Dano Nissen

Crime comes full circle. 

Steven Soderbergh’s new Max series “Full Circle” explores two New York City families of different backgrounds bound together by past transgressions, misdeeds and criminal enterprise.

The Knockturnal spoke to the director about the 70s New York films that informed the series, his collaboration with “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” screenwriter Ed Solomon and what he thinks of his earlier project “Traffic” and the war on drugs in light of his latest work.

We also spoke to CCH Pounder, who plays the matriarch of a Guyanese crime syndicate. Find the video interview below.

Every year there is a list released of the films and TV shows that you’ve watched. I noticed that in 2022 you watched [William] Friedkin’s “Sorcerer” three times, when this would have been filmed and in production. Was that at all on your mind when making this or were there other films you were thinking about?

Yeah, I was thinking about Friedkin’s work of the 70s a lot. I was thinking about Sydney Lumet’s New York movies from the 70s. In terms of of the film making style, I wanted it to be precise, but I also wanted it to be kind of blunt. I don’t know how else to describe it. This was something I was surfing sort of moment to moment. Some scenes required a little bit more of an operatic or baroque approach because we are making a melodrama. I wanted those press and release visually of things where you might have a scene where you are just totally unaware of what I’m doing as a director and other scenes for a specific reason the filmmaking leans forward a little bit.

I knew from the get go that I wanted to employ a very traditional melodramatic score. That was always going to be part of what we were doing. I wanted the score to not be trendy or hip or anything like that. I really wanted a classic Hollywood approach to the score to blend in with this idea of mine that we are making an urban version of “Peyton Place.” It was a difficult thing to describe, but in visual terms I wanted hopefully the texture of “French Connection” or “Sorcerer,” which are gritty.

I want to ask about Ed Solomon. This is someone who is known for writing “party on dudes” with “Bill and Ted.” You’re also someone who has made comedies. You’ve made avant-garde films like “Schizopolis” and the “Ocean’s” movies, commercial movies. What’s it like having those different sensibilities meld and what’s your collaboration like having all those different tastes?

It’s funny. It came about in a very serendipitous way. Ed and I met and started to know each other about twenty years ago. We had mutual friends. We just started meeting up occasionally and just talking. And then I ran into him in Canada when he was shooting his movie called “Levity” many years ago. We started having more serious conversations about filmmaking. My sense was the superficial read on Ed and Ed’s capabilities was not entirely accurate based on the conversations we were having. This was a much more soulful and serious person than his resume might suggest. He’s obviously also very funny. But I’m saying if you looked at his IMDb page at the point where he and I started hanging out — he’s the common jokemeister. That was only part of the picture that is really Ed.

I was working on developing this branching narrative app and writing a demo to shoot to show how this app would work. I was trying to find somebody I thought was going to grok what I was going to do. I wanted it to be fun, but I also wanted it to have some kind of drama. Out of the blue [producer] Casey Silver was involved with this, and out of the blue I said, “Why don’t we get Ed to help us with this to write this demo for this branching narrative?” And he goes, “I love it, let’s do it.” So Ed came on and helped finish the script for this demo, which was bought by HBO and turned into “Mosaic.” And so that was how we really started our collaboration. As we were doing the demo I thought, “Ok, they bought the concept, now we got to write the show. Do you want to write the show?” And he said, “Sure.” And we started working on “Mosaic.”

And often happens when you spend a lot of time standing next to somebody, ideas come about and you start to pitch things. While we were at the tail end of “Mosaic,” we started talking about two things. We started talking about “No Sudden Move,” and Ed started talking to me about what would become “Full Circle,” which is a fusion of a story he read in the newspaper in the early 2000s about an insurance scam criminal ring in Queens, where they were taking out policies on transient people, paying the premiums and then getting rid of them. We did “No Sudden Move” first, but while he was doing that he was writing “Full Circle,” which was originally supposed to include a branching narrative app version. But last spring in London, when I was shooting “Magic Mike’s Last Dance,” I said to Ed, “Look, I can’t do both of these at the same time.” “Mosaic” I was able to do because I was repurposing the footage to use in both ways. I was using the same footage from the linear version as I was using for the app. That’s why that wasn’t a problem.

My vision for the app version of “Full Circle” was completely different imagery, complete different approach directorially, different cameras, different everything. So we had the “Full Circle” script, which was 400 pages, which we were shooting in 65 days. Then we have the app version, which was about 170 pages, where there’s no overlap — it’s all new stuff. And I told him I can’t do it. I go, “I can shoot fast, but I cannot shoot that fast.” And we had to throw all that away. There’s a lot of work Ed did. Look, some of that 170 pages leaked its way back into the linear version. It’s not like we just never looked at it again, but still I wasn’t looking forward to that lunch where I was gonna sit down and tell him, “Yeah, all that work you did, I’m throwing it out.” But he understood, and as we got further into it acknowledged we’re having a hard enough time just wrapping our minds around this normal version, forget about the branching narrative app. I guess from the outside it all looks like very structured and inevitable. These things develop, but the reality is there are so many variables and you never know which thing you’re trying to get going is going to be ready when.

The other thing is Ed and I were batting 6 or 7 episodes back and forth for a couple months, feeling pretty good about it, turned it into Max and they greenlit it immediately. Then there was a moment of, “Oh shit.” We thought there would be more back and forth and development process. But we were in a “Oh great, when are you starting? How much is it going to cost ?” So we really had to shift gears and attack it more quickly than I think we anticipated. I think we thought once we turned it in there would be a fairly significant amount of time before it was actually going to shoot. And it turned out they wanted it to go and they wanted it to go immediately.

This series deals with crime and the many people who are involved, all coming from different backgrounds with different levels of privilege. It reminds me of your film “Traffic,” which deals with similar themes. Were you thinking about that film at all? In these last two decades since that film came out have you’ve evolved on your thoughts on those themes? Is this bringing something new to the table?

Well, yes and no. “Traffic” seemed a lot easier in retrospect than “Full Circle” in terms of getting to figuring out what the thing wants to be. It just happens, I think, much quicker in the case of “Traffic,” in terms of these larger things. The sad thing is, these are human issues that are never going away. When we made “Traffic” I knew right then you could make “Traffic” every five years, because this is never going to get solved, and it’s never going to go away. And it still hasn’t been solved, and it still hasn’t gone away.

You have on the one hand this many states with legalized cannabis. But these stores are still operating cash only. They are not allowed to access the banking system. So as a result, when people say this isn’t working the way it’s supposed to work; we’re not getting the benefits we’re supposed to be getting — yeah it’s because they can’t be part of the normal economic system that every other business of its scale is allowed to access, which is the federal banking system, because the government still views this as something illegal. And so it’s dangerous. This is still a cash business. We have a tendency to not be able to get out of our own way, or at least to have an idea and then before that idea actually gets executed it becomes so compromised that you can’t really get a sense of whether it was a good idea or not, because its almost unrecognizable by the time it gets through the legislative process.

To answer your question, none of the major themes in either of those projects is going anywhere anytime soon, and especially in New York. I think there is a version of “Full Circle” you can make every year that can involve two completely different groups of people that are up to things they aren’t supposed to be up to, or are built on foundations that are not acknowledged that are corrupt.