The Atlantic talked with Soderbergh about shooting movies on cell phones, the future of the theatrical experience, the Netflix production process, and what his ideal Oscars ceremony would look like. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

David Sims: How did High Flying Bird come to you? Did you hear about the script or was it more organic than that?

Steven Soderbergh: It was pretty serendipitous. André [Holland] and I had been having conversations during The Knick. We started kicking around a couple ideas for projects about sports, and this one seemed to check off a couple of important boxes. The key being that the scale of it allowed for completely independent financing. They say sometimes, The budget is the aesthetic. My saying that I wanted to be able to do the movie at this [smaller] scale created a clear structure from the get-go. I talked a lot about Sweet Smell of Success and Glengarry Glen Ross—hyperverbal, short time frame, limited locations. I said [to Tarell Alvin McCraney], This is what we’re aiming for, so think in those terms. To Tarell’s credit, he really took that on and understood it.

Read: Tarell Alvin McCraney channeled athletes’ dissent to write ‘High Flying Bird’

Sims: Glengarry Glen Ross is a great movie, but people would call it stagey, and obviously it’s based on a play. Whereas High Flying Bird doesn’t feel like it could be a play, even though it’s mostly conversation, mostly in rooms. The locations and how you’re getting us inside places we couldn’t otherwise get inside—I feel like you couldn’t replicate that in another medium.

Soderbergh: I agree. As verbal as High Flying Bird is, I still think its best expression is as a movie, for the reason you cite. I wanted it to have a range of looks, in terms of locations, so that you did feel the breadth of [New York City]. One of my favorite shooting days was—we shoot the opening scene at The Standard hotel. Then we take a break—me and a crew of four or five people, and André—and we start walking downtown. I’m walking and I’ll go, “Okay, stop, we’ll put the camera here.” Shoot that, walk, walk, walk, okay, we’re stopping here. It was really fun. It took us two hours to walk and shoot our way down to the World Trade Center. You could have done it on a normal movie by sending everyone away, but in this case you were able to bring the whole crew.

Sims: Did you always envision using the iPhone for the movie, before the script was ready?

Soderbergh: No; my interest in the iPhone came from two directions. I was starting to shoot a lot of stuff on my own as a kind of experiment. And then I saw [Sean Baker’s film] Tangerine, and I was like, “That works.” Now I’m on the lookout for something that would be best served by this approach. That became Unsane, and High Flying Bird hadn’t come in at that point. When it did come in, I thought I wanted to duplicate the production method with a very different aesthetic.