Steven Soderbergh quotes:

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.

When a film like Chris Nolan's Memento cannot get picked up, to me independent film is over. It's dead.

There are three major social issues that this country is struggling with: education, poverty, and drugs. Two of them we talk about, and one of them we don't.

The great thing about the business is how Darwinian it is. We have to swim or die - if you are found wanting over a period of time, you've either got to change what you're doing or find something else to do.

Never had a cup of coffee in my life. Dr Pepper is my caffeine delivery system of choice.

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

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.

People like Chris Nolan are shooting isolated sequences in IMAX. Those cameras are the size of a Volkswagen.

When things go right it's hard to figure out why, but when things go wrong it's really easy.

Lying is like alcoholism. You are always recovering.

[I watch] Fincher, Spielberg, Cameron, McTiernan. Just people who are good at staging action. I like to know where I am. I don't like the kind of cutting where you don't know where you are.

I just produced Criminal, this remake of Nine Queens, and one of the things that appealed to me about Nine Queens is that it was a performance piece, and that's the most fun.

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 The film business in general is using a model that is outdated and, worse than that, inefficient.

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.

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.

You're being mean to someone who's helping you. What is that? Everyone knows who the assholes are, and I avoid them.

The brief flashbacks are sun-kissed, summery and optimistic. It's the only place in the movie you will see red, yellow, orange, or any vibrant colors.

The ought to be a worldwide cultural taskforce that just stops you when you have ideas like combining The Red Desert with an armored car heist movie.

In Full Frontal and K Street, I learned to take advantage of the mobility that digital provides.

Well, it's 15 years since Sex, Lies And Videotape, and if you hang around long enough you're having the same arguments with just a new set of people every few years and it gets boring.

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.

A real litmus test for me is how people treat someone who is waiting on them. That's a dealbreaker for me.If I were on the verge of getting into a serious relationship and I saw that person be mean to a waiter... I'm out.

It's a weird thing to say, but it would appear to me axiomatic that if you understood fully what I was doing and appreciated it, you would like it.

I guess I didn't feel confident enough to be searching in a big public way. I was very content at the time to toil in obscurity on things that I thought might point me in certain directions or teach me certain things - not knowing what that would be.

I don't consider myself to be particularly gifted in the way that other filmmakers are gifted.

The best set was probably 'Bloody Sunday.' We had no money for extras and gambled on months of outreach to persuade the people of Derry to turn out and march for us on one single afternoon. And they did. In their tens of thousands. Seeing them march, their patience and their dignity and their commitment, I knew the movie would have a quality of truth.

If you're not flying people around on wires, and you're only allowing them to do things that people can really do, it can't go on for very long, because eventually somebody gets the drop on the other person and then it's over.

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.

I guess why the Ocean's films are hard for me is because on the one hand you have to make sure the performances are there, but on the other hand it's a film that demands, to my mind, a very layered and complex visual scheme. That takes a lot of time to figure out.

I look at other filmmakers and see skills in them that I wish I had but I know that I don't. I feel like I have to work really hard to keep myself afloat, doing what I do. But I find it pleasurable.

I had more fun making Traffic than either of the Ocean's films.

A movie that costs only $1.6 million doesn't have to be a cultural event to turn a profit.

"A meteor hits planet Earth" - that's a story idea but that doesn't give me any indication of what the character is.

A big part of making an album is that you want to have enough material - you want to have enough stuff for people to hear and know that it represents you. So it does sometimes turn into a situation where you're saying to the person you're working with, "Well, what do you want?" But then there are other times when I work with people and they'll turn to me and say, "How do you want to do this?" And that's actually when I work best.

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.

A movie is something you see, cinema is something that's made.

A real explosion is not only much more fun to shoot, it also helps the actors and creates an energy on set and ultimately in the scene.

All human interaction, you can break it down to incentives. All relationships, at some level, are transactional. They're fascinated with incentives.

Another thing that really excites me: I'd like to do multiple versions of the same film.

Any time I think out loud, 'I can't believe this is my job,' and remember I am a very lucky duck. Whether marshalling hundreds of zombies, doing crazy stunts or shooting big music numbers, I just feel fortunate to have made my passion my vocation.

Anytime you've got something that can take you into the political realm then you've opened up the conversation a lot.

Castro, without question, is one of the smartest politicians that's ever walked.

Ego is something that everybody, creative especially, has to grapple with. You need enough ego to keep going but not so much ego that you're deaf or blind, that you're making a mistake and can't fix the course.

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.

Everything had been done long before I started making movies. I mean, there's nothing that Godard hasn't already done. You can't do a single thing that Godard hasn't already thought of. And so you struggle to do something that is not predictable.

Everything is the director's fault - you can quote me on that. There are no excuses.

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.

I always have a plan, but then I'm always ready to throw the plan out, and everyone's ready to make a radical left turn if necessary.

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.

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.

I don't have any kind of ideology that precludes me from moving in one direction or another. I just want creative autonomy and I want at least an opportunity that it's going to be seen.

I feel I need to really think about whether there's a way to use what skill I have to address things that outrage me, like the 13 year old girl getting stoned to death. Because I don't think making a movie is going to help that, or change that.

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.

I grew up mostly in the South, and there's definitely something about the South that's different from the North. When people ask me where I'm from, I say Louisiana. I spent more years there than anywhere else.

I guess I just look at talent as a very subjective thing. I mean, if you never tried playing an oboe, how do you know you're not the most talented oboe player ever? The point is that if you don't love it, then it doesn't matter.

I have a friend whose theory is that you're from wherever you went to high school. I think that's mostly true.

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.

I just find it annoying that in these sequences [ of the fight scenes], traditionally, there's music trying to pump you up. I don't like that, personally, as an audience member. This just reflects my taste.

I like a lot of different kinds of movies, I like a lot of different kinds of paintings.

I like to make all kinds of movies. I'd do 'Ocean's Thirteen' with the right script.

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.

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.

I recently decided that I'm not an originator. I'm a synthesist.

I stopped reading reviews about my own movies. I read stuff about other people's movies.

I suppose I could try to be some avant-garde artist if I wanted to, but that doesn't interest me as much.

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

I think about art a lot only in two contexts. One is narrative.The other thing that I'm interested in, which is tangential, but not unrelated... All art to me is about problem solving.

I think that it's fear. The musicians themselves don't seem to know enough about why they're in the positions they're in, so they're afraid to lose those positions. If you're 22 years old and you can't believe you're even in the position to have a career making music, the first thing you're going to think is: Maintain. Don't lose it. And that's precisely what causes you to lose everything.

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.

I think the feeling that we're going to work together again usually starts to come up before the first project's even done. The Black Keys and I have already talked about starting on something new.

I think there are only two times that I've ever ended up paying somebody their quote. Like what they actually were worth in the marketplace.

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.

I want to form a political party that's based entirely on what music people listen to. To me, it's a much better barometer of what they think and feel than their political stance.

I want to thank anyone who spends part of their day creating...anybody who spends part of their day sharing their experience with us-I think this world would be unlivable without art and I thank you.

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.

I was thinking that people have to believe you're crazy in order to take you seriously as an artist. If you're wandering the streets, talking in gibberish, nobody ever asks you to change anything about your art because there's no context for people to look at what you do.

If I'm a director and I read a script and I say yeah I really want to do this, I would never walk away because the deal wasn't very good - that I wasn't getting paid very much or that the chances that I would see anything on the back end were remote because of the financial waterfall and the way it's structured. I would never use that as a reason not to do something.

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.

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.

If you're going to make a movie for ten thousand you can talk everybody into doing it for free. You could make a really good-looking movie right for ten grand, if you have an idea.

If you're not smart enough to know what Fidel meant during the Cuban revolution, that - when they were on the Granma - Fidel was already a rock star in Cuba, and how important that was to the indigenous population, then you're not paying attention.

If you're sitting around thinking what other people think about your work, you'll just become paralysed.

I'm a big believer that if there's something you really want to do, don't walk away because of the deal.

I'm a grinder. I'll beat you because I will not sleep.

I'm always a little unnerved when I see a show that's set in the past that implies in any way that things were nicer then.

I'm not a snob. If I feel like there's a star that's the best person for that role, then that's who I get.

I'm not going to spend two years of my life on something that I'm not excited about.

I'm not precious about anything. The effort it took to get something means nothing to me in post. It means nothing to the audience. I'll chop limbs off. I'll put an arm where a leg should be. I'll do anything.

I'm obviously really opinionated, but as a producer, you don't necessarily want the person you're working with to try to impress you - you want them to just be themselves.

I'm probably more character-driven than plot-driven. It's rare for me to attach myself to an idea for a story.

I'm still very affected and moved by their music - maybe in a way that's different from someone who grew up around it.

In nature, if a cell gets too big, it divides. You can't come up with a set of rules that's going to work for 350 million people. You're just not.

In the land of ideas, you are always renting.

It takes one asshole to ruin the whole thing. That's it. One. The problem with the world is one asshole comes up with a really bad idea and now we're all taking our shoes off at the airport.

It's become absolutely horrible the way the people with the money decide they can fart in the kitchen.

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.

I've begun to believe more and more that movies are all about transitions, that the key to making good movies is to pay attention to the transition between scenes. And not just how you get from one scene to the next, but where you leave a scene and where you come into a new scene. Those are some of the most important decisions that you make. It can be the difference between a movie that works and a movie that doesn't.

I've never been a snob. It [movie] is just about stories. And I've never felt just because it's a big screen and you plop down your eight bucks that gives it a special meaning. It's just "Are you good at telling a story?"

I've tried to get better about weighing what I think the accessibility of an idea is against the cost of executing it. I've tried to be smarter about that, because if you're not smart about that, you're going to be unemployed. But I'm still mystified about what works for people. And I'm not talking about my movies, I'm talking in general. I'm mystified by the stuff that doesn't work. I'm mystified by what's going on in the critical side, too.

Jude [Law] is really good at playing an obsessive. He has a very watchable quality when he's on a quest for something.

Making a film that's supposed to be fun to watch is really hard - that's the weird irony of it.

Maybe I'll paint, do photography, just something else. I can see that.

Men tend to define themselves by what they do, and so if you're dealing with a character who's trying to figure that out, or multiple characters, then there's something there for guys, too.

My experience over the years with working with people who are not actors or not trained actors is that you have to get to know them well enough to see what they have that's translatable onto the screen. So you're constantly calibrating to play to their strengths. And the key is to never ask them to do things that are beyond their abilities or are really far away from who they are at their core.

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.

My first three movies, I didn't start editing until we were finished shooting. That's unthinkable to me now.

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.

Never done an explosion, but I have had explosive diarrhea, and that was very, very real. Good thing I have my trailer.

Nobody's talking about movies the way they're talking about their favorite TV shows.

People are sort of numb to watching violence, but sexual activity is still as strong as it ever was in terms of generating response.

Reality shows are all the rage on TV at the moment, but thats not reality, its just another aesthetic form of fiction.

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.

Sometimes I might feel like [a movie] is kind of a weird idea and if I'm going to get enough money to execute it properly I've got to get somebody in it that is going to justify the expense.

Stuff I like is getting trashed and stuff that is being praised I think is terrible. I don't really feel in sync with what's happening, but at the same time, what I think keeps me afloat is that I try not to be, and don't want to be, very indulgent. I try to make the films as lean as possible, and to not spend a lot of time crawling up my own ass creatively.

Surprisingly, I don't throw away that much. I don't move forward with a lot of things unless they're going somewhere. You also have to remember that when you're working with other artists, you have to be really careful about how you deal with that stuff.

That's why my attitude, even on my larger-scale movies, is to make them cheap. The less these things cost, the better for everybody.

The art model of problem solving is incredibly efficient because ideology has no place there.There's only the thing and what the thing needs to be.

The key is, how do you feel with the one asshole? They cannot be talked to. That's why they are assholes.

The key is, if youre not monkeying around with the script, then everything usually goes pretty well.