While he isn’t making feature films at the moment, that doesn’t mean Steven Soderbergh doesn’t like to play with them. We’ve seen him mashup Alfred Hitchcock and Gus Van Sant‘s "Psycho," and now he’s toying with a massive cultural touchstone of the 1980s.
Soderbergh decided to take Steven Spielberg‘s "Raiders Of The Lost Ark" and drape a new score on top—mostly consisting of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross‘ work for David Fincher‘s "The Social Network" and "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo"—and then turned the whole movie into monochrome black-and-white. Why? Here’s an excerpt from Soderbergh’s blog post:
I value the ability to stage something well because when it’s done well its pleasures are huge, and most people don’t do it well, which indicates it must not be easy to master (it’s frightening how many opportunities there are to do something wrong in a sequence or a group of scenes. Minefields EVERYWHERE. Fincher said it: there’s potentially a hundred different ways to shoot something but at the end of the day there’s really only two, and one of them is wrong).
So I want you to watch this movie and think only about staging, how the shots are built and laid out, what the rules of movement are, what the cutting patterns are. See if you can reproduce the thought process that resulted in these choices by asking yourself: why was each shot—whether short or long—held for that exact length of time and placed in that order? Sounds like fun, right? It actually is. To me. Oh, and I’ve removed all sound and color from the film, apart from a score designed to aid you in your quest to just study the visual staging aspect.
Sadly, we can’t embed the effort here, but head over to Extension 765 and watch it there, and yeah, it’s pretty fascinating stuff.
It\’s pretty clear that Soderbergh doesn\’t believe he improved the film any.
Only a fool would use Neo as a name for a comment section, lol. I\’m surprised how many people do not get this exercise. He\’s not changing anything. One of the previous comments from Daniel is exactly right.
The people commenting here seem to be missing the point. Soderbergh isn\’t out to "improve" Raiders by changing the music, so much as he is trying to distill the image from the music so you can look at the shots more objectively.
I\’m amazed by the stupidity out there on the internet. Are your attention spans to short to even read the article?
Only a fool would replace the music of John Williams. Loser
Raiders is actually the one Spielberg film that\’s a masterpiece so I wouldn\’t change a thing.
I think he means so that it still plays as a fluid experience — he\’s using different music so your brain doesn\’t fall into the same groove of watching Raiders for the umpteenth time, to let you see the staging more clearly. Very effective as a study tool.
Williams\’ score already helped with the visual staging aspect, dammit Soderbergh!