Steven Soderbergh is an American film producer, screenwriter, cinematographer, editor, and an Academy Award-winning film director. He is best known for directing the films Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Erin Brockovich, Traffic, Ocean’s Eleven, Che and The Informant!

It wasn’t until Soderbergh came back to Baton Rouge that he conceived the idea for Sex, Lies, and Videotape, which he wrote in eight days. The independent film won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, became a worldwide commercial success and greatly contributed to the 1990s independent film revolution. At age 26, Soderbergh became the youngest director to win the festival’s top award. Movie critic Roger Ebert dubbed Soderbergh the “poster boy of the Sundance generation”.

Sex, Lies, and Videotape was followed by a series of low-budget box-office disappointments: Kafka, a biopic mixing fact and Kafka’s own fiction; King of the Hill, a critically acclaimed Depression-era drama; The Underneath, a remake of Robert Siodmak’s 1949 film noir Criss Cross; and Schizopolis, a comedy which he starred in, wrote, composed, and shot as well as directed. He also directed the Spalding Gray monologue film Gray’s Anatomy in 1996.

Making good on his Schizopolis-inspired “artistic wake-up call”, his commercial slump ended in 1998 with Out of Sight, a stylized adaptation of an Elmore Leonard novel. The film was widely praised, though only a moderate box-office success. It reaffirmed Soderbergh’s potential, sparking the beginnings of a lucrative artistic partnership between Clooney and Soderbergh.

Soderbergh followed up on the success of Out of Sight by making another crime caper, The Limey, from an original screenplay by Lem Dobbs and starring veteran actors Terence Stamp and Peter Fonda. The film was well-received, but not as much as Erin Brockovich, a “Rocky movie” he directed. Later that year, Soderbergh released Traffic, a social drama written by Stephen Gaghan and featuring an ensemble cast. Traffic became his most acclaimed movie since Sex, Lies, and Videotape, and earned him an Academy Award for Best Director. He was also nominated that same year for Erin Brockovich. He is the only director to have been nominated in the same year for Best Director for two different films by the Academy Awards, the Golden Globes and the Directors Guild of America.

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