Steven Soderbergh "We Always Need To Tell Stories"

Every year, the San Francisco International Film Festival invites a well-known public figure to talk about the intersecting worlds of contemporary cinema and visual arts, culture and society, images and ideas. Past speakers have included Jonathan Lethem, Walter Murch, and Brad Bird. This year, Steven Soderbergh (Ocean's Eleven and Magic Mike) took the stage.

Speaking about cinema versus movies, he compared the relationship to auteurs versus studios. He told the audience that art will always be a human need, as humans have always needed to tell stories.

He went on to say "The simplest way that I can describe it is that a movie is something you see, and cinema is something that’s made…. Cinema is a specificity of vision. It’s an approach in which everything matters. It’s the polar opposite of generic or arbitrary and the result is as unique as a signature or a fingerprint. It isn’t made by a committee, and it isn’t made by a company, and it isn’t made by the audience. It means that if this filmmaker didn’t do it, it either wouldn’t exist at all, or it wouldn’t exist in anything like this form".

State of Cinema: Steven Soderbergh from San Francisco Film Society on Vimeo.

Adapted from an article originally by Rain Jokinen of The San Francisco Appeal