Shot on iPhone 'High Flying Bird' by Steven Soderbergh

Steven Soderbergh Talks About Filming ‘High Flying Bird’

Shot On iPhone feature film High Flying Bird had it’s world premiere at Slamdance last Sunday (Jan 27th, 2019). The film will be officially released on February 8th.

So with about a week to go before we can watch the film ourselves, some reviews are out to give us another taste of what we can expect.

“…if everyone from an Oscar-winning filmmaker to a couple of kids on YouTube can pick up a camera phone and perform an end run around the legacy powers of moviemaking, what’s to stop a few enterprising basketball players from trying to do the same?” Andrew barker, Variety.

Soderbergh has spoken in The Hollywood Reporter about his experiences filming a movie with an iPhone, bringing a film to Netflix and his next project, The Laundromat, which stars Gary Oldman and Meryl Streep.

Talking about Shooting on an iPhone…

Soderbergh: “It was shot in February and March of 2018, in three weeks. It’s a very small crew and the gear that’s available to enhance this already pretty extraordinary capture-device made it even better. 

“So, if I had to do it in a more traditional way, it would have actually hurt the film. I was able to do things because of the ease of shooting something. You can basically shoot anything you can think of, you can put the lens anywhere you want. If I were in a more traditional mode, there were things that I wouldn’t have been able to execute as well as I’d wanted, because of the size of the equipment and people necessary to move it around.

“It’s hard not to think, when I was 15 years old, what I would be doing with this stuff. I was back in a world of scraping up a few bucks for Super 8 footage, you shoot a little bit, and you have to send it away and wait for weeks for it to come back, and maybe it would look good or maybe it didn’t.

“The opportunity costs were high if you wanted to do something that looked good; now they are not. You still need to know how to stage something, but it’s a pretty incredible tool.”

How did Netflix get involved?

Soderbergh: “I’d been in conversations with Netflix during Unsane [also shot on an iPhone], and when I ended up going in a different way, I said, “Look, I have this other thing, I will make sure you get eyes on it early.” When it was basically finished, I brought it to them and they said, “Great, we’d like to buy it.”

“It felt like, the kind of film it is, the best way to maximize eyeballs. It’s got a better shot at finding all the people who will like it. Otherwise, it’s a slow-rolling platform release, which are expensive and you’re bound by where the big art house theaters are. You can’t just go anywhere.

“I just felt I’d rather have it drop and have everybody be able to see it. There are a lot of philosophical debates going on about all of this [distribution] stuff. The bottom line is: You are never going to settle on a universal field theory of how this should or shouldn’t work because every movie is different.

“As soon as you think, I’ve got that algorithm, you’ll run into a movie that will blow it up. Every movie needs to be addressed individually. They’re not automobiles.”

But self-distribution failed

Soderbergh goes on to talk about why his self-distribution company Fingerprint Releasing failed.

Soderbergh: “…the amount of money you need to create awareness for something that is going to go out on 2,500 or 3,000 screens is just significantly higher than I hoped, and much more than we had. It was merely an attempt to open up another lane. The whole point was to do what studios were doing, but for less. It just didn’t work.”

You can read the whole interview here: Soderbergh Hollywood Reporter Interview.

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