Steven Soderbergh is a workhorse. I can’t begin to speak for him, as I have no personal connection to the filmmaker. However, judging by his productivity, it’s clear that Soderbergh is the type of guy that doesn’t necessarily take a few months off. You have to imagine this has led to a bit of frustration with the current pandemic. But as he explained to The Daily Beast, he has been far from bored during the lockdown of the past several months. He’s been prepping the release of his new HBO Max film, “Let Them Talk,” working on getting “No Sudden Move” into production. If that wasn’t enough, he’s also working on creating a box set of several of his own films with new restorations and brand-new edits, including the highly-anticipated re-release of “Kafka.” So yeah, Soderbergh is a workhorse.
“I’m hoping next year to put out a limited-edition box set of the seven titles that have reverted back to me, or that I have some control over,” he explained. “We’ve been remastering them and cleaning them up. ‘Kafka,’ I’d always wanted to go back in and alter in some radical way—not to make it more palatable, but to make it into something that I felt mitigated what I wasn’t able to fix. ‘Schizopolis‘ and ‘Full Frontal‘ are just shorter, and the rest are as they were. It’ll be a collection of titles that weren’t made for studios, and in the case of ‘Kafka,’ hasn’t been available for a long, long time.”
We spoke with Soderbergh earlier this year, and he shed some additional light on what the new cut of “Kafka” would look like. He told us the re-edit is “a completely new iteration of itself and has a new title.”
One of the films that won’t be part of a proposed box set is the forthcoming HBO Max feature, “No Sudden Move.” This is Soderbergh’s new crime film with an incredible cast (would you expect anything less?) and is currently in production. That feature doesn’t have a release date yet (2021 seems likely), but the filmmaker did explain why “No Sudden” move is different than “Let Them All Talk” (obviously) and what drew him to tell the crime story.
READ MORE: George Clooney Reveals Why He Had To Drop Out Of Steven Soderbergh’s ‘No Sudden Move’
“It’s completely different than ‘Let Them All Talk’—it’s a genre film with a lot of great actors,” he explained. “People who commit crimes are compelling, because most of us don’t do that and wouldn’t do that, so there’s an inherent drama as soon as you start. At the end of the day, all conflict, and all drama, can be reduced to the idea of betrayal. So when you’re in a criminal world, these issues of trust and betrayal become very amplified, and the stakes are large.”
“Let Them All Talk” is set to arrive on HBO Max on December 10. The upcoming box set doesn’t have an official announcement or release date, but hopefully, it’s soon because we’re all dying to see these new cuts.