Steven Soderbergh is nothing if not ever-evolving—except, maybe, for tireless. After establishing himself as one of his generation’s great auteurs with movies like Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Out of Sight, and Traffic, he vowed to stop making theatrical films. During the supposed hiatus, he made HBO’s Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra, and two seasons of prestige drama The Knick for Cinemax. Then this summer, "retirement" over, he returned to the multiplex with the heist flick Logan Lucky.

That wasn’t all, though. He’s also spent the last few years working on Mosaic, an app-based miniseries mystery that viewers navigate their way through, chapter by chapter. (At the end of each node, they can choose which character to follow or which new scene to watch.) For most other directors, it would be a dramatic career turn. But for someone as prolific as Soderbergh, it’s just one of a handful of projects he seems to be constantly working his way through with a savant-like ease.

Soderbergh sat down with WIRED in his Tribeca office (which looks delightfully like where a 1930s gumshoe would set up shop) to share the backstory on his latest project, as well as his thoughts on virtual reality, the future of filmmaking, and the sexual harassment allegations against the man who helped make Sex, Lies, and Videotape a hit: Harvey Weinstein.

Steven Soderbergh on making an app that tells a story:

I was initially reticent—as a filmmaker/storyteller, anything that feels game-y is a little scary because games and being told a story work at cross-purposes. In the game, the viewer has agency, and as a result there’s a certain kind of engagement that happens that isn’t the kind of emotional engagement you get from experiencing a story. So my concern was: Will I still have the kind of control as a filmmaker that I need to have? But what I saw was something that was not a film, and not a game. It was rubbing up against both these things, but was different enough from each to be exciting. The technical innovations that have taken place in gaming over the last decade and a half are stunning, so this seemed like an opportunity to take advantage of a form that has been around a long time—branching narrative—and have the technology be an organic part of the story, as opposed to someone coming along and saying “Oh, I got this piece of new tech, let’s jam a story into it.”

On virtual reality:

There are several things working against it. When you can’t see your protagonist, it’s virtually impossible to hook into the story. This is how we engage, looking into the eyes of the protagonist. There’s no such thing as montage. It’s uncomfortable to have that thing on your head for more than a certain period of time. Part of the joy of anything is watching it with someone else and at a certain point looking at them and going “Holy shit!” That’s gone. To me, there are all these things working against it as a longform, narrative format. I think it’s going to work best as a combination of immersion and gaming and stuff like that, but I don’t… I wish I could short it, I could make a lot of money. But I don’t think I can.

On the value of short TV seasons:

It’s a chicken or the egg thing, does [a short series] feel more satisfying because they’re designing them that way, or is it truly more satisfying? I don’t know. It depends on the format. Sitcoms tend to lend themselves to years and years and years, for whatever reason. Hour-long dramas, they’re hard. To keep them fresh you need to keep introducing new people and killing people off. You gotta have a universe that’s large enough to allow for expansion and contraction.