Steven Soderbergh Doubles Down on AI Use in Next Movie: “I’m Just Not Threatened by It”

Listen, Steven Soderbergh has always been a risk taker. This is the same guy who mainstreamed the indie film movement with “Sex, Lies, and Videotape.” The same man who shot films on iPhones, stripped down production models, and has jumped between studio and micro-budget work. His career has been defined by risk.

Which is why I wasn’t surprised by Soderbergh’s now controversial comments from the past week, where he announced an upcoming movie tackling the Spanish-American War, starring Wagner Moura, that will “use a lot of AI.”

However, in a new interview with Variety, Soderbergh is actually doubling down.

Soderbergh’s attitude toward the backlash is, to put it mildly, unconcerned. When asked about criticism of his AI embrace, he responds: “I’m just not threatened by it. I’m only scared of things I don’t understand.”

For Soderbergh, AI is not an existential crisis—it’s an unfamiliar instrument that he intends to learn, test, and potentially exploit creatively. In his own words, “My job is to deliver a good movie, period.”

No, really—Soderbergh is genuinely confused at the intensity of the reaction to his comments. When he first learned about the controversy, with a friend repeating his words back to him, his reaction? “Where’s the smoke here?”

In his view, AI simply replaced what would once have required expensive VFX pipelines:

“Ten years ago, I would have needed to engage a visual effects house at an unbelievable cost… No longer.”

There needs to be some context here. What went unmentioned in many of the think pieces is that Soderbergh is recalibrating creatively after the underperformance of “Black Bag,” which, despite critical acclaim, struggled at the box office, prompting him to rethink his approach.

He now says he wants to make films with “scale” and something that can be “event-ized”—a notable shift for a director often associated with lean, experimental storytelling.