Before this weekend, it didn’t seem very likely that we’d find some clear connection between the productions of Paul Schrader‘s The Canyons and Spike Jonze‘s Her, but when Steven Soderbergh, never wont to meet expectations, steps in, you’re willing to believe almost anything. You may recall, buried deep in that now-legendary New York Times profile of the former project’s disastrous process, the notice that he’d offered a new, turned-out-in-72-hours edit of the Lindsay Lohan-starrer — it wasn’t to the other filmmaker’s liking, sadly — and while this possibility clearly didn’t come to fruition, it allowed a glimpse into an unusual aspect of the multi-hyphenate’s alter ego, Mary Ann Bernard.
Although made with a seemingly less hectic schedule, Her — detailed in a rather illuminating profile at Vulture — was nevertheless handed right off to Soderbergh for a proper reason: Jonze considers him “the smartest, fastest editor-filmmaker I know,” a plaudit proved when a 150-minute picture found itself whittled down to 90 over the course of a mere 24 hours (maybe Schrader was underestimating his skill?), but, despite this missing hour, delivered without much in the way of major suggestions. In the writer-director’s words, his own, seemingly major command to “[b]e radical, shock us” was met with “things to think about” — from it, Jonze says, “the confidence to lose some big things that I wasn’t ready to lose [before].”
What makes his involvement all the more intriguing — and what makes Her, a film yours truly desperately wants to see, suddenly all the more appealing — is that Soderbergh‘s edits seem to have informed the final picture in an almost psychological sense. Excisions which could amend “anything that might distract from the story he wanted to tell” seem more obvious, once noted — including a faux documentary with Chris Cooper — but the ability “to make connections between scenes out of connections he made” have us wondering where, if anywhere, his authorial touch may be felt. It’s better that, ultimately, Spike Jonze make a Spike Jonze film, especially when we don’t get them very often to begin with, but a touch of Soderbergh isn’t really so bad.
Her will premiere at the New York Film Festival this weekend, enter a limited release on December 18, and open wide on January 10.
Are you curious to see how Steven Soderbergh might have affected Her?