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Thursday, 27 February, 2003, 17:39 GMT
Solaris
Steven Soderbergh - the only director apart from Francis Ford Copolla to have been nominated for two Oscars in the same year - has a reputation for never making the same film twice.
His 1989 debut success, Sex, Lies And Videotape, had almost nothing in common with Out Of Sight which revived his career 10 years later after a series of flops. Erin Brockovich and Traffic - the movies which brought him his double Oscar listing - were also very non-identical twins. But - in a different sense - Soderbergh is now repeating material. Traffic was adapted from a TV series, while his next film - Ocean's 11 - was based on a 1960 Frank Sinatra flick. And now Soderbergh has made his third remake in a row: Solaris, starring George Clooney as a widowed psychiatrist sent to a space station where deaths have taken place.
(Edited highlights of the panel's review)
MARK LAWSON:
SAM TAYLOR-WOOD: I thought this will be dire and also Solaris. I thought it would be terrible and I would come out feeling a waste of a few hours. But I thought the opposite. I think Steven Soderbergh is an extremely clever director in the way that he handled it. I thought the film clips that were shown didn't really do it justice, because you don't get the sense of the claustrophobia and the intensity of the film through those clips. I think it was uncompromising for an American remake. I thought it was quite brave to make it, because it won't bring in lots of money and I thought it was quite a challenging film.
MARK LAWSON: They are trying to sell it here as a sci-fi mystery with a bit of philosophy thrown in. Do you buy that?
MICHAEL GOVE: I think that George Clooney is miscast. He's a light actor, a modern Cary Grant. He's inappropriate for the role. I think Natasha McElhone is playing a Sloane lost in space.
SAM TAYLOR-WOOD:
MICHAEL GOVE: There are a few meaningful significant glances. There is no psychological depth to their relationship.
SAM TAYLOR-WOOD:
MICHAEL GOVE:
MARK LAWSON:
MICHAEL GOVE: What's the game? You are wasting 90 minutes rather than 3 hours. The other thing is for anyone who is a genuine sci-fi fan, a lot of the science is hocus-pocus. They lay on the science in an effort to give it an air of sophistication and all they make any genuine sci-fan do is roll his eyes.
MARK LAWSON:
GERMAINE GREER: Here I am in space and I'm going to get a second chance to do it all over again. What I couldn't believe and I couldn't believe anything about it really and I don't like science fiction, the thing that I was amazed by is I saw Andrei Tarkovsky on video after I saw this version of Solaris and I thought it was wonderful.
MARK LAWSON:
GERMAINE GREER: Here is a psychiatrist who thinks that people remember things accurately, in particular himself, who is surprised to be told by the incarnation of his memory that it is not she and not correct and I'm suicidal because you remember me as suicidal and so on. In fact, the Andrei Tarkovsky is much tougher psychologically and philosophically because you start off knowing that these are projections of your memories and they are made of neutrinos. He gets told this as soon as he gets there. But instead Clooney has to work it out and I thought maybe they were going to be intelligent about what kind of a bully he was. When he is being a psychiatrist. All you can think is I hope he's never my psychiatrist, the bastard. He's chopping them off in mid-word.
MARK LAWSON: It's entirely on his terms and that's his selfishness and brutality.
GERMAINE GREER: I don't think he learns anything much. In the end he emulates himself, great, terrific, I am in favour of that.
MARK LAWSON: What I think might appeal to you as an artist, is this is his third remake and I think it's one of the great things about Steven Soderbergh that he wants to take on the history of cinema and play with previous versions. I think he's does fascinating things with them.
SAM TAYLOR-WOOD: But I felt this was so full of grief and confusion and the ideas and the way that he has filmed it. I felt the intensity of the relationship and I didn't expect what I went along to see. I know it was a remake of a tough film but I still found it tough and I felt it dealt with the issues that Andrei Tarkovsky was dealing with. I thought I would be alone on liking this film. This transcript was produced from the teletext subtitles that are generated live for Newsnight. It has been checked against the programme as broadcast, however Newsnight can accept no responsibility for any factual inaccuracies. We will be happy to correct serious errors.
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