Steven Soderbergh's Haywire Gets a Release Date; Director Still Plans to Retire
Posted 06.17.11 by Ryan
Director Steven Soderbergh (Ocean's Eleven, Erin Brockovich) confirmed his plans to retire in March, but, thankfully, not before his finishes an unending stream of movies.
Soderbergh's action-thriller Haywire, which stars MMA fighter Gina Carano as a special ops agent who seeks revenge on the people who double-crossed her, was shot before the director's deadly virus thriller Contagion, but will open three months after Contagion's Oct. 22 release date. Deadline reports Relativity Media has picked up the U.S. distribution rights for Haywire, setting a release for Jan. 20, 2012. Soderbergh told the site that he thinks the release date order is fitting for the two movies.
I think it might be best for Haywire to follow Contagion, which is the kind of film people like to see me make. It's in the vein of Traffic, an entertaining multi-layered story about something timely right now. Because Gina has never been in a movie before, being able to draft off Contagion will be very good. We knew she could do the right stuff, but she really delivers as a screen presence. She looks comfortable, and then she tears these guys in half.
With two movies soon arriving in theaters, Soderbergh is set to put his attention toward Magic Mike, a comedy that stars Channing Tatum and Alex Pettyfer as two male strippers in what is being described as a Saturday Night Fever-inspired movie. Reid Carolin (Earth Made of Glass) wrote the script.
In February, Soderbergh will shoot a remake of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. with George Clooney and then finish his career next summer with the biopic Liberace with Matt Damon and Michael Douglas. After that, Soderbergh says he still plans to hang up his director's chair.
I'm still following my plan. I've been stupid about it, I should have kept my mouth shut, but at the same time, I don't think there's anything that unusual about it. By the time I finish with the series of projects I'm planning, it will be 26 or 27 films. That's plenty and if you take volume over quality; I'm twice as good as Kubrick. I figured by giving them two years lead time, they would line up those lifetime achievement awards, but there have been no calls or anything.
So what would make an Academy Award-winning director want to retire so early? "I'm not better at things that I've been trying to get at and I find it frustrating," said Soderbergh, who added that he feels like he's simply "out of ideas," even if his three-movie sprint to the finish suggests otherwise.
I find myself saying, I've done this shot before. Or, I've solved this problem before by doing the same thing I'm doing now. I don't like that feeling of, "I've done this." If you are dealing within the confines of traditional narrative filmmaking, it's hard not to feel like you're in a box after awhile.
While Soderbergh doesn't say so, his firing by Columbia just days before shooting the upcoming Moneyball could have been the trigger that started Soderbergh's unhappiness with making movies. The studio rejected the unorthodox narrative structure of Soderbergh's script, and eventually shot Moneyball with a new script and director.
Soderbergh says he will do "something visual" and says he "wouldn't be surprised" if he ends up making "things", but says those "things" will be "under the radar and I won't be asking other people to pay for them." Soderbergh admitted that his retirement could end up as an "extended sabbatical" but says that by the time he turns 50 in 2013, he "would like to think I will have blown a kiss goodbye to the industry."
As for how he would like to go out, Soderbergh revealed specific plans.
A year-long daily celebration of my fabulousness would be nice. Or maybe just a smallish parade.