“Logan Lucky is an experiment,” Soderbergh says. “The problem that I think needs to be addressed is: What has happened to movies for grown-ups made by people who are still interested in the idea of cinema?” In other words: What happened to the kind of films that Steven Soderbergh has spent the past three decades making?

As he talks, he sits perched on a stool, still in the way that people who are good at concentrating often are. You do not interview Soderbergh, precisely; you prompt him, and out come fully formed sentences, which line up neatly into fully formed paragraphs. He has a movie director’s way of being in control, of guiding you even when your ostensible job is to guide him. After a while you just surrender.

GQ: I read that principal photography on Logan Lucky began on August 24 and you were watching a finished version of it on October 12. Is that real? That doesn’t seem possible.

Steven Soderbergh: I had a cut of the movie the night we wrapped.

That’s insane.

That’s a result of technology allowing for extreme efficiencies of process. I love the fact that the gap now between something that I’m imagining and seeing it is shrinking. It’s basically now shrunk to a level that I don’t know how much more it can shrink. Within an hour of wrapping on a typical day, I have the footage on my laptop and can start cutting.

A lot of people get very misty-eyed about celluloid. When I think of the time that’s wasted in sending it back to the lab and having it developed and brought back, it would make me insane. I love getting my hands on the stuff immediately. That doesn’t work for everybody. It just works for me.

I never really believed in your retirement, in part because—

Because I lie a lot.

He makes work about momentum with momentum. Because he is so easily bored, he might be the least boring filmmaker alive.

Well, because it never seemed like you believed in it. But why come back for this particular film?

A couple of reasons. It’s the kind of film that I like to make. It’s the kind of film I like to watch. And self-distribution on a wide scale is becoming possible in a way that it never was before. And then I was tasked—or asked—to help find a director for [the Logan Lucky] script. After a couple of weeks, I said, “I really can’t stand the idea of somebody else getting to do this.” So I drafted myself.

Logan Lucky has a light, comic tone—it doesn’t seem like you came back to make some grand creative statement.

Well, let’s put it this way: There was no scenario in which I was going to un-retire and make a movie that wasn’t fun. I would not have come out of retirement to do something “serious” or “important.” No way.

Soderbergh’s comeback film, Logan Lucky, is a red-state spin on the Ocean’s series: a heist at Charlotte Motor Speedway. Claudette Barius

There’s something compulsive about Soderbergh, a compulsion that tends to spill into his films in subtle but illuminating ways: As different as each one is, what connects them is people solving complex problems, or attempting to process vast amounts of information, and doing so with grace and humor. Some of his later films, especially, almost seem like challenges to himself: a full-length thriller with very little dialogue, starring an MMA fighter in the lead role (Haywire), or a film about the business of sex, starring a porn actress (The Girlfriend Experience). A common criticism of Soderbergh’s films is that they’re cool to the touch; they trace dizzying, virtuoso arcs around the surface of objects, people, emotions. But I’ve always thought that was the point: Like Soderbergh himself, they’re perpetual-motion machines. He makes work about momentum with momentum. Because he is so easily bored, he might be the least boring filmmaker alive.

Now, sitting in his office in May, he ticks off all his various projects he’s working on simultaneously. In a week, the Logan Lucky trailer will come out. The week after that, he’ll start production on a new film, with The Crown’s Claire Foy and Juno Temple, called Unsane. It’s a horror movie; he plans to shoot it in ten days, no more. “I just want to do it, sell it, and have it drop and that’s it.” This fall will see the release of a new HBO project, Mosaic—an interactive, “branching narrative” app, followed by a linear reprise of the same story on television, starring Sharon Stone. Scott Z. Burns, who wrote The Informant! and Contagion and Side Effects for Soderbergh, is working on a new script about the Panama Papers that Soderbergh hopes to direct. He and Lem Dobbs, who wrote The Limey, are working on a new TV show together. It’s enough to ask—

I’m going to pose a question from your 1999 book, Getting Away with It, that you asked yourself at the time: “Why am I so attracted to this romantic idea of the guy who can do five things at once and do them all well?”

I think what I was probably talking about is a certain kind of proficiency that is very compelling. There’s something really fun about watching people really good at something. I’m sort of falling prey to that image, whether it’s real or not, of casual proficiency. Part of the appeal is that it seems effortless, or at least that the person seems unstressed by whatever obstacle they’re trying to overcome.