facade of success, happiness and dependability.    

“I’m always interested in the degree to which we obfuscate what we mean and who we are,” Soderbergh says. “I’m drawn to this line in ‘The Fallen Idol’ where the young boy in that film asks Ralph Richardson why people lie. And he says, ‘Well, usually it’s because they want something, and they think telling the truth won’t get it for them.’”  

It’s interesting, because the one time that the usually loquacious Soderbergh seems lost for words is after I ask him if he is fundamentally an honest person. After a pregnant silence, he offers up, “Basically I am, but I’m still going to spin some things and add a little brush stroke or two.”  

When Soderbergh calls me back a few days after we meet, he wants to clarify why he took a “Rose Mary Woods-sized pause.” It’s not that he lies frequently. It’s that he sometimes elides uncomfortable truths. If someone asks him to watch a cut of their film, for instance, he’s aware of how unhelpful his unvarnished opinion may be. “I’m not going to give someone a note that’s impossible. If one of the leads is miscast, I’m not going to say that, because are they going to reshoot the whole thing? Or if I really don’t like something, I may say I’m not the target audience, because what do I know? I like what I like.”   

Maybe it’s his attraction to this porous line between honesty and mendacity, but Soderbergh recently revisited the world of “Sex, Lies, and Videotape.” During the COVID lockdown, he wrote a sequel to the movie that focuses on the sisters and finds Cynthia trying to reconnect with her daughter, who is about to get married. He got MacDowell and San Giacomo to agree to be in the movie. However, now Soderbergh, who’s never published any fiction, thinks he will turn it into a novel. “It doesn’t feel as of the moment as it did,” he says.  

There are other characters Soderbergh brought to life on-screen who no longer beckon. Margot Robbie is producing a prequel to “Ocean’s Eleven,” but Soderbergh won’t be involved. Nor will he participate in George Clooney’s planned sequel, which would check in on an older and grayer Danny Ocean.   

“After we made the third movie, I felt like the series was very much concluded for me,” Soderbergh says. “When the studio approached me to see if I’d be involved in continuing the franchise, I told them no, because it just doesn’t feel like a move forward for me. I’m chasing something else.”