Steven Soderbergh: Directing TRAFFIC

Director Steven Soderbergh has A-list stars queuing to work with him. And he reckons he knows how to run rings around the studios, writes NICK BRADSHAW.

An interloper is at large in cinema's corridors of power. Hollywood beware! The 38-year-old Steven Soderbergh might not yet rank alongside the masters of American film's glory years, but in the quagmire of complacency and cowardice of contemporary Hollywood, a talent like his comes to look this most radical threat: an agitator for quality.

He thinks, he knows how to make films, and best of all, he keeps you guessing. Through the swings of his 12-year career, his roaming intelligence and inquisitive skill have come to bear on diverse forms of film-making.

A poster boy for the burgeoning independent scene when his 1989 debut sex, lies and videotape stormed Sundance and Cannes, he took the ensuing opportunities and ran almost into a brick wall, with unsung experiments like Kafka, King of the Hill and The Underneath.

The no-budget (and almost no-release) Schizopolis, with its comically frenzied deconstruction of film and other languages, looked a wilful culmination of this journey to the margins.

Then came Out of Sight and The Limey and along with them came stars and audiences and kudos again, as well as proof that Soderbergh could be consistently stylish, adventurous and pop.

But this last year has been his most triumphant: first, Erin Brockovich demonstrated how a Julia Roberts vehicle might yet be bold and true, revealing hidden depths in both the star and class-riven US society; and now Traffic, in subject and scope his most audacious film yet. He has been nominated for best director Oscars for both movies and both films figure in the best picture category.

Soderbergh's double-directing nomination is the first since 1938, when Michael Curtiz was nominated for Angels With Dirty Faces and Four Daughters.

An American (and highly cinematic) translation of the late 80s Channel 4 series Traffik, which surveyed the narcotics trade through a multitude of points of vantage and involvement, Traffic offers an awesome sweep and an intimate inquiry into America's putative war on drugs, spanning couriers, dealers, cops, judges, and end users.

It hops between three colour-coded, interlocking narratives: in a lustrously sepia-toned Tijuana, Benicio Del Toro's undercover cop struggles to stay upright on his country's slippery policing strategy; in a gleaming San Jose, Don Cheadle and Luis Guzman ensnare Steven Bauer's big-shot dealer, leaving his society wife, Catherine Zeta Jones, to pick up the pieces; and, in the cobalt-filtered chambers of Washington and home in Ohio, drugs tsar appointee Michael Douglas peers into the vortex of national drugs policy while his family is falling apart.

It's appropriately mobile cinema (the film elucidates how free-trade arrangements have crucially changed the field of play). It's also far more muscular, socially committed and less formally tricksy than his previous films; what with this and the corporate-muck-revealing Erin Brockovich, it's as if Soderbergh had suddenly decided to make like Michael Mann (The Insider).

"Yeah, but that'll stop," he shoots back. "And yes, I take it as a compliment. I thought The Insider was terrific but the next one'll be different. No, it just happened by accident that I had two sort of socially conscious movies in a row, Traffic being the one that I felt, if we don't make this movie right now, this year, then we're missing an opportunity.

"I just get the sense that people want to talk about this because everybody knows somebody that's been through something like this, whether it's drugs, alcohol, or any prescription drug. And yet nobody's asking them what they think. Politicians aren't."

In one scene in Traffic, Erika Christensen's heroin-addicted teenager tells a Narcotics Anonymous meeting that, for someone her age, it's easier to get hold of drugs than alcohol.

Up in the clouds in his government jet, Michael Douglas holds an impromptu brain-storming policy session with his advisers. For a minute, he says, "Let's think outside the box; I want to hear some radical suggestions." Absolute silence descends.

"Everyone agrees what we're doing now doesn't work," Soderbergh continues. "There's no politician in the US who will go on television and say the drug war's working - you'd be laughed out of town.

"What they won't go public and say is why it's not working and what they think ought to be done to change it.

"If you go out and suggest anything progressive, you're attacked for being soft on crime. And the whole point is that we need to stop looking at this as a criminal issue, we need to look at it as a healthcare issue. You know - can we get people to consider the fact that we do not throw alcoholics in jail as a good thing, and that perhaps that idea should extend to other forms of addiction?"

We've come to a pretty pass when it's left to art and entertainment to talk about issues politicians fear to raise. The reasons, as he agrees, have much to do with the corporatisation of the media, the downward pressure on standards and resulting clamour and sensation; but then, these are precisely the conditions afflicting Hollywood that he is busy demonstrating can be circumvented.

"The good news is that they're big and slow and stupid in a way, so if you're nimble you can get in and out without them knowing you were there, which is what I've been able to do lately.

"It's really like the Jedi mind trick; you have to get them to repeat, like a mantra: 'This'll be a good movie for the studio to make ... This'll be a good movie for the studio to make ... ' But thankfully I'm very responsible. So when I come in under budget and under schedule, it's hard for them to say 'Gee, this movie's a little odder than we thought ... ' I mean, this last one was $US4 million under budget, and that's what they care about."

And what of the stars - George Clooney, Douglas, Roberts, Brad Pitt - now queuing to work with him? Do they make a difference or force any compromise?

"Only in terms of their strengths," he considers. "It seems to me audiences will go so far off the down-the-middle version of what they like seeing the star do, and then no further; so I try to find where that line is, and take them up to the edge of it.

"The key is to get people to accept an aesthetic or a couple of ideas they might not normally accept, but if you're not using at least part of what makes them a movie star, I think you're stupid.

"I'm so glad I got Michael Douglas, because he's so great at playing the guy who thinks he's on top of it but isn't. It's such a human-scale performance, it's pitched at the same level as everyone else. But the next film's going to be so different. It's a big heist movie [a remake of the Ratpack caper Ocean's 11], with lots of curves and twists. It's a movie of absolutely no importance whatsoever.

"And afterwards," he says, "I'm going do another off-the-radar movie. I'll need the antidote. It's so physically big, it's scary, and I know coming out of it I'm going to want to run off ... "'

Screaming?

"Yeah, with just a T-shirt on ... "

- INDEPENDENT