Steven Soderbergh, iPhones and the Return of the B-Movie

I read an interesting quote in article in Cult of the Mac Magazine.

Variety magazine said Soderbergh “embraced the freeing possibilities of both the iPhone and the B-Movie” with Unsane.

Soderbergh is rumoured to have completed a 2nd iPhone feature, after Unsane, a basketball drama called HIGH FLYING BIRD. This quote gives us an extra insight into his thinking. In its original usage, during the Golden Age of Hollywood, the term “B Movie” identified films intended for distribution as the less-publicized bottom half of a double feature.

There was a time in the last decade when critics said b-movies had become the new a-movies. They were referring to how mainstream films were being dumbed down as their budgets had expanded. But this was more of a comment on the depth and quality of the screenplay, than anything.

Because more budget means film financiers are less willing to let filmmakers take risks, some great films were made as b-movies, because of their low budget, rather than despite it. And it’s difficult to be creative and original if you can’t take risks. With the film industry turning to digital streaming as it’s main source of distribution, are we arriving at a new age of the b-movie?

We’ve seen that digital streamers such as Netflix are happier for their filmmakers to take risks, but with much smaller budgets than Hollywood is used to in the 21st century. Is Soderbergh seeing this as an opportunity? Is he thinking back to the b movie production line which required films be made cheaply and fast? As long as you reach certain standards of picture and audio quality, the rest is up to you…

Joshua Leonard, who plays a stalker in Soderbergh’s Unsane, was in The Blair Witch Project, a 1999 indie box office hit shot on digital video cameras.

“(Soderbergh) approached this film with real specificity and not because he can’t afford (conventional) cameras,” Leonard told Cult of Mac. “He is a master of his craft and has proved himself in many genres. If somebody like Steve can make a film on iPhone, others will feel like they have the permission to do the same thing. There are no excuses.”

Then, talking of the advantages of using a smartphone to shoot a film:

“It was Steven Soderbergh holding the iPhone 7 with nothing else,” Leonard said. “As an actor, the camera doesn’t take up space in the room. There was no downtime between takes. It felt like one solid impulse all the way through.”

He also says Soderbergh shot about 85% of Unsane with available light. No lighting setups means less time spent setting stuff up and, as I spoke about before, time really does equal money.

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