In the mid 1980s, two future film institutions were still immature: the American indie scene, whose annual highlight was a tiny, two-theater film festival in Park City, Utah , and a would-be director named Steven Soderbergh . who’d quit Hollywood when his ambitions hadn’t taken him further than holding cue cards on a game show. Dejected, the then-24-year-old returned home to Baton Rouge, La., took a job in a video arcade, and boosted his ego by cheating on his girlfriend.

“I was very intent on getting acceptance and approval from whatever woman,” he later admitted to Rolling Stone. One night out at a local bar, Soderbergh realized he’d slept with three people in a two-foot radius. He resolved to grow up. Within a year, he was back in Los Angeles, crashing on a friend’s couch and clutching a script he’d written to figure out how he’d gone astray — the kind of self-dissection he’d fixated on since writing a 120-page autobiographical novel when he was 12.

“Sex, Lies and Videotape,” which celebrates the 30th anniversary of its release this month, is a four-person drama that divided Soderbergh’s psyche into quarters. He saw himself in the emotionally frigid Ann ( Andie MacDowell ), her philandering husband, John ( Peter Gallagher ) and his competitive mistress, Cyndi ( Laura San Giacomo ), who’s also Ann’s sister. Audiences, however, mostly assumed the shy-seeming Soderbergh was James Spader’s Graham, a soft-voiced drifter who wouldn’t get closer to a woman than a zoom lens. Soderbergh even dressed identically to Graham, who the script describes as looking “like some undertaker for the art world.”

“We never talked about it,” admitted Spader in that same Rolling Stone feature , “but there would be days when I’d get out of wardrobe and come to the set, and we’d be wearing the same thing.”