Q: Let’s start with explaining what a “girlfriend experience” is.
Steven Soderbergh: GFE is an acronym that describes a kind of escort that re-creates or duplicates the exact emotional and physical environment that you would have from having an actual girlfriend…meaning they know all about you, they’ve read everything you’ve read, they’ve seen the movies you’ve seen, they know what’s going on in your life, what’s going on with your family. You can make out with them. It’s literally renting a relationship by the hour, and in that world there is a surcharge for that kind of intimacy. And that’s what was so interesting to me, that’s the most expensive time there is. And you weren’t paying someone extra for something sexually that you couldn’t get anyone else to do, you were paying them this surcharge so they will convince you that you’re involved with them. That’s the fantasy…what would it be like to be her boyfriend.
Q: Using real people on camera goes back to “Sex, Lies and Videotape”. Is this something you were always interested in? I’m curious how this all developed? And were there any watershed moments, or was it organic?
Soderbergh: No. I saw “Sex Lies” at Sundance, I didn’t sit through it…I came in during the last ten minutes, and it was kind of hilarious to see. To think that 20 years ago what James Spader was doing could be outré and kind of scandalous, when the shit you can see now in a double click will like sear your brain, but I’ve seen stuff on the internet that I can’t un-see. It’s unimaginable, It was kind of quaint. It was like watching a movie that took place in the era of gas lamps. I was like “Wow, this was so innocent.” And then there was the hair. The 80’s hair.
I mean, I think I started to be interested in this idea probably around the time of “Skizopolis” actually because I was coming off the “Underneath,” which was a watershed movie in the sense that I really thought about quitting. I’d drifted so far off in a direction that I didn’t feel connected to, I thought how did this happen? But anyway, it was…it ended up being for me…I guess a piece that was entirely about artifice and form. There was something so extremely formal about it, I thought I gotta break myself of this. It ‘s not good for me So “Skizopolis” is sort of an overreaction, but it was the beginning of…I cast my ex-wife as my wife and that sort of started this idea of integrating real people into situations that they’d either experienced or had some real knowledge of. And seeing where that would go. I remember in “Erin (Brockovich)” we had a judge play himself. And that was played by the judge who really handed down that ruling and I remember thinking, “Wow he’s good!” He has a quality that’s really interesting. In “Traffic”, there are a lot of people playing themselves at the Mexican border, so I was really intrigued by this…I liked the energy they had. And then, when I did the deal to make the films for 2929, and obviously ‘K Street,” which was an even more complex attempt to fuse more real people and real situations, what I drew from that was you can still feel the dividing line between people who are actors and people who are not actors. But I still felt that there were two sort of universes colliding so I resolved that when we got the 2929 deal, to just move everything into this universe where they were all non actors and we’re working with a detailed sort of outline and scene breakdown, and bullet points about what the scene is about, but I’m going to hire real people and turn them loose.
Q: How long was the shoot?
Soderbergh: Sixteen days.
Q: For this film the locations play an important role…
Soderbergh: It s funny you should mention that, because with the locations it was hard, and they were really important. Because if you’re making a movie and it’s about transactions, money, and commerce, then you have to explore the fetishization of the environment and explore the space where people want to transact. So it was important for me to find places and shoot the exteriors of them and make you feel like, “that‘s where people go…that’s part of the fabric of this very specific slice of this city.” You know, by design this is a very myopic view of a very small cross-section of people who are doing a certain thing in October of 2008. I also I like that in a movie, when you can see that specificity and you can say “I’ve walked right by that place. I know that place.” or “I’ve eaten at Kraft, I think I sent something back.”
Q: Why did you cast Sasha for this?
Soderbergh: I found out about her because I read this article in Los Angeles magazine by accident. I was on a dubbing stage in Los Angeles and I just picked the magazine up and was leafing through it and I saw this article about her, and I started reading it and I never really heard anybody in the porn industry talk this way about the industry, about themselves. She didn’t seem to hit the markers that people in that industry hit and I was surprised by that, and intrigued. She has a stable family, no history of abuse, no drugs, no alcohol and I just sort of filed that away. And then in the spring of ‘06 is when we wrote the outline for this, it had been sitting in the drawer for awhile and as it got to the point of actually slotting it in and actually scheduling it, I contacted her representatives and said I want to sit down and talk with her about being in this movie. I knew even if it wasn’t going to be explicit really, I wanted somebody who in sexualized situations feels totally in command, and powerful, and I feel like that‘s a tricky thing to fake. And one of my favorite things she did, is the last scene in the movie with the jeweler. He’s getting undressed, she’s already undressed, and the way she looks relaxed and completely in-control. When I watched it I thought, “I don’t know how you fake that.” I don’t know how to describe it, just totally Zen. Not in a hurry…that’s what I was looking for. Someone completely in control, because that’s what the movie is about,…control. The fact that her…what a lot of people might see as a problem…her affect, I felt was crucial to the core of the movie. That disconnected quality, that people might say, “She seems really kind of flat,” I was like “Yup, exactly.” She gets punctured by Glen Kenny, and in that moment of vulnerability she meets this other guy who seems to be different in feeling from her boyfriend, and she leaps into something she would never do. And so in point-of-fact who Sasha is was absolutely central to this. Imagine somebody else who is a more traditionally open and emotional normal person in that role…it doesn’t work the same way. There’s no break point. It was important that you feel that she’s sort of closed.
Q: Did you watch her films to research her?
Soderbergh: There’s two sort of things that Sasha does. There’s the traditional porn and then there’s the gonzo stuff she does, very extreme stuff. And what I noticed about the extreme stuff was her awareness of the camera. The camera is like a character in the scene, it’s a threesome. Sometimes a ten-some, but she’s always aware of the lens.
Q: Did you talk to Sasha about where she’s going in her career? Did she quiz you a lot about movies?
Soderbergh: She’s seen a lot of movies. She’s very close now to making her own films and I‘m really curious to see what’s going to come of that, because she’s in a world in which most of the people who make those films don’t have the kind of aspirations she has for herself. So, I’m really curious to see what she comes up with. She’s got this sort of magpie eclecticism, and I ‘m really curious to see what influences she pulls from.
“The Girlfriend Experience” opens today.
