The directors: Steven Soderbergh

Steven Soderbergh‘s latest film, ’The Good German‘ is not only set in 1945 Berlin – starring George Clooney as a US Army war correspondent and Cate Blanchett as his mysterious German ex-girlfriend Lena – but is also shot in the style of a 1940s black-and-white noir. Even the promo ads mirror the original poster for ’Casablanca‘. Here, Soderbergh explains the process by which he decided to recreate war-ravaged Berlin on a Hollywood back-lot for no more than $32 million

For a while, I thought of doing it as an animated film in colour, sort of in the style of ‘Fritz the Cat’ – not real, very stylised and sort of hallucinatory. In that case, there wouldn’t be any archival footage. So, I went into Warner Bros and said, ‘Okay, here are your options. We’re either going to shoot it in black-and-white with real actors. Or it’s going to be in colour, but animated.’

Warners voted for the live-action, real-actors version of the movie. I said, great, and they said: here’s the budget. Then, I started doing my homework. The movie ended up being a compendium of every studio film I’ve ever seen, every noir film I’ve ever seen, every black-and-white film I’ve ever seen. It’s not just ‘Mildred Pierce’, it’s also ‘Anatomy of a Murder’.

The production designer Phil Messina and I had very extensive conversations as to how to tranform the back-lot into this movie, given the financial constraints. Phil came up with a list of cheats that they used to do in the old days, like taking one street that you’ve already shot, reversing all the signage and shooting it again so that it looks like a different street, which totally works. Broken glass in windows was an important thing too, and Phil discovered that they used to cut black felt into the shape of what you wanted the broken glass to look like and then put the felt over it. That was a gigantic time and money saver.

When I watched the movie with an audience at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this month I was wondering what the 1,700 people around me thought. I felt that this may have been a way of working, an aesthetic, that may end up being too distancing for too many people – more than we need to make the movie financially successful.

But when I think of all the other ways you could have made it, this was the best one for me. I came away thinking that for better or worse, that was the choice to make. You have to be aware that there are some people that won’t be able to get past the artifice, but that’s the risk. I can’t imagine if we’d shot the film in a contemporary fashion, in colour, in Cinemascope – I just can’t imagine that would be interesting or distinctive.

‘The Good German’ opens on March 9 and will be reviewed in two weeks’ time.

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