Steven Soderbergh’s second iPhone-shot film takes the technology to fresh heights, says Dan Slevin.
André Holland as sports agent Ray Burke in Steven Soderbergh’s High Flying Bird. Photo: Netflix
Since Steven Soderbergh retired from the film business in 2013 (supposedly to concentrate on painting, his boutique liquor importation business and re-cutting famous films for fun) he has directed four feature films and 27 episodes of television, photographed and edited the sequel to his own blockbuster hit Magic Mike (Magic Mike XXL), and produced or executive produced four television series and one feature documentary.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest Mr. Soderbergh is not really retired.
Actually, that’s a weak joke. Soderbergh officially came out of retirement for the 2017 NASCAR-heist movie Logan Lucky but he’s never really taken his foot off the gas at any point in his career. Now, technology is enabling him to bypass the big Hollywood studios and their soul-crushing development process and he’s found an on-set method that allows him to work fast and make decisions quickly.
For a long time, he has shot and edited his own films (digital filmmaking allows him to produce rough cuts of scenes in his hotel room at night while the rest of his crew are relaxing) and now the cinematography you can produce with a humble iPhone is good enough that he can take the camera to places where traditional kit won’t go.
Director Steven Soderbergh with his iPhone rig shooting a scene from High Flying Bird. Photo: Netflix
The results are spectacularly apparent with his first film for Netflix – High Flying Bird – which was shot with an iPhone, a single 12-inch LCD light for illumination and a wheelchair instead of a dolly. It’s not as intensely in-your-face as his first iPhone picture, Unsane which came out in theatres last year, but it does encourage a free-flowing mobility to the camera and multiple set-ups for each scene which might have been tricky with more infrastructure to wrangle. The editor in him is positively giddy with all the extra choices available.
“But what is it about?” I hear you ask (with justification). Firstly, it’s about 90 minutes long which is just about perfect. Secondly, it’s about the African-American experience, especially athletes who sell themselves to white team owners and then lose control over most aspects of their lives in the process. There are obvious parallels with other aspects of African-American history and the film makes sure they are powerfully made.
Photo: Netflix
These are the responsibility of screenwriter Tarell Alvin McCraney who wrote the original play that the Oscar-winner Moonlight was based on. High Flying Bird has the feel of a play, too. The dialogue is zippy and constant and so dense at times it’s not always easy to follow. It has a Sorkin-esque kind of feel about it – that same kind of hyper-articulacy – but Sorkin himself would struggle to approximate the many black voices on offer here with any kind of authority.
André Holland (who played Kevin the short order cook in the final sequence of Moonlight) is Ray Burke, a sports agent with a long list of professional basketball clients. This would normally be a good thing except we join the film in the middle of a lockout – a labour dispute if you will in which the Players Association (in the form of Sonja Sohn from The Wire) is trying to get a bigger cut of a new TV deal from the owners (represented by Kyle McLauchlan) – and nobody gets paid during a lockout.
Burke’s newest client is a rookie named Erick Scott (Melvin Gregg) who hasn’t been on the team long enough to receive a single paycheck and whose naivete has him borrowing money from sharks against the big pay day that’s coming (but nobody knows when).
Something has to give and it is Burke’s gift that he sees a way out of the dispute so his players can get paid again but that he also sees another way forward entirely – one that will restore some personal and professional agency to those same players.
High Flying Bird is a film I think I’ll get another kick out of second time around – there is so much going on in so little time and space – and I really dug the shiny and colourful Manhattan locations so crisply photographed on a device similar to the one I have in my pocket. That should be inspiring to Kiwi filmmakers too.
High Flying Bird is streaming exclusively on Netflix.
