“We didn’t really think about genre,” says director Soderbergh. “Human behavior was our compass. Our characters’ evolution as people determined the film’s trajectory.”

Soderbergh and writer Ed Solomon have worked together on the noir thriller “No Sudden Move” and the mysteries “Mosaic” and “Full Circle.” “The Christophers,” their latest collaboration, opened in limited release April 10.

Soderbergh: It started with one-sentence pitch to Ed over drinks. There’s an older artist at the end of his career, and a young apprentice-type rolls up, and there’s something not on the level about her presence. In my mind, she was more of a Tom Ripley character. Ed immediately started filling that idea out. He was like: “What if there are children? What if there’s some issue about the value of the estate?” Over time he shoved these deeper themes of mentorship, insecurity and ego into it. It really became about asking the question, what is a legacy?

Soderbergh: That’s the terror for every creative person. I call it the slackening. It’s night sweat material for me. I’m very interested in the lives of artists. How can somebody maintain their output right up to the end? What is it about their personality that enabled them to keep their level high? Why does the opposite happen? What makes someone incapable of sustaining that quality? Nobody wants to be described as an artist whose stuff fell off. But how do you determine that? Sometimes critics are wrong. Sometimes your work showed up too soon, and you were ahead of the audience. I focus on what I can control, which is the method of making things. I set up circumstances with trusted collaborators that allow for the alchemy that creates good stuff. All I can do is bring the ingredients together in a pot. That’s the best chance you’ve got of making something that tastes good.

Soderbergh: It made me realize I need to find material that I like and that has a shot of reaching a sizable audience. “The Christophers” is very accessible movie, but it’s not going to turn into “Weapons”? Going forward, I want to find something that has scale, because it’s been a while since I’ve made a movie of real size, and has a hook that gets people to go to the theaters in big numbers. I want to find something that I can event-ize, that I also love.

Ian McKellen, vibrant and larger-than-life, but also vulnerable and insecure

Soderbergh: I didn’t see any lingering physical manifestation from the fall. But it’s a type of event that anybody would be affected by. There’s a sense of precarity that it must conjure up.

Soderbergh: I was just blown away by her show, “I May Destroy You.” It was an entirely new thing. She’s a thoroughbred. She’s got all the tools. It’s kind of ridiculous how talented she is.

Julian’s children (James Corden, Jessica Gunning) 

Soderbergh: Julian glibly dismisses their upbringing. It is indicative of what they experienced. As a child, you’re wired to seek approval of your parents and at no stage of their lives were they given any approbation or affection from him. That corrodes you. They’re feral because nobody taught them to be different.

Julian hasn’t changed much by the end of the film. He’s only come to a place where his behavior has changed around Michaela’s character. He can be with her in a way that he isn’t with other people, and probably never has been. He’s still a jerk.

Using A.I. in documentary “John Lennon”

Soderbergh: This is mystifying to me. I found out from people looking at me like they’d seen my chest X-ray. I was like, “What’s up?” And they’re, “These AI comments!” They read me back what I had said, and I felt, “Where’s the smoke here?”

Soderbergh: I’m just not threatened by it. I’m only scared of things I don’t understand. I felt obligated to engage with it, to figure out what it is and what it can do. It turned out to be very good tool for certain passages of the Lennon documentary where I needed surrealistic imagery that was impossible to shoot. It allowed me to solve creative problem about how to visualize what John and Yoko are speaking about philosophically. Ten years ago, I would have needed to engage a visual effects house at unbelievable cost to come up with this stuff. No longer. My job is to deliver a good movie. This tool showed up at a moment when I needed it. I don’t think it’s the solution to everything, and I don’t think it’s the death of everything. We’re in the early stages. Five years from now, we all may be going, “That was a fun phase.” We may end up not using it as much as we thought. There are some people that I have love and respect for that refuse to engage with it. That’s their privilege. But I’m not built that way. You show me a new tool. I want to get my hands on it and see what’s going on.

“The Christophers” Inspired by?

Soderbergh: I thought a lot about the great John Schlesinger, whose film, “Sunday, Bloody Sunday,” is one of my favorites. It’s a great London film. I was influenced by his treatment of the characters. They’re so complex and he has this willingness to allow all the various shades of people to be expressed. He never judges his characters, and that’s what we tried to do with “The Christophers.”