Critics 'don't get' Full Frontal
2002-09-02 09:21
Venice - Last year Steven Soderbergh was making Oscar history and was the toast of Hollywood but now he's fighting disparaging critics who "don't get" his new film.
Full Frontal, a star-laden film shot on a shoestring budget, has been panned by many of the critics who cheered him to a historic double nomination for the 2001 best director Oscar, which he won for Traffic.
"The critics have taken Full Frontal seriously whereas in fact it is a satire," Soderbergh told reporters at the Venice Film Festival, where the movie is one of 18 showing in the "Upstream" or experimental, competition.
"Films come in two categories - those which tell and those which show. Critics only want the first sort because stories fit into their scheme of things. If things don't fit their scheme, they get mad," said the director whose 1989 debut film Sex, Lies and Videotape earned him a Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.
Full Frontal boasts a cast that would usually cost millions, including X-Files star David Duchovny and Julia Roberts, who won the 2001 Golden Globe and Oscar for her leading role in Soderbergh's Erin Brockovich.
The script that hit the actors' doormat was prefaced with several rules - including a demand to shoot on location with hand-held cameras.
The method keeps down costs but more importantly builds up the reality of the film - in the case of Full Frontal, the tale of quirky and dysfunctional relationships between lonely Los Angelinos.
Actors were told to drive themselves to the set, forego plush trailers to hang out in between takes and take care of their own wardrobe.
Roberts was reportedly paid $3 000 for a film that cost about $2 million to make. Not only that, she also had to provide her own make-up, costumes and hair-styling.
The hand-held camera shots give a sense of peering into the characters' lives like a voyeur rather than being presented with a canned image.
"Reality shows are all the rage on TV at the moment ... but that's not reality, it's just another aesthetic form of fiction," said Soderbergh, predicting that one of the film's legacies would be a valuable snapshot of the "real" Los Angeles.
The return to bare essentials is part of the artistic balancing act for the director of last year's big-budget Hollywood hit Ocean's Eleven.
"Ocean's Eleven and Full Frontal are the exact opposite of each other but I couldn't have done one without doing the other," he said. "You need to recharge your batteries."