Steven Soderbergh Quotes

Any play that's making a point is less interesting than something that stays with you and suggests something further.

A lot of people don't give their audiences credit. You can leave it a little mysterious. They can think about it.

I realized all the writing I love lives in the gray area.

I never think that a film should answer questions for you. I think it should make you ask a lot of questions.

The nature of good fiction is that it dwells in ambiguity.

The purpose of narrative is to present us with complexity and ambiguity.

I think we just need to have a demand for fresh and nuanced movies.

I am oblique; I think that has to do with my own nature. I like trying to do things which work on many levels, because I think it is terribly important to give an audience a lot of things they might not get as well as those they will, so that finally the film does take on a texture and is not just simplistic communication.

The performances I enjoy are the ones that are hard to read or ambiguous or left-of-centre because it makes you look closer and that's what humans are like - quite mysterious creatures, hard to pinpoint.

A play, after all, is a mystery. There's no narration. And as soon as there's no narration, it's open to interpretation. It must be interpreted. You don't have a choice... Each play can become many things.

Maybe 'Doonby' will haunt people for awhile and make them wonder, 'What was that really about?' And that excites me as an artist.

I'm not saying anything that's unknown, but movies are always cut down and there's a lot of complexity within the film that is not always widely accepted by the general audience, which is just a reality; a movie of a certain size, they don't want people to be too - it's a balance of how deep to keep going with these ideas.

Sometimes it's okay for an audience not to understand everything that's going on.

There are plenty of movies that you need to chew on a bit. Movies that you return to and see something different in the second time around.

I love having those lyrics that at first make you think it's about one thing, but it's really about something so much more.

I always find with dramas that the more that's left to the imagination of the audience, the better.

As an audience member myself, I love to be in a position where I'm trying to figure out what I am supposed to feel or if what I'm feeling is appropriate or not.

There were several ways of understanding her: there was what she said, and there was what she meant, and there was something between the two, that was neither.

I always liked records that didn't explain themselves too well - ones that you had to listen a few times.

Art has nothing to do with clarity, does not dabble in the clear and does not make clear

Movies work, in my opinion, on the best level when they're more enigmatic, when we don't say it's this or that and where it raises more questions than answers.

A painting requires a little mystery, some vagueness, and some fantasy. When you always make your meaning perfectly plain you end up boring people.

My feeling, however, is that films that are open are more productive for the audience. The films that, if I'm in a cinema, and I'm watching a movie that answers all the questions that it raises, it's a film that bores me. In the same way, if I'm reading a book that doesn't leave me with questions, moving questions, that I feel confronted with, then for me it's a waste of time. I don't want to read a book that simply confirms what I already know.

You have to watch out with my plays. They're like yeast. You think they're one thing, then all of a sudden subtext gets to working.

I love movies that ask big questions but don't necessarily answer everything. I like people walking out thinking about something.