Steven Soderbergh Explains How He Came To Work On The Hunger Games

Last month a strange little story popped online. It was reported that director Steven Soderbergh had taken a second unit gig on the set of Gary Ross' The Hunger Games. Soderbergh and Ross have been friends for years, but there were still a lot of questions to be asked: How did Ross offer the job? Why did he pick Soderbergh? Why did Soderbergh say yes? Fortunately, with Contagion due out next week the Traffic filmmaker is doing the press rounds and recently explained the whole situation to Moviefone.

It all started in April when Ross was going over storyboards and found that there would be two days of second unit needed for the first week of August. According to Soderbergh, Ross called him and said, "Is there any way you can come down and help me out? Because I'd rather have you do it than hire somebody who I don't know." Seeing a gap in his schedule - Contagion had wrapped and Magic Mike was just starting to be prepped - he agreed.

As for Soderbergh's approach, his goal was to simply emulate everything that Ross and cinematographer Tom Stern had been doing. "If I've done my job properly, I hope I did," Soderbergh said, "by design, you won't be able to tell what I did. Because it's supposed to cut seamlessly into what they're doing. That's the whole point. That's why he asked me to come down, because he knew that I would be rigorous about matching what they were doing." The filmmaker was shown footage from around the stuff he was doing and they talked at length about the vision of the project. "I thought, 'OK, I see what you guys are doing,'" Sodbergh said. "'I know what the tool kit is. I know what the rules are'. And it's fun in a way."

He also found some excitement making films not for himself, but for someone else's approval. "I was really back to that situation of being the person who has to please someone else – as opposed to pleasing myself," Soderbergh said. "And that made me really anxious. You know, I wanted to do a good job... Gary is a friend of mine."

Best part about this? You know there are going to be some crazy people out there who go to see The Hunger Games just so that they can try and pick out the shots done by Soderbergh. Hell, I may even join them.