Art, Lies, and Handheld Cameras: Steven Soderbergh on The Christophers

There’s something distinctive about a Manhattan hotel room. The fire door tight up against the bed. The mirrors on the closet to give the impression of space. So much for Hollywood glamour as Steven Soderbergh enters a second day of press interviews for his new film, The Christophers. “Yesterday I got to be in rooms with people,” he sighed. “Today it’s virtual.”

However, the location brings a certain circularity to the history of the film. The hotel is in Chinatown, not far from where he and scriptwriter Ed Solomon first discussed the idea for his latest film, The Christophers. “I pitched Ed a one-sentence idea, a setup,” said Soderbergh. “Older artist, used to be big, not anymore, near the end of his career and time on this planet. Assistant shows up and is not on the level. There’s some subterfuge going on – and that’s all I had.”

Soderbergh said that his original conception was “for more of a Tom Ripley, Patricia Highsmith-type story.” Yet as the son of a painter, abstract artist Maxine Solomon, it was the art scene elements that resonated with the writer. Through conversations, Soderbergh said, that brief outline became “something a little deeper … a much more philosophical movie about some larger issues that I wasn’t thinking about when I pitched him this one-line idea.”

When art restorer Lori Butler (Michaela Coel) is hired to be the assistant to former enfant terrible Julian Sklar (Ian McKellen), what he doesn’t know is that she has also been hired by his children to complete a series of abandoned canvases that have sat in his attic for decades. If she does, is it fraud? Would they be fakes? Or would she just be doing what apprentices have been accepted as doing for centuries? And if Sklar suddenly decided to finish them himself, would they even really be the same piece of art, since he’s no longer the same artist? “The question of authorship is fun to consider,” said Soderbergh, “especially when you’re dealing with a piece of work that’s potentially provocative or controversial or incendiary.”

Questions of authorship, and of artistic responsibility to the work and the audience, envelop The Christophers, and for Soderbergh they’re essential because they color how people regard art in any medium. He pitched a thought experiment for cinema: “Let’s say you have a film that makes claims of being an unprecedentedly raw and brutal excavation of the misogyny and the male tendency for destruction. It’s supposed to be a real, unvarnished take on what’s wrong with men, and you show one version where it says I directed it, and you show another version and it says Amy Seimetz directed it. You get very different responses from people, and that’s interesting to me, because it says the source matters.”

The Christophers probes issues like that within the specifics of the art world. The difference in medium as subject pervades the film, down to the options for location. Art-centric cities like New York, Paris, even Austin, where Soderbergh spent part of his childhood and then returned to for the filming of The Underneath, could all have been viable options. But there was something about London that spoke to the story and Julian as a figure in the art world (plus, Soderbergh noted, Solomon was just relocating there, and it’s one of his own favorite cinematic cities). “London felt like the most likely place for these two characters to be, and the vision that Ed and I both shared of Julian immediately led us to a very specific, British form of hyper-articulation.”

Ian McKellen in The Christophers Credit: Claudette Barius | NEON

Filming in Solomon’s new hometown wasn’t the only great opportunity that The Christophers presented. It also meant creating that rarest of roles: a lead part for Ian McKellen. Even though he is one of the most respected and popular actors of the last half century, McKellen’s film career has mostly been in supporting roles; his last lead role was in 2023’s little-seen The Critic. Soderbergh said, “There’s not a lot of writers sitting around going, ‘I’m going to write this lead for an 86-year-old man.”

And this wasn’t just about having a part for which McKellen was a good fit. Soderbergh and Solomon created Lori and Julian specifically for Coel and McKellen without any clue if either would be interested, “which is not traditionally encouraged,” Soderbergh smiled. “I didn’t know either of these people personally, but I told [Solomon], ‘Write it with them in mind,’ and we sent it to them and they said yes, and the first company we sent it to for financing, Department M, said yes. When things happen that quickly, it’s a good sign, and it just felt kind of charmed.”

Moreover, Coel and McKellen both became eager collaborators, sharpening the script and the characters with Solomon. Soderbergh said, “[They] spent over a week doing what we call a page turn and just going through line-by-line, speaking the subtext, analyzing the text, so that when we showed up on set we were ready to shoot and we weren’t figuring it out with the clock running.”

Artists are often described as going through periods: Indeed, underlying The Christophers is the idea that Sklar had three distinct periods of the Christophers. That’s the polar opposite of Soderbergh’s career, which has been marked by a deliberate eclecticism. In the last three years alone, he’s directed stripper sequel Magic Mike’s Last Dance, POV ghost story Presence, spy drama Black Bag, and now his intimate art drama. From early in his career, Soderbergh said, “I wanted to plant an idea in people’s minds that you don’t know what you’re going to get when you roll up to a film that I made.” It took a while to get to that position, and he noted that the five films after sex, lies, and videotape “all had varying degrees of non-success, but they were very crucial in my development, so that when Out of Sight came along I felt a sense of, ‘OK, this is what I’m built to do.’”

Steven Soderbergh Credit: NEON

“What I wanted was Howard Hawks’ career,” he added. “When Howard Hawks was in the studio system, people would offer him all kinds of movies. I wanted to be in that situation.”

A coincidence: I mentioned that I’d recently been talking with the equally unpredictable Ben Wheatley about his new film, Normal, and he’d mentioned something very similar, about wanting that kind of classic studio career when a director would go from a gangster flick to a musical to a Western. That last one, however, is where Soderbergh draws the line. “I’m terrified of horses.”

While he’s avoided being pigeonholed by genre, there is a perception that there are two sides to Soderbergh as a filmmaker. There’s the immaculate formalist of Out of Sight and Ocean’s Eleven, and then there’s the run-and-gun handheld maverick of The Girlfriend Experience and Unsane. “I describe it as objective and subjective directing,” Soderbergh said. “In objective directing, the camera knows ahead of time where everyone is going to. In subjective directing, the conceit is that it doesn’t, and it’s chasing what’s happening.”

As for which viewpoint to take, he said, “Those choices are driven by whatever the thing wants and this film wanted a bit of both.”

The two Soderberghs often co-exist within the same film, and that Russian nesting doll approach actually goes back to his very first feature, 1989’s sex, lies, and videotape. The indie masterpiece is shot in that objective fashion, except for one 90-second sequence in which John (Peter Gallagher) beats up Graham (James Spader) in a fit of raw cuckolded fury. “In that brief 90 seconds of sex, lies, the camera is suddenly off the shoulder because I thought it needed to be. You needed to be jolted by a new aesthetic for a moment.”

What’s important for him is that the audience feels a specificity, a logic and reason for any such choice. In The Christophers, he explained, “inside Julian’s house, we’re handheld. When we’re outside of Julian’s house, we’re in studio mode. That was a simple way to create the sense of destabilization Lori feels as soon as she steps into Julian’s house.”

The Christophers opens in Austin April 17. See review and showtimes.

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