“The Christophers,” the story of a past-his-prime painter (Ian McKellen) and the mysterious assistant (Michaela Coel) he hires to destroy some priceless works of his half-finished art, defies easy categorization. It’s funny and sad, veering between a crime thriller and a character drama, as it examines the precarious nature of talent. Why, it asks, do some artists lose their creative spark?
“We didn’t really think about genre,” says Steven Soderbergh, the film’s director. “Human behavior was our compass. Our characters’ evolution as people determined the film’s trajectory.”
Soderbergh is scrunched next to Ed Solomon, the writer of “The Christophers,” at a comically small desk at the Warren Street Hotel in Manhattan. The two have worked together previously on the noir thriller “No Sudden Move” and the twisty mysteries “Mosaic” and “Full Circle.” It’s the day before “The Christophers,” their latest collaboration, opens in limited release on April 10, and the men are finishing off the promotional rounds for the low-budget indie.
It’s a press tour that courted controversy after Soderbergh, one of the most candid and thoughtful A-list directors in Hollywood, was open about using AI on an upcoming documentary about John Lennon and talked about its creative possibilities. His remarks sparked a torrent of criticism on social media, where some commentators faulted him for embracing technology that could kill jobs in the entertainment industry.
But Soderbergh is never one to shy away from a debate. In our discussion, he doubled down on his views about AI’s potential, while also talking about his working relationship with Solomon, the artistic anxieties that “The Christophers” explores and the “Star Wars” project he was forced to abandon.
Who came up with the idea for “The Christophers”?
Steven Soderbergh: It started with a one-sentence pitch to Ed over drinks. Basically it was, there’s an older artist at the end of his career, and a young apprentice-type rolls up, and there’s something not on the level about her presence. In my mind, she was more of a Tom Ripley character. Ed immediately started filling that idea out. He was like: “What if there are children? What if there’s some issue about the value of the estate?” Over time he shoved these deeper themes of mentorship, insecurity and ego into it. It really became about asking the question, what is a legacy?
Ed Solomon: I hadn’t even planned to write something. It emerged after I asked, what are you thinking about? And then we just started throwing stuff around. I drew on the emotional relationships I’d had with quite a few different artists — directors, writers, comedians — and how fame could turn into a prison for them. But sometimes there are things that enter from the subconscious. Like two weeks ago, I turned to Steven and said, “Oh my God, my mom’s a painter!” It’s funny how sometimes you don’t realize what you’re writing about.
Julian, the character that Ian McKellen plays, was a major painter who squandered his talent after becoming a reality show judge. Have you seen people who achieved at a very high level and then lost their creative way?
Soderbergh: That’s the terror for every creative person. I call it the slackening. It’s night sweat material for me. I’m very interested in the lives of artists. How can somebody maintain their output right up to the end? What is it about their personality that enabled them to keep their level high? And why does the opposite happen? What makes someone incapable of sustaining that quality? Nobody wants to be described as an artist whose stuff fell off. But also, how do you determine that? Sometimes critics are wrong. Sometimes your work showed up too soon, and you were ahead of the audience. I focus on what I can control, which is the method of making things. I set up circumstances and environments with trusted collaborators that allow for the alchemy that creates good stuff to take place. All I can do is bring the ingredients together in a pot. That’s the best chance you’ve got of making something that tastes good.
Last year, you released the spy thriller “Black Bag.” It had two big stars in Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender. Critics loved it, but it struggled at the box office. Did its commercial failure make you recalibrate anything about how you choose projects?
Soderbergh: Well, yeah. It made me realize I need to find material that I like and that has a shot of reaching a sizable audience. “The Christophers” is a very accessible movie, but it’s not going to turn into “Weapons,” right? But going forward, I want to find something that has scale, because it’s been a while since I’ve made a movie of real size, and has a hook that gets people to go to the theaters in big numbers. I want to find something that I can event-ize, that I also love.
Ed, your previous collaborations with Steven, like “No Sudden Move” and “Full Circle,” were intricately plotted. “The Christophers” feels more like a chamber piece where two razor-sharp characters circle each other, often jousting verbally. Do you find it easier to work out the plot of the film or to write the dialogue?
Solomon: When it works best, everything is intertwined and coming together at the same time. What I’m interested in is finding truthful moments that are surprising. To do that, I have to constantly go back to the question, what would actually happen here, and what would this character say or do that feels truthful and not stock? That requires getting into the emotional space of a person. Once I feel what they’re feeling, I know where they need to go. When I get too plot-oriented, characters start to become little more than chess pieces you’re moving around. That’s a problem with how they teach screenwriting. More and more, they teach it as a structural event. Now, there is an inherent structure in movies. You need a beginning, a middle and an end. But the more time I spend doing this, the more I go back to the most basic questions, why is this person here? What do they want? And what’s the truth of the situation?
Ian McKellen is so wonderful in this film — he’s vibrant and larger-than-life, but also vulnerable and insecure. He had a terrible accident in 2024 and injured himself falling off the stage. Do you think that experience influenced his performance?
Soderbergh: I didn’t see any lingering physical manifestation from the fall. But it’s a type of event that anybody would be affected by. There’s a sense of precarity that it must conjure up.
Solomon: Before we started filming, there was this moment when Ian said, “I don’t know what I would do if I weren’t acting.” We were talking about how meaning and purpose get funneled through a creative person’s work. He didn’t say anything explicitly about the fall, but he did admit how scared he would be if he couldn’t perform any longer. I’m guessing that an accident like that puts everything in stark relief and that the feelings he was having were, in some way, related to the character of Julian. They both were asking, “Who am I if I don’t have my art?”
Steven, what made you think of Michaela Coel for this film?
Soderbergh: I was just blown away by her show, “I May Destroy You.” It was an entirely new thing. She’s a thoroughbred. She’s got all the tools. It’s kind of ridiculous how talented she is.
I’ve seen the movie twice. The first time, Julian’s children (James Corden, Jessica Gunning) seemed like miserable, greedy wretches. The second time, I felt a lot of sympathy for them. They obviously had no love growing up.
Soderbergh: In the film, Julian glibly dismisses their upbringing. It is indicative of what they experienced. As a child, you’re wired to seek the approval of your parents and at no stage of their lives were they given any approbation or affection from him. And that corrodes you. They’re feral because nobody taught them to be different.
Solomon: My heart breaks for them in a strange way. At the same time, we didn’t want to do the typical, let’s resolve that relationship thing, because we also wanted it to stay honest. We wanted the changes these characters experience to be internal, and not overt and tectonic.
Soderbergh: The same thing is true with Julian. He hasn’t changed much by the end of the film. He’s only come to a place where his behavior has changed around Michaela’s character. He can be with her in a way that he isn’t with other people, and probably never has been. That’s as far as he’s able to go. He’s still a jerk.
Steven, congratulations on getting into Cannes with your documentary “John Lennon: The Last Interview.” Your recent comments about using AI on the film have been heavily criticized. What do you make of the debate?
Soderbergh: [Pauses] This is mystifying to me.
Are you unaware of the blowback?
Soderbergh: No, I’m aware. I found out from people looking at me like they’d seen my chest X-ray. I was like, “What’s up?” And they’re like, “These AI comments!” And they read me back what I had said, and I honestly felt, “Where’s the smoke here?”
You used AI on that film and said you are going to use it on an upcoming film about the Spanish-American War. Clearly, you see it as a useful tool?
Soderbergh: I’m just not threatened by it. I’m only scared of things I don’t understand. So I felt obligated to engage with it, to figure out what it is and what it can do. It turned out to be a very good tool for certain passages of the Lennon documentary where I needed surrealistic imagery that was impossible to shoot. It allowed me to solve a creative problem about how to visualize what John and Yoko are speaking about philosophically. Ten years ago, I would have needed to engage a visual effects house at an unbelievable cost to come up with this stuff. No longer. My job is to deliver a good movie, period. And this tool showed up at a moment when I needed it. I don’t think it’s the solution to everything, and I don’t think it’s the death of everything. We’re in the very early stages. Five years from now, we all may be going, “That was a fun phase.” We may end up not using it as much as we thought we were going to. There are some people that I have absolute love and respect for that refuse to engage with it. That’s their privilege. But I’m not built that way. You show me a new tool. I want to get my hands on it and see what’s going on.
Ed, as a writer, what do you think of AI?
Solomon: I’m not interested in using it as a writing tool because it takes away from what I love about what I do, which is the process. It makes it result-oriented. I’m not scared of it. I just don’t see myself using it in any kind of a significant creative way.
Steven, your “Star Wars” film, “The Hunt for Ben Solo,” got cancelled. What did you learn from the process of trying to get that movie made?
Soderbergh: That there’s no such thing as wasted creative time. It was great to work on that with Adam Driver and [writers] Rebecca Blunt and Scott Burns. Sometimes that’s just the way things go. I know what we came up with was good. I think it would have excited audiences. Working with smart people, trying to solve shit, is how you get better. Adam felt bad for having gotten me into it. I think he felt like he wasted my time, and I made it clear to him, “Dude, that was not wasted time.” It’s a problem solving experience that will get applied to everything I do going forward. I’m not upset. I feel positive about everything that we did together.
What movie would you recommend someone watch to get in the right frame of mind for “The Christophers”?
Soderbergh: Making this, I thought a lot about the great John Schlesinger. His film, “Sunday, Bloody Sunday,” is one of my favorites. It’s a great London film. And I was influenced by his treatment of the characters. They’re so complex and he has this willingness in his movies to allow all the various shades of people to be expressed. He never judges his characters, and that’s what we tried to do with “The Christophers.”
