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I don’t understand how they’re not still shooting that film,” Soderbergh once said, “and I don’t understand how hundreds of people aren’t dead.”
The wasteland is barren and unable to take seed. Yet there is a “Green Place” and the seeds have been kept, so that when the Man animates the Woman by giving her his blood, some hitherto unimaginable hope, the re-greening of the wasteland, seems achievable.
Susan Sarandon said it well: When you’re pairing couples, you always want a female to skew male and a male to skew female. She told me, “If you look at the great male movie stars, they have a female quality—they’re not effeminate but there’s a looseness to them that reminds one of the female approach to life. And the female stars have always had a male quality, which is to be very direct.” The classic example is Hepburn and Tracy: She was very direct and Spencer Tracy, for all his rough masculinity, has a looseness with him.
It’s utterly to be expected with something like this. There are a lot of people at the top of the pyramid that don’t have a creative bone in their body—literally, they do not. They don’t think about movies as creative things, they think of them as products that they order. You put the product in their hand and then they sell the product to people, and when this showed up in their hand, they were losing their shit.
“Don’t make the mistake of not celebrating success, because it comes around so rarely.”
The Swahili storytellers have this quote, “The story has been told. If it was bad, it was my fault, because I’m the storyteller. But if it was good, it belongs to everybody.” And that feeling of the story belonging to everybody is really the reward.
