His new film, The Christophers, which bows in Toronto Film Fest, was made entirely outside the system.

There’s no studio, no sales company, no distributor. “We’re going old school,” Soderbergh says. “We’re going to premiere it and see what happens. It’s risky, but if it works, the best-case scenario is to get multiple parties interested. So as soon as I saw how the calendar was going to lay out, I already had Toronto in mind because I’ve always had good experiences there.”

Yet alongside the hits, he has consistently returned to experimentation: shooting films on iPhones (Unsane, High Flying Bird), interactive storytelling (Mosaic) and re-cutting his earlier work (Kafka, 1991, reissued as Mr. Kneff).

That instinct to keep re-inventing himself takes new form with The Christophers, a chamber drama set in London’s art world. Ian McKellen plays Julian Sklar, a once-celebrated pop artist now broke and long estranged from his children. His kids, played by James Corden and Jessica Gunning, enlist Lori (Michaela Coel), a restorer and former forger, to finish Sklar’s abandoned canvases so they can one day inherit them. The story begins as a heist but evolves into a duel between artists, one at the end of his career, the other desperate to forge her own.

The idea came, like other Soderbergh projects, over cocktails. He pitched a “sentence and a half” to writer and frequent collaborator Ed Solomon about a younger artist insinuating herself into an older artist’s life.

“Within 15 minutes, a general shape formed about a woman who’s hired by the children of this artist to forge some works of his that he’s had buried in storage,” Solomon recalls.

“We thought you could do a story that begins as a kind of elevated concept heist idea but really turns into a story about art and mortality, legacy and ambition, and failed dreams.”

They got them. McKellen and Coel both said yes. Financing came quickly from Michael Schaefer and Mike Larocca’s new company, Department M. “It all just kind of took on a critical mass very quickly,” Soderbergh says.

Fast Production 

Solomon, McKellen and Coel spent 10 days at McKellen’s house going through the script, line by line.

Then Soderbergh came in and shot the film in 19 days!

“On The Christophers, there’s really no safety net,” he says. “The movie lives or dies on the text and the performances and coming up with ways to keep it interesting to look at. Doing that without acting from a place of insecurity is a challenge.”

Editing, under the pseudonym Mary Ann Bernard, Soderbergh says the postproduction was about streamlining. “Every shot, every scene, every line has to prove that it deserves to be in the movie,” he says.

That drive to pare things to their essence echoed the film’s subject: an artist confronting what remains when all the noise is stripped away.

Fear of Being Irrelevant

For Soderbergh, that theme cut close to home. “Irrelevance is the nightmare, for any artist,” he says. “Even being hated is an active state. Irrelevance is a non-state. There are many examples of artists and filmmakers whose work as they got older became less relevant, less compelling. That’s something I think about a great deal.”

Solomon, whose career has included big franchises (Bill & Ted, Men in Black), saw The Christophers as part of a larger turn back to first principles. “After the success of Men in Black, I suddenly found myself in this very rarefied, studio-writer world where a lot of things were coming to me,” he recalls. “But, creatively, I found it really increasingly depressing. It actually was a conscious choice I made about 16, 17 years ago to get off that train. And that’s when Steven and I came together creatively.”

In Toronto, their latest gamble will be put to the test. It’s a fitting stage: Across his career, Soderbergh has brought to TIFF everything from Gray’s Anatomy and Schizopolis to Che, The Informant! and, most recently, Presence. Each marked a different phase of his restless career, and with The Christophers, he’s once again using Toronto as the launchpad for a stripped-down experiment in how risk-taking cinema can feel urgent and alive.