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solaris
“I sent Steven a letter and said ‘I don’t know if I can do it, but I’d like to take a crack at it’,” says the star. “This is really an actor’s piece and it’s the most difficult and scariest
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“Natascha reminded me of the great European actresses of the sixties and seventies. They were smart, sexy, complicated women. Not girls – women”
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thing I’ve ever done by far. As an actor, if you’re going to go way out on a limb, you’re going to want to do that with Steven. He’s good at being very specific, which is what good directors do; there’s always a point of view.”
Soderbergh, meanwhile, found himself looking at a whole new George Clooney. “When you see somebody that you know well and that you’ve worked with do something that surprises you almost every day, it’s pretty thrilling,” he says. “George would keep pushing his performance and taking it further. I live for working with actors, so watching that was incredibly exciting. His complete willingness to jump off a cliff every day was inspiring.”
Clooney could do this, reckons the actor, because he found the themes of Solaris every bit as fascinating as did Soderbergh. “What makes Solaris relevant today,” he says, “is that it deals with the basic issues we constantly question and wonder about: love, death, the after-life… the things we don’t have any answers to. We want to define things, and those things we can’t define terrify us. We want to know how high is up, how old is eternity. Everything we know as humans has limits – a beginning, middle and an end.
“No one in this story has answers,” he concludes. “They just have really good, smart questions.”
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SOLARIS
Lightstorm Entertainment for Twentieth Century Fox
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Prod: James Cameron, Rae Sanchini, Jon Landau; Exec prod: Gregory Jacobs; Co-prod: Michael Polaire, Charles V Bender; Dir/Ph/Ed: Steven Soderbergh; Scr: Steven Soderbergh, based on the novel by Stanislaw Lem; Prod des: Philip Messina; Cost des: Milena Canonero; Casting: Debra Zane; Mus: Cliff Martinez.
With George Clooney (Dr Chris Kelvin), Natascha McElhone (Rheya Kelvin), Jeremy Davies (Snow), Viola Davis (Dr Helen Gordon), Ulrich Tukur (Gibarian).
International distribution:
Twentieth Century Fox
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