In 2013, Steven Soderbergh told me during an interview that he was retiring. “Five years ago, as we were finishing Che, I said, ‘OK, when I turn 50, I want to be done. I’m going to jam in as much as I can, but when I turn 50, I want to be done.'”
Yet Soderbergh’s concept of retirement must be different from most mortals. In the past year, he not only executive produced the Showtime series The Knick but he also directed all ten episodes. Using the handle @Bitchuation, he wrote an entire novel on Twitter called Glue. And he produced and directed a Broadway show starring Chloë Grace Moretz called The Library. And in his copious free time, he’s been producing various cinematic experiments on his website Extension 765, which included a piece that spliced together Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho with Gus Van Sant’s bizarro shot-by-shot remake, a black and white version of Raiders of the Lost Ark and an edit of Michael Cimino’s famously bloated Heaven’s Gates.
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