FILM / This is the way the director sees it . . .

IT TOOK Steven Soderbergh a long while to recover from the success of sex, lies, and videotape. Many, not least the quiet, dry, bespectacled film-maker himself, in a series of uncommonly confessional interviews, went round saying that he was putting his own fevered psyche on screen: 'There was one point at which I was in a bar and, within a radius of about two feet, there were three different women I was sleeping with,' he would say. Or, 'I just became somebody that, if I knew him, I would hate.'

Soderbergh's second film, Kafka, a literary and, apparently, more impersonal project, was annihilated by American critics and has yet to open here (there are plans to release it early next year). Now he is attempting his comeback with King of the Hill. A poignant comedy based on the memoir by A E Hotchner of his childhood during the Depression, it's quite unlike the two first films in tone (even if, as Soderbergh points out below, there are thematic similarities). With it, he hopes to establish himself as an audience-friendly, craftsman-director in the vintage studio tradition.

This time United States reaction was enthusiastic (although this charming little film again failed to score a hit with the public), and even the doubters praised its superb technique. Here, Soderbergh talks in detail about his approach to filming six of King of the Hill's more striking scenes in what amounts to a mini-masterclass on the art of cinema.

SCENE ONE

The opening scene: Aaron reads a school essay, in which he imagines being phoned up by his friend Charles Lindbergh.

'The camera starts in very, very, very tight on Aaron, looking at us. I wanted him to make you think he was speaking only to us initially, to begin the movie with his face. Then gradually we begin to take in the rest of the room and you realise that he's speaking to a group. Clearly the entire essay is a fantasy, but until he says 'Charles Lindbergh here', it seems plausible. Probably most of the class thinks that it is a true story because the irony is just not apparent to them; it's not a level that they operate on. They assume that he's showing off.

'The discussion about whether to use voice-over in the film went on for quite a while. It was the obvious way to go; the book was told in the first person and told very well. But I tend not to like voice-over unless there's a spin on it, like Sunset Boulevard, where the speaker is dead, or the two Terrence Malick films, Days of Heaven and Badlands, which use voice-over in a very interesting way because they have narrators who are not very self-aware or articulate.

'But this kid is very intelligent. Plus I thought it would prevent people from being able to project themselves on to him; it would make his experiences so specific it would distance the audience. I don't know how often voice-over is used as a specific and intentional design element in a film from the beginning. I usually feel it has been added as an afterthought.

'I didn't really solve the problem until I came up with the idea of the Lindbergh speech, which doesn't appear in the book. Once I wrote that, things started to flow better and I was very confident about finding his voice.'

SCENE TWO

Aaron thrashes two older boys at a game of marbles. The scene is framed with a long circular tracking shot.

'I'm so disappointed with that scene, when I look at it now: it strikes me as a low-rent version of something out of The Colour of Money. That's what we were calling it while we were shooting it, 'The Colour of Marbles'. In order to accomplish what I wanted to do, I should have rented a prism-snorkel lens - a lens which was developed mainly, if I'm not mistaken, for medical purposes. It's very small and you can attach a prism to the end of it, so that you can get it right down on the ground. So I could have shot the marbles in a much more interesting fashion. There's remarkable snorkel-lens photography, actually, in Alan Parker's Pink Floyd: The Wall.

'But I had to shoot that sequence over a long period of time: during the entire filming I would be picking up shots of it here and there. We couldn't afford to rent that lens for so long. So I had to resort to a lot of cheating and oversized marbles. With the lens, I could have gotten closer to the marbles with the boys still in the frame.

'The reason we shot the film in CinemaScope was that we'd looked at a lot of Edward Hopper paintings and often he had that very wide frame. Which is interesting when you think about it because, when he was painting, this was not a very common ratio. And the colours he used were never primary, there were always these reds that were more burgundy and yellows that were kind of mustard. We really went after those. We talked a lot about 'shall we go warm? shall we go cold?' and decided to go with an amber cast to the whole film, mostly because it was set in summer.'

SCENE THREE

Aaron takes the first prize at his school's prizegiving, although his family isn't there to cheer him on.

'The decision to have this scene play without sound was an accident. While we were mixing, my re-recording mixer was experimenting with the piano accompaniment, trying to get the correct equalisation, and while he was doing that I was watching the scene silent. And I decided it played better that way, that in this case the sounds were not giving us any additional information; it was quite clear visually what was happening. Somehow the combination of the piano and the silence was much more emotional than the sounds that were actually in the room.

'So I said, 'Just leave it: we don't need the other sounds until the principal begins his speech.' Then there's a dissolve to indicate a passage of time and we can bring the voices back in. The scene seemed much more melancholy that way. I was aware that it could be maudlin very easily, but at the same time I knew there was another scene coming right after it in which the whole feeling of triumph would be completely deflated. The peak was OK, as long as you had the valley following.

'A lot of people assume that you have to have sound happening all the time. Sound is very important and I try to use it as much as possible, but in this case I realised that the absence of sound is also a use of sound. I've seen other films in which this idea has been used to great effect. The most famous example is North By North West, in the scene where Leo G Carroll is telling the entire story of the movie to Cary Grant and it's all drowned out by airplane engines. Hitchcock later said it was because there was no way to explain what had gone on but at least he could let the audience know that the characters understood the plot.'

SCENE FOUR

Locked alone for days in his hotel room, Aaron cuts out and eats pictures of food to keep from starving.

'A E Hotchner helped a lot on the film, with publicity and by telling me a lot of extra details. He said, 'Make sure that the boy has a plate and cutlery because I didn't just cut out the pictures of the food, I arranged them - it really was a meal on the plate.' It's kind of funny and sad at the same time. What makes the sequence work is that Aaron hasn't got a clue of how much trouble he's in and how dire the circumstances are. And ultimately that may be what enables him to pull out of it.

'The first cut of that sequence was excruciatingly long. As written, it was very, very detailed and progressed in tiny increments. I found out when I started showing the film to friends that I had crossed the line between giving the impression of boredom and actually boring people. So that sequence, more than any other, required a lot of tinkering. And I cut out an enormous amount. It was really built in the editing room; I shot the hell out of it and then started tearing away. But it's the climax of the film and leads to this sort of hallucination from hunger.

'I shot all the hallucinations at a variety of speeds (the standard speed is 24 frames per second). Then, if I'd shot something at four frames per second, I would optically print each frame six times, so that the action would appear at 24 fps, normal speed, but it would be very jerky and impressionistic because the frames themselves were these long blurs. If I shot at six frames, I would print each frame four times, if I shot at eight frames, I'd print each frame three times. When I saw JFK I realised Oliver Stone had done that in a lot of sequences and I thought it was a very interesting technique, so I just stole it.'

SCENE FIVE

Things take a miraculous turn for the better and the family, now reunited, moves into a bigger apartment.

'Hotchner had related a story to me which doesn't appear in the book: when they moved into that apartment his brother would get a kick out of yelling to him from another room, because they had never lived in an apartment with more than one room. I thought that was a great idea.

'Clearly, it's a set that we had built, and I took the most obvious path, in that I tried to shoot it in a very loose style because the kids had been unleashed and I wanted to sort of unleash the camera a little bit too, at least until the parents showed up. I used wider lenses to make it look bigger, and lit the scene in a way that has a certain amount of depth, juxtaposing light and dark so the space seems to have more depth and layers that it might in reality.

'I've edited all three of my films; I love that part of the process. I absolutely hate writing, but editing is always fun, for the most part. Sometimes you kick yourself - you know I blame the director a lot] But in general it really is where film becomes an artform. You're bringing all the elements together - the sound, the music, the performances - and that to me is the most interesting part.

'It's hard though. sex, lies was a really small movie. On this one I adapted the book, I directed the film, I edited the film, and it became relentless, because I was the sole recipient of all feedback. Sometimes you can use your editor as a buffer, you can get producers to give him the notes. Here, I was it, I was the only person that the studio could talk to about anything at any point in the movie.'

SCENE SIX

The final scene: a bittersweet reconciliation between Aaron and his errant, irresponsible father.

'The ending to me is very ambivalent, emotionally; he feels remote from his family, with the exception of, perhaps, his brother. He has gone though much more difficulty than they have, he's come near starvation. And he realises his father is never going to progress beyond a certain point: he's gotten the anger at his father out and he accepts him at the end for who he is. But he isn't jumping up and down with joy like his brother.

'Now that I've made three films and we can triangulate a bit, I can see that each of them contains a very isolated and disconnected protagonist - Kafka is the most extreme example you can find. I'm drawn to that sort of material and relate to it strongly.

'There's this assumption, I find, that 'if it's not dark, it's not art' - I find that especially in Europe. I've had questions from European critics about the 'happy ending' of King of the Hill. First of all, I don't find it overly happy. And second, so what? I don't like these endings when I feel like they were grafted on as the result of some test screening, but here I felt that it was earned; it wasn't arbitrary. I never found it falsely upbeat.

'This idea some critics had that I'd sold out by making a film about the Depression was so laughable - these people clearly had no clue what the United States marketplace was like. In America, as opposed to the UK, there's an in-built prejudice against period films, especially, as I found out, period films set in the Thirties. They're just not interested. Believe me, there were people in the United States who said that by making King of the Hill I was committing career suicide.'

Steven Soderbergh was talking to Sheila Johnston

(Photographs omitted)