With his new film, The Informant!, playing at the Toronto Film Festival this month, Steven Soderbergh has started doing some press, and details of his next projects – as well as his thoughts on Moneyball, the project that was not to be – are being divulged.
Talking with the Orlando Sentinel, Soderbergh says that he isn’t letting the way Moneyball fell apart – right at the starting line – deter him. “As soon as it became clear that there was no iteration of that movie
that I was going to get to direct, I immediately started looking around
for something else to do,” he tells the Orlando Sentinel. “I have a couple of other things in
development that I had hoped to move up, but actor’s schedules wouldn’t
allow it. But I have something I can get to after the first of the
year, and I’m supposed to do my Liberace movie next summer. So my
attitude when something like that happens is, ‘What’s next?’ You can’t
dwell on it.”
That Liberace film, to star Michael Douglas as the pianist and Matt Damon as his lover, is still looking for funding.
“It’s a very difficult
environment to raise money for a movie like that, because it’s a movie
for grownups and it’s about Liberace. So a lot of people look at it and
go, ‘Who’s this for?’
“I’m confident we can get it together. We just may have to do it for a REAL price”
Soderbergh says he has his next lined up for January – is this the 3D rock musical Cleopatra movie, which he also talks to the Sentinel about? – but I bet that his Liberace money starts coming in once people see The Informant!, which is hilarious and excellent.