From Indendent Film and Video Monthly, April 1997. Reprinted by permission.
Schizopolis opens with a long shot of a manic crazy-man clad only in a tee-shirt fleeing across a green lawn with two men in white in hot pursuit. It’s a situation the film’s director, Steven Soderbergh, likens to being an independent filmmaker: “You want to be free, but everyone’s trying to tackle you and bring you down.”
With Schizopolis, Soderbergh refused to be wrestled into conformity. His fifth feature is an idiosyncratic, energetic, and blissfully uncommercial comedy that represents a complete departure from the director’s expected career track—a screeching U-turn, in fact, that takes him back to the world of no-budget filmmaking. Shot over a ten-month period in Soderbergh’s hometown of Baton Rouge, Schizopolis came together with the help of friends who took deferred salaries and sometimes doubled as crew and cast. For his part, Soderbergh not only wrote and directed the film, but also served as cinematographer and played two of the leads.
For indie directors who envy the kind of studio deals and comfortable budgets Soderbergh had previously managed to land, Schizopolis is a surprising career twist. But it’s no fluke; the writer/director is already at work on a sequel.
As the whole world knows, Soderbergh made his remarkable debut in 1989 with sex, lies, and videotape, which cost $1.2 million and grossed almost $25 million domestically after winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes and making it into multiplexes everywhere. Its critical and financial success marks a milestone in independent film history, launching the current chapter in which indie film is taken seriously by industry, audiences, and college career counselors. From there Soderbergh went on to direct Kafka (1991), produced by Barry Levinson and backed by French financiers to the tune of $11 million; Universal’s King of the Hill (1993), made for $8 million; and the $6.5 million The Underneath (1995), also made with Universal. Schizopolis, in contrast, cost a mere $250,000—about one-fourth the budget of sex, lies and videotape.
Filmgoers who have caught Schizopolis on the festival circuit have called it everything from “brilliant” to “the worst movie ever made.” Filmmakers tend to love it, especially its freewheeling energy and wacky, witty film jokes that recall the cinematic shenanigans of Richard Lester (the subject of a book Soderbergh is writing), Monty Python, and the French New Wave. But critics thus far have tended to hold their heads and groan.
Schizopolis is a wild ride, to say the least, and it’s giddy fun for those willing to lay back and let it happen. Bursting with an exuberant sense of experimentation, Schizopolis is loaded with verbal and visual jokes, bizarre non sequiturs, and goofy slapstick. While it sticks to a three-act structure (watch for the numbers), the plot careens like a drunken sailor between its story of double doppelgangers, involving a corporate-drone speechwriter for a New Age guru and a randy dentist (both played by Soderbergh), and their love interests (played by the director’s ex-wife, Betsy Brantley). But beneath its jokey surface lie some more serious concerns: anxiety in the workplace, the loss of meaningful communication at home, and the vaporous content of New Age gurus who pretend to offer solutions to a society that’s adrift and alienated.
Schizopolis was a tough sell to distributors, most of whom were stumped by the question of how to market such a feature. Northern Arts, a small but growing distributor based in Massachusetts, took up the challenge, picking up domestic theatrical rights. (Previous releases include Drunks, Tokyo Decadence, I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times, Wallace & Gromit: A Close Shave and The Best of Aardman, and Chameleon Street.) Fox Lorber has domestic video rights and will handle world sales. Schizopolis opens in theaters this month.
The Independent caught up with Soderbergh at the Toronto and Hamptons film festivals, where he was presenting both his film of a Spalding Gray monologue, Gray’s Anatomy (an Independent Film Channel commission), and the surreal, irrepressible Schizopolis.
Patricia Thompson: Let’s begin with the genesis of Schizopolis. How long were the ideas for the various strands floating around—the doppelganger theme, the New Age religion, your play on the language of cinema—and when did they coalesce? Or did the idea for the film come as a piece?
Steven Soderbergh: It was a little bit of everything. Some of the ideas I’d been carrying around for a long time. Some were discovered when I began to write the screenplay. Others happened while we were shooting.
PT: How did the pseudo-Scientology theme, here called “Eventualism,” develop?
SS: It grew out of my interest in gurus and people’s desire to find a way to order their lives in a world they’re finding increasingly hostile and complicated. I’m always fascinated when people relinquish control of their lives to someone else, especially a stranger. That’s always struck me as odd. I didn’t really have Scientology in mind specifically. I don’t find Scientology stranger than any religion. Personally, I find them all weird. But Scientology is one of the few religions that advertises on television and has images that are instantly recognizable that I could appropriate—the volcano, the book. You see that image and it conjures up something.
PT: And it’s not the Methodist Church.
SS: Right. So there was that and also it played into the idea of paranoia and in-fighting within a company. That sort of thing tends to be more pronounced in an organization that is run by one very mercurial personality.
PT: Have you ever worked at a place like that?
SS: Sure. When I was doing odd jobs, I worked for companies that were basically run by autocrats and they were very unpredictable. Your life hung in the balance seemingly every half-hour.
PT: You play the two main characters: Fletcher Munson, the speech-writer for the New Age guru, and a dentist who has an affair with Munson’s wife. I saw these characters as two different people. But when the dentist says, “I’m having an affair with my own wife,” that throws that interpretation into a tailspin. What’s that line about?
SS: Well, basically what’s happened is he’s jumped rails onto somebody else’s life, but is aware of that. So when he realizes “I’ve jumped into somebody’s else’s life” and it turns out that somebody was having an affair with his wife, he’s a little freaked out by that, as anybody would be.
So in the part of the film with Fletcher Munson, which takes place over the course of two or three days, when he jumps ship to this other life, he has been reliving those two or three days as the dentist—sort of skipping backwards. Then in the third act we see those days from [the wife’s] perspective. That grew out of my interest in parallel time structures.
PT: Where did the two main characters come from? They’re off the beaten track, and I doubt they came from your immediate sphere. . . .
SS: Oh, sure, why wouldn’t they be? I’ve seen a lot of dentists.
PT: Reaching that age where your fillings fall out?
SS: No, I’ve just had a long history of correction and bullshit. I actually have come into contact with a lot of dentists. So I picked a profession and a type I thought I knew well.
But the idea of doppelgangers, parallel universes, and parallel time frames is something that’s always interested me. I had an idea to do something about that for several years. But it wasn’t until I was making The Underneath that I decided it was time to change what I was doing and how I was doing it. Sort of start over again.
PT: In terms of what? The scale of production? Narrative structure?
SS: Everything. Just start over again. Rediscover the joy of filmmaking, which I’d slowly begun to lose over the course of the four films I directed.
PT: Why was that?
SS: I don’t know. I was just drifting off course. I’m sure there are tons of reasons, some personal and some professional. The bottom line was I sort of woke up in the middle of The Underneath and felt I was making a movie I wasn’t interested in. When I began to question whether or not I wanted to make movies anymore, I realized that what I needed to do was change what I was doing. So it’s a progression, in a weird sort of way. Even though The Underneath is my least favorite, in retrospect it may have been my most important film, because the dissatisfaction drove me into a new area.
PT: Is this direction related to your earlier shorts?
SS: The shorts I made were very similar.
PT: In what respect?
SS: Energy, comic stance.
PT: When watching Schizopolis, if you’re into the humor—and some people weren’t . . .
SS: How could you not be?
PT: Well, some people really weren’t—the overall feeling is that you’re simply having a lark, that you yourself weren’t taking the film too seriously.
SS: I needed a lark. Schizopolis is extreme in one way, and I think what will happen is I’ll end up applying a lot of the things that I got out of Schizopolis to something a little less schizophrenic in terms of its story. The follow-up to Schizopolis that I’m getting ready to write is going to have the same energy, be made in the same way, and have the same m.o., but be a bit of a more linear story and not quite so complicated. This thing, I just had to get a lot of it out of my system. Now I think I can see a balance between Schizopolis and a “normal” movie, whatever that is. I’m hoping I can apply some of what I’ve learned making Schizopolis to that film—just a way of working that is interesting and allows me more freedom.
PT: Freedom in terms of what specifically?
SS: Stripping the crew down, getting rid of things that have been getting in the way, both from a technical standpoint and a practical crew standpoint. Things like video assist. You know, we made Gray’s Anatomy with a crew of about a dozen, when it came right down to it. Meet the Parents [Soderbergh’s remake of a low-budget first feature by Chicagoan Greg Gliana, which is now in development] could easily be made with a crew that size. A lot of things like that—operating the camera myself, trying to strip it down. I’ve decided that anybody who’s not actively involved in what’s going on in front of the camera needs to be eliminated, that somebody who’s just standing there is an energy vacuum.
PT: What kinds of changes did this freedom and flexibility allow you to make to the Schizopolis script during production?
SS: Sometimes you couldn’t do what you thought you’d be able to do from a practical standpoint. You’d sit around—there’d be the four of us, or the five of us, if we were lucky—and say, “Hmm, I just don’t think this is working.” You’d go eat lunch and talk about why it wasn’t working. And you’d drive around, see another location, and think, “Maybe the problem is location.” You know, it was all very loose and informal, and it was strictly based on, do you feel it at the time? Do you feel like it’s really happening? If it’s not, let’s not do it, and let’s figure out why.
PT: Did that create structural changes?
SS: Sometimes; not major ones. But some of the best things in the film resulted from either accidents or problems that were turned into advantages. One of my favorite scenes is where [Eventualism guru T. Azimuth] Schwitters is going down the list of people who sent him condolences [for an assassination attempt]. In the script it’s a scene between him and his wife. Well, the actress who played the wife had left town and not told anyone [he laughs]. So I said, “Does anybody know a girl in her early twenties who we could use to play his assistant?” Somebody goes off to make the phone call. In the meantime, I sit down and think, “Alright, here’s the scene: They’re in there, the right-hand man is pacing and she’s reading out this list.” We wrote the list right there. The girl showed up, we gave her the note pad, and we shot it. It’s one of my favorite things in the movie.
The whole movie was like that. The analogy in sports would be when you’re in the zone. I just felt in the zone all the time. I just felt [snapping his fingers] every decision was the right decision. Things just would fall into place, even when mistakes occurred.
PT: Did Schizopolis come together in a substantial way in the editing stage?
SS: There’s a lot of stuff we cut out of it, but I’d say the biggest changes were during shooting, just things that would occur to me. We started cutting while we were still shooting, so I was able to see if I needed things. The great thing about it being a movie made by just a handful of people with your own equipment was we literally could sit in the editing room and say, for instance, “We need a shot of an airplane landing” and go to the office, get the equipment, and go shoot an airplane. So the amount of time between idea and execution was very small. It was great.
PT: Who were the other five people?
SS: John Hardy, my producer. David Jensen, who’s a grip and also an actor; he plays Elmo Oxygen; he’s worked on all my movies. Paul Ledford, who’s my production sound mixer, also worked on all my movies. Mike Malone, who played Schwitters, was an on-set dresser in The Underneath; he was there for a large part of the shoot. And then there was usually a sort of rotating fifth person.
PT: Several of the main themes in Schizopolis were also present in sex, lies, and videotape, namely the problem of communication between couples and the difficulty of marriage. Are these both personal films?
SS: Oh, sure. Schizopolis more so, despite its abstract, surreal quality; it’s a closer representation of my experience of the difficulties in maintaining communications in a relationship than sex, lies was. It’s all tied in together [with] what I see as the gradual simplification and almost destruction of our language. We’ve gotten lazy with it, and it’s used to obscure instead of illuminate. So the struggle to keep life meaningful is getting more and more difficult.
PT: Tell me about the scenes in the bathroom, when you’re making faces in the mirror and masturbating in the stall. What was your intent?
SS: Well, you know, all that is intended to be amusing—the guy’s chronic masturbation and all that—but what it means to me is not so funny. And that is, the culture, in the States especially, is so noisy and so overwhelming, and the forces that divide you from other people and from your community are so strong. The “Me” period that everybody went through yielded so little. I think the end result of all these things is a guy sitting there by himself looking in the mirror like that. This is where it’s all leading if we’re not careful—that specific type of emptiness. I’d rather people laugh at it. But a couple of people have picked up on that, who said, “That stuff was really funny, but at the same time it was really sad.” That was a one-taker, you know. I just sort of did it.
PT: I’ve been hearing a lot of positive word of mouth about your acting in Schizopolis. Is this something you would like to do again?
SS: Well, it wasn’t acting. Those are just variations on my personality. It wasn’t really a performance, as far as I was concerned. When there are four or five of you, and I’m lighting it and setting the shot, I go from behind the camera, then I walk and sit in the chair in front of the camera, and we roll. The whole thing was so fluid that you never really thought about it. Which is great! I don’t know if I’d be that comfortable under the conditions that movies are normally made under. I don’t really have any desire to find out.
PT: Could you walk through the stages of financing Schizopolis?
SS: What happened was I called Universal during The Underneath and said, “I’m going to make this movie; I don’t have a script. It’s a comedy and it’s in color, but that’s all I know. I want you to buy North American video for seventy-five grand right now.” And they did. Then after we finished shooting, I said, “Look, I want to do another film like this, and I also need more money to finish Schizopolis. So for the second film, I’ll sell you North American video and theatrical for $400,000 and you get the two films for $475,000”—always with the agreement that I could buy those rights back in order to get a distribution deal, which is what we ended up doing. When Fox Lorber came in, I used the money that Fox Lorber was paying to buy back the video rights for Schizopolis. So at the end of the day, Schizopolis will end up costing about $250–$275,000, and with the remaining money, we’ll make the sequel.
PT: So Universal is handling nothing, and they’ve been paid back?
SS: They’ve been paid back for Schizopolis. They did it as a favor for me.
PT: Did they take first look for theatrical?
SS: I think they knew. I told them, “You’re not going to want this movie. This is just to keep me going.” You know, I’ve had a good experience there. I made two movies there that didn’t make them any money, and they’ve left me completely alone and still would like me to make a film there.
PT: Are they asking to see the sequel’s script?
SS: No. For them, this amount of money is infinitesimal. They pay that amount for writers to do a couple months of work on a script.
PT: What else were you doing during the ten months of off-and-on production?
SS: Writing scripts for other people, and then, late in Schizopolis, we started making Gray’s Anatomy. So it was a pretty busy time.
PT: What other scripts?
SS: One of them was Nightwatch, a Miramax film. I did some work on Mimic, which is shooting [in Toronto] now, although I don’t think much of my work survived. I just turned in a draft of a script I’m writing for Henry Selleck [James and the Giant Peach], so I’ve been writing for hire back to back during the production of both films.
PT: Do you see this as a way of continuing the new low-budget, stripped-down direction you’re taking?
SS: Yeah, because I haven’t taken a salary on a movie since I finished The Underneath in November of ’94, so it’s my only source of income. But I don’t enjoy it, because I don’t like to write. It’s been hard, but it’s my only option. I don’t want to go direct for money, because it’s too hard and it’s a year-and-a-half. And commercials don’t interest me.
PT: In 10 Feet in 10 Days, Marina Zenovich’s documentary-in-progress about Slamdance, you state: “Independent films are creeping towards the mainstream, and I feel there needs to be another wave of really outrageously independent films. . . . People are not feeling as independent as they used to . . . because [they] are thinking they can make money. That’s what people who make studio movies think. It’s gotten to the point where people, before they’re making their films, are wondering, ‘Is this the kind of film that’s going to get into Sundance?’ As soon as that happens, it’s really over. That’s not what you’re supposed to have in your head.” Do you believe independent film is seriously off-course?
SS: Maybe parts of it are, but there’s always going to be someone who’s not. I don’t worry about interesting films getting made; I worry about how they’re going to get seen. Because as the stakes get higher and it gets more and more expensive to release a movie, the distributors are going to be less willing to take a risk. That’s what I found. It was a frustrating summer, toting Gray’s Anatomy and Schizopolis around and having everybody say, “I don’t think we can make this work.” We had one company say, “We ran the numbers and we decided that we actually could turn a profit with this film, but not enough of a profit to make it worth our time.” And I thought, “Gee, if you can say that about all twelve films you release this year, that’s a good year.” It was interesting both on Schizopolis and Gray’s to reimmerse myself in an area I hadn’t been in since sex, lies, which is the “We’ve made a film, now what do we do with it?” arena. It’s changed. Yeah, getting the movie made is only half of it.