“Logan Lucky” races into cinemas today, with Steven Soderbergh firing on all cylinders for his hugely enjoyable heist comedy. But as always, the director is shifting gears for his next effort, the HBO project “Mosaic.” The project, which has been kept under wraps for quite some time, stars Garrett Hedlund and Sharon Stone, with Ed Solomon (“Men in Black,” “Charlie’s Angels“) writing the script for the story that will allow users to pursue different narrative paths, utilizing a new state-of-the-art app. However, how it all works has been a mystery for quite some time….until now.
Speaking with Film Comment, Soderbergh revealed that this fall, the app for “Mosaic” will be unveiled, and it sounds like something that might make you fall down a bit of a rabbit hole.
“[It’ll be available] for your phone, iPad, desktop, Apple TV. Anything. We started thinking we’ll just do iOS. But after long series of conversations, we said it makes no sense while we’re building this thing not to include Android and desktop. While we have the hood open, don’t we want as many eyeballs on this thing as possible? And it’s a free app. So set aside your time, because if you watch all the various nodes, it’s like seven and a half hours,” he said. “I was very aware while we were making it that this is the cave painting of this format—that somebody else is going to take this thing and push it way further. I was just trying to get a working story. Ed Solomon, who wrote ‘Mosaic,’ has another piece that’s built on what we did and is going to be much more complex.”
“You download the app, and the first chapter begins. At the end of that chapter, you are given the possibility of going right or left, and after that you just keep going. There are a couple of companies that are playing with branching narrative,” Soderbergh added.
That sounds completely fascinating, and given the story — which the filmmaker is still keeping somewhat guarded — it looks like this is the kind of narrative that can really go in a multitude of directions.
“It’s a murder. Not a murder mystery so much. There are two different time frames, one contemporary and one four years ago. This case that everyone thought was solved gets reexamined with interesting results,” he said. “So you get to go back and forth depending on who you want to follow at what point. It seemed to be a kind of story that benefited from this multiverse perspective. The writing and the editing of it was tricky. The giant board that Ed and I had was a real head-scratcher.”
However, if you’re looking for a more straightforward experience, Soderbergh has you covered, as “Mosaic” will be unveiled next year as a more traditional series on HBO. That’s right — it was never a movie as many assumed.
“There will be a linear episodic version that’s set to air on HBO in January, but ideally going forward, it would just be an app. I offered HBO the possibility of doing a linear cut because I needed more money to develop the technology,” he explained. “I called them and said I have a lot of material that’s not in the app; ‘I can cut a six-hour episodic version of this that will be its own thing.’ And they said, absolutely.”
So it sounds like there are two different versions of “Mosaic” you can explore. We can’t wait to roll up our sleeves/eyeballs and dive into this. There’s no debut date for “Mosaic” yet, but get the medium of your choice ready.