St. Louis Post-Dispatch – For his 20th feature film, “The Girlfriend Experience,” director Steven Soderbergh has returned to a theme he explored in his breakthrough “sex, lies and videotape”: infidelity. Yet the Oscar-winning director of “Traffic” and blockbusters such as “Ocean’s Eleven” refuses to play it safe. Like his recent projects “Bubble” and “Che,” “The Girlfriend Experience” is available for PC download and pay-per-view simultaneous with the theatrical release. And Soderbergh crossed an invisible line when he cast adult-film star Sasha Grey in the lead role.
I spoke by phone with Steven Soderbergh last week.
Q: Did the original idea for this movie come from you or from the screenwriters (Brian Koppelman and David Levien, who wrote “Ocean’s Thirteen”)?
A: It landed on us at the same time. We were together at a bar in midtown Manhattan when I saw a woman who seemed disconnected from everything else that was going on there. I asked them if they could figure out how she fit in, and they both said “Oh, that’s a G.F.E.”
