Steven Soderbergh says he helped Christopher Nolan get his Insomnia gig
Steven Soderbergh loved Memento so much he helped solidify the nearly two-decade long partnership between Christopher Nolan and Warner Bros.
History is full of interesting little domino effects. Here’s one from the cinema side: if Steven Soderbergh never intervened, we probably wouldn’t have Insomnia. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Soderbergh says he became Christopher Nolan’s champion after seeing a screening of Memento and thinking it was “a fucking instant classic.”
Months later, Nolan’s agent Dan Aloni called Soderbergh “and he goes, ‘Look, there’s this script over at Warner, Insomnia. Chris is really interested in it, but Warner won’t take the meeting,’” Soderbergh recalled. “And I go, ‘What do you mean they won’t take the meeting?’ And he goes, ‘Well, the executive there didn’t like Memento.’ And I said, ‘Well, so what? Why won’t they take the meeting?’”
Soderbergh (who at this point had already directed Sex, Lies, And Videotape and more) called up the doubting executive and urged him to take the meeting. “And he goes, ‘But I didn’t like the movie.’ And I go, ‘Well, did you like the movie-making?’ And he goes, ‘Well, yeah, it’s brilliantly made.’ And I go, ‘Take the meeting.’ That is all I did. I knew Chris well enough to know that if he gets in the room, he’s going to get that job.”
Soderbergh may have been one of Nolan’s earliest supporters, but these days The Dark Knight filmmaker has plenty of people in his corner. After a career of hits, Oppenheimer is receiving rave reviews. Another legendary director, Paul Schrader, admitted he’s “not a Nolan groupie” but called the movie “the best, most important film of this century.”
But as far as domino effects go, Soderbergh says Nolan would’ve gotten here even if his intervention hadn’t sparked a long partnership between the filmmaker and Warner Bros.“[Let’s] be clear: one way or another, Christopher Nolan is going to emerge. If he didn’t make ‘Insomnia,’ he’d have made something else and still had the career he has,” Soderbergh told Rolling Stone. “That was just a fortunate set of circumstances where I could get on the phone and advocate for him.”