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solaris
PAST IMPERFECT:
Kelvin (George Clooney) is (perhaps) given the chance to relive his relationship with his wife Rheya (Natascha McElhone), who
committed suicide some years earlier. |
“The theme of predestination is crucial,” explains Soderbergh. “Kelvin and Rheya’s relationship had ended very badly. When she appears on the Prometheus, they both struggle with the idea of the relationship travelling the same path it did before. Those issues of memory, guilt, potential redemption and the opportunity to do something again and maybe do it differently, appealed to me. As one character says at a certain point in the film, ‘There are no answers, only choices’. And it really does come down to that.”
For Soderbergh himself, the choice was not a difficult one to make. A friend at Fox suggested he might be interested in making a film based on Lem’s novel. Fascinated by its themes, Soderbergh discovered that the rights were held by Cameron’s company, Lightstorm, following a five-year negotiation with Mosfilm which, as the continuation of the old Soviet state film studio, held the rights.
The two met, talked about the project and discovered that they shared many of the same ideas about it, most notably the fact that, unlike most Hollywood sci-fi stories, it was a psychological study rather than an adventure story. “It had a whole other dimension,” says Cameron. “It’s a very personal story. Much of it takes place in the mind and in the memory, so you could find many different ways to interpret it.”
Soderbergh figured he had a way, but set one condition before agreeing to make the film. “I told them I had an idea of how to do this,” he says, “but I wanted to write the screenplay on spec; I didn’t want to make a deal to do it. I explained my approach and what I wanted to focus on and the ways in which I thought it would be different from the book and different from Tarkovsky’s movie.”
“This was Steven’s ballgame from the get-go,” adds Cameron. “He went off and wrote the script, essentially in a vacuum. We didn’t tell him what we thought it should be. We didn’t sit down and talk about whether it should be an effects film or not. We just waited to see what he came back with. And his initial script blew us away.”
For Soderbergh, Solaris is a tragic love story and the story of a space mission that goes wrong - in that order. “The biggest difference between this incarnation of Solaris and Tarkovsky’s film and the novel,” he notes, “is that our film details the past relationship between Kelvin and his wife - with what happened to them on Earth years before. That’s what I really wanted to get into. I felt if you were going to explore this idea of whether or not you’re doomed to play out a relationship the same way every time with the same person, then you had to see what happened to them before.”
For the role of Rheya, Soderbergh found himself thinking back to an early performance by an actress who has gone on to become a Hollywood star: British-born Natascha McElhone. The film he remembered was James Ivory’s Surviving Picasso, in which McElhone plays the painter’s mistreated lover, Françoise, mother of Paloma. “She reminded me of the great European actresses of the sixties and seventies, like Jeanne Moreau and Dominique Sanda,” he says. “They were smart, sexy, complicated women. Not girls – women.”
Although the casting of Clooney may seem inevitable, given the relationship between the director and the star (they run production company Section Eight together), it didn’t really happen like that. In fact, it was Clooney who all but lobbied Soderbergh to let him play the part, which is very different from anything he has done before.
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