The Girlfriend Experience

The Sasha Grey Experience

Steven Soderbergh did a lot of unpredictable things with his new film "The Girlfriend Experience." At the January Sundance sneak preview of the film he projected a 1080p reduction of the file, then a "work in progress." This week he released it on Amazon as a video on demand rental before it hits theaters on May 22. Soderbergh shot it with a 4K-Red digital camera (a camera so light and light-sensitive that only two scenes in the film required more illumination than was already in the room), he made the film in 16 days for a budget of $1.7 million, it was largely improvised, and he cast non-professional actors. He said he "hired real people and turned them loose" including journalist Mark Jacobsen cast as a journalist and movie reviewer Glenn Kenny playing an escort reviewer. That he cast Sasha Grey as the high-end Manhattan sex worker was exciting but not entirely unpredictable; Grey herself is as complex and layered and mesmerizing as a Soderbergh film itself -- that's why Grey's fans cross all kinds of cultural and moral divides.

"...Steven wanted a very natural feel to the film and have me bring in my personality -- I had to find a way to do that while also creating a character...."

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Soderbergh Shares The Girlfriend Experience

Every year at the Sundance Film Festival, there are a couple of unexpected surprises and to coincide with the 20th Anniversary of Steven Soderbegh's Sex, Lies and Videotape premiering at the festival, there was a last-minute addition to the program billed merely as "An Evening with Steven Soderbergh." Word quickly got around that the filmmaker would be using the Eccles Theater's vast space to sneak preview his new movie The Girlfriend Experience to an audience for the first time.

After being introduced by the festival's director Geoff Gilmore, Soderbergh tried play the sneak preview cooly as if he hadn't planned on showing anything, but that ruse was quickly dropped to the delight of the packed theater. Before rolling the film, Soderbergh made it clear that the film was a work-in-progress, and one can expect changes before the movie gets its inevitable release later this year. Even so, the film, shot using the same Red digital camera technology Soderbergh used on his groundbreaking Latin American epic Che, looked absolutely amazing and was clearly a step up from his last film in the HDNet series, Bubble.

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