How Steven Soderbergh Brings It All Together for “Full Circle”

Timothy Olyphant and Claire Danes in the Max limited series “Full Circle”

Full Circle, a six-part series that just completed its run on Max, is a melodramatic crime drama series with interconnected storylines and hidden secrets, taking viewers on unexpected twists and turns.

Director Steven Soderbergh collaborated with writer Ed Solomon and together they talked about the project during an hour-long roundtable with a handful of trade outlets.

On Shooting Long Takes

One of the hallmarks of the show’s visual style is a tendency toward long takes that present the action at a distance without punching in excessively for close-ups. According to Soderbergh, as Jim Hemphill reported in IndieWire, those long, intricately choreographed takes have a practical component as well as a desirable emotional effect: They allow him to work faster.

“The thing that takes time when you have a lot of work to do in a day is unnecessary coverage,” the director said. “If you can rehearse and block and stage something and know where the cuts are coming before you’ve shot it and you don’t capture any redundant material and you’re not doing 20 of 30 takes of stuff, you can move pretty quickly.”

READ MORE: Steven Soderbergh Knew He Had to Keep Things Simple Filming ‘Full Circle’ (IndieWire)

On Virtual Production

In the endeavor to shoot efficiently, much of the show’s interiors were shot on a volume stage. While Soderbergh initially hoped to shoot these scenes on location in an apartment near New York’s Washington Square Park, various factors led to the production opting to shoot inside a sound stage instead. Instead, the production team decided to use the new RDX System from Rosco.

Phil Greenstreet, Rosco’s head of development for backdrops & imaging, went on the location scout around the apartments near Washington Square Park and shot hundreds of images with a Fuji 100 GFX camera. The apartment set was modified with long hallways for Soderbergh’s roving camera.

“They didn’t want to be messing with motion,” Greenstreet told Bill Desowitz at IndieWire. “They didn’t even want motion in the background, so the flags weren’t moving, the cars weren’t moving, you only see small slivers of cars in the distance anyway.”

Soderbergh explained to IndieWire, “I love what you get from [RDX] and the ability to go from one look to another in a matter of seconds. Literally, I can move the image around, I can adjust the contrast, I can adjust the brightness, I can blow things up, I can shrink them. There’s no other way to get this interactive, refractive light bouncing around the room off the surfaces with that kind of technology.”

READ MORE: Steven Soderbergh Knew He Had to Keep Things Simple Filming ‘Full Circle’ (IndieWire)

On Branching Narratives

Soderbergh and Solomon originally intended Full Circle to be a branching narrative like their 2018 HBO series Mosaic, which gave viewers the option to choose different outcomes for the story via the app.

“On Mosaic, we were able to do that, because that was repurposing the footage to use in both ways. I was using the same footage for the linear version that I was using for the app. That’s why that was not a problem,” Soderbergh explained during the roundtable, as quoted by The Hollywood Reporter’s Hilary Lewis. “My vision for the app version of Full Circle was completely different imagery, completely different approach directorially, different cameras, different everything.”

The Full Circle script was 400 pages, Soderbergh said, with the app version consisting of an additional 170 pages “in which there’s no overlap,” he said.

“I can shoot fast, but I cannot shoot that fast. We had to throw all of that away [though] some of those 170 pages leaked its way back into the linear version.”

The process made Soderbergh question whether there’s any real place for branching narratives in narrative storytelling.

“It’s not clear to me that this form of storytelling is needed or even wanted by audiences. In a primal sense, around the campfire or a dinner table, if somebody pulls the attention of the group to tell a story, the people in that group are expecting and wanting to hear a story that resolves itself. They don’t want to hear somebody tell a story at a dinner table in which they go one way, and then they back up and go, ‘Or it could go this way.’ That’s not what you want. I think there’s a very strong impulse for people to want to be told a story like, ‘You’re the storyteller. Tell me a story. Don’t make me do the work. That is your work.’

“That’s what I’m beginning to think. So it’s a real question whether or not I would return to that format without an idea that I feel can only be executed properly in that format.”

“That’s what I’m beginning to think. So it’s a real question whether or not I would return to that format without an idea that I feel can only be executed properly in that format.”

READ MORE: Steven Soderbergh on the Real Heroes of ‘Full Circle,’ Why He Didn’t Use Flashbacks and What’s Next for Characters (The Hollywood Reporter)

On AI

Asked for his thoughts on AI, Soderbergh said it could be helpful as a tool but he has doubts about AI’s ability to mimic the lived human experience.

“It doesn’t know what it means to have a flight cancelled and have to figure out how to get home,” he said, as quoted by Christina Radish at Collider. “At a certain point, that’s a real problem. You have to remember, its only input is data, text and images. It has no body temperature. It doesn’t know what it means to be tired.”

He added, “I think it’s useful for design creation… as a basic way to accumulate a framework. Let’s say it writes a script and it’s supposed to be a comedy script that ChatGPT has generated, and you say to it, ‘It needs to be funnier.’ And it says, ‘How?’ And you go, ‘I don’t know, it just needs to be funnier.’ What does it do? It’s just a tool. But if you asked it to design a creature that’s a combination of a cat and a Volkswagen Beetle, it can do that. That’s fun.”

This naturally segued onto a discussion of AI’s implications on industry jobs. Solomon doubled down on his belief that art made by human beings cannot be replicated.

“The problem is, the people making decisions on the highest level are all about the bottom line and “How can I get rid of as many human beings as possible?” [and they] don’t have the ability to judge what is good art and not good art. If we don’t draw a line in the sand now, my fear is we’re going to continue to a place where a lot of people are [going to be] out of work.”

READ MORE: Steven Soderbergh on ‘Full Circle’ and How William Friedkin & Sidney Lumet’s Work in the ‘70s Influenced Series (Collider)

Engineered to the Final Shot

Inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 film High and Low, the premise of Full Circle asks: What if there were a kidnapping but the wrong child was taken?

But while viewers may have originally tuned in to see Claire Danes, Dennis Quaid, Timothy Olyphant, Zazie Beetz and Jim Gaffigan, those who stayed with the limited series saw a story take about two Guyanese teenagers take center stage.

“You think it’s about this group of well-off white people being victimized. And then over the course of the show, the whole thing starts to tilt,” Soderbergh told the group of reporters, as quoted by THR. “By the end of it, we’re in a very different place than where we started. So it was this melodrama that had this very interesting subterranean thematic thread bubbling along that eventually comes up and takes primacy in the last two episodes.”

The series ends with the lead Guyanese characters walking around the unfinished Colony at Essequibo, the ill-fated development that connected them with Danes’ character’s family, and a pan over to a billboard advertising that the aborted project is “coming in 2003.”

“From the very, very beginning of the script, it was all engineered to that one last shot,” Soderbergh said.

Critical Reception

Whether moving from character to character or balancing suspense and action, Full Circle thrives on efficiency, reviews Ben Travers of IndieWire.

“Taken as a creative twist on a tried-and-true format, it balances the experimental and the satisfying in a way TV should strive for more often, especially in an era when filmmakers are being asked to create content. If you’re going to churn out stories for streaming, you may as well maintain your artistic credibility.”

READ MORE: ‘Full Circle’ Review: Steven Soderbergh Sustains His Hot Streak on Max (IndieWire)

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