Academy Award-winning director Steven Soderbergh said in a recent interview that he wouldn’t be able to direct a modern superhero film due to the genre’s lack of sex scenes.
Speaking to the Daily Beast ahead of the release of his latest film ‘Kimi’, the director was asked if he would be willing to direct or write a superhero film. He replied by saying that while unlike some other big-name directors in the industry, such as Martin Scorcese or Francis Ford Coppola, he doesn’t consider the genre to be “lower tier” in any way, but said that he can’t relate to the films since he is too “earthbound.”
“I’m not a snob; it’s not that I feel it’s some lower tier in any way. It really becomes about what universe you occupy as a storyteller,” Soderbergh told the website. “I’m just too earthbound to really release myself to a universe in which Newtonian physics don’t exist [laughs]. I just have a lack of imagination in that regard, which is why the one foray I had into pure science-fiction [2002’s ‘Solaris’] was essentially a character drama that happened to be set on a spaceship.”
Soderbergh went on to explain that the film genre’s tendency to omit intimate sex scenes was something he just couldn’t understand and that it ruined the worldbuilding for him.
“Also, for a lot of these, for me to understand the world and how to write or supervise the writing of the story and the characters – apart from the fact that I can bend time and defy gravity and shoot beams out of my fingers – there’s no f**king. Nobody’s f**king! Like, I don’t know how to tell people how to behave in a world in which that is not a thing… the fantasy-spectacle universe, as far as I can tell, typically doesn’t involve a lot of f**king, and also things like – who’s paying these people? Who do they work for? How does this job come to be?”
Soderbergh’s latest film ‘Kimi’ premieres on February 10 and follows the story of a young, agoraphobic woman (played by Zoe Kravitz) as she discovers evidence of a violent crime, but her quest for justice is thwarted by Big Tech overlords and her crippling fear of stepping outside the house.