Soderbergh: "I'm not some highfalutin deep thinker"

Steven Soderbergh has given an interview to 'The Sunday Times' newspaper where he reveals he is quitting movies because  audiences no longer want  challenging films.

"I think there are economic issues, some residual effect from 9/11. And I think people are looking towards movies more as an escape, rather than a mirror."

After making 28 feature films in 25 years (including 'Sex, Lies and Videotape', 'Ocean's Eleven', 'Erin Brokovich' and 'Traffic') , he's going to become a painter.

Meanwhile he's enjoying some of the best reviews of his career for his new film 'Side Effects', a tense psychological thriller starring Jude Law, Rooney Mara and Catherine Zeta-Jones.

Audiences come out puzzling over the twists. Its success is down to the rush of shock cinema, he says. "It's like heroin."

Soderbergh, 50, denies accusations of elitism. "I have in the past been accused of being anti-audience, which is funny to me as I feel I'm the opposite."

He's loved cinema since the age of 13. "I'm not some hifalutin deep thinker. I'm just somebody who loved movies and decided I wanted to make them.The idea that I am somehow standing on a balcony with the audience below is ludicrous."

But adds that his films over the past half decade have pushed him in so many ways, he feels there is nowhere left to go. "I'm wondering if there's some other way of transmitting information that we're not thinking of. But I've reached a point here to make one more film, for me, would be an admission that I'm coasting."

Nevertheless there is great excitement about his new HBO series, 'Behind the Candelabra', soon to be screened with Michael Douglas as Liberace and Matt Damon as his young lover.

It's a project he regards as a suitable goodbye. "It felt in a weird way to exist in a continuum with 'Sex, Lies'," he says. "Because I began my career with people in a room and now end it with people in a room, except they're in a hot tub. It's pretty gay."