‘The Good German’: Director Steven Soderbergh And His Team Dive Back Into Their R-Rated Resurrection Of ‘40s Noir

CATE BLANCHETT stars as Lena Brandt and GEORGE CLOONEY stars as Jake Geismer in Warner Bros

More Pictures' and Virtual Studios' dramatic thriller "The Good German," distributed by Warner Bros

The film also stars Tobey Maguire

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It was very much akin to the gun or the knife," Soderbergh recalls over Zoom. “I said, ‘I either want to shoot it in black and white, in the style of a movie made from that period, or I want to do it as an animated film. ’ And they went with the -action notion … We all agreed to do the movie for a nominal amount of money

If I’m not mistaken, I think we all took the same amount just because we really wanted to make it

We knew that it was risky. " “From soup to nuts, Steven wanted it to be shot, lit, and acted [in that style],” affirms ducer Ben Cosgrove, an erstwhile key figure in Section Eight (the now-defunct duction company founded by Soderbergh and George Clooney in the late '90s). “He was really obsessed with ‘40s-style Warner Bros. [films and] we were on the Warner Bros

We were right there where a bunch of these movies had been shot and he said, ‘Well, why don't we shoot a ‘40s-style movie. ’” While the star-studded adaptation of Joseph Kanon’s novel ly draws inspiration from Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon, The Third Man, and other monochrome classics from a bygone era, the film, a labyrinthine thriller set against the rubble-strewn backdrop of post-World War II Berlin, is more than just homage or pastiche, but a genuine and breathtaking resurrection of a long-forgotten method of cinematic storytelling — albeit with a contemporary, R-rated twist. “There’s the what-if aspect to the ject,” Soderbergh explains. “What if [Casablanca director] Michael Curtiz could have the kind of freedom in 1945 that I’ve enjoyed. ” Nearly two decades after its inauspicious theatrical rollout, The Good German (now available to own on 4K UHD and Blu-ray) remains a criminally misunderstood masterpiece that uses the noir genre as a lens through which to explore the moral ambiguity in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, particularly with regards to Operation Paperclip

Initially labeled “Overcast,” the top-secret gram undertaken by the United States government recruited Nazi scientists, many of whom were guilty war criminals complicit in the Holocaust, to the American side of the fomenting Cold War. “There’s a considerable amount of whitewashing of the Nazis and then specifically as it related to the rocket gram, because we wanted those brains,” explains Good German screenwriter Paul Attanasio. “I think you can look at it and say, ‘Well, we got the brains and we got a rocket gram, and maybe it was the right decision. ’ But then since we're on the eve of the Fourth of July, possibly our self-righteousness should be tempered. ” MORE FOR YOU At the end of the day, The Good German is a cinephile’s greatest wish come true

It’s an audacious, time-traveling, and thematically complex experiment undertaken by an fearless artist who ved beyond a shadow of a doubt that, as the Times said, the Golden Age ways of doing things were not as dead as one might think. "When Warners asked me, ‘Who is this movie for, actually. ’ I said, ‘It’s for anybody that loves movies,’" the Oscar-winning director explains

Book scout, and just loved it,” the ducer says. “I thought it was really compelling and powerful [with] great characters

I thought it was something for George, but didn’t know Steven well enough to know if it was his kind of thing yet

Optioned it on our behalf and then it was literally one of those situations where they said, ‘Okay, just [go out to] wver your favorite writer is

I had always wanted to work with Paul Attanasio

I’d been a huge fan of Quiz Show and Donnie Brasco

So I sent it to Paul and he immediately read it and loved it

So my kids, even at that time, started calling him ‘Dr. ’ And so, ‘Dr

Pepper’ would come to the house and we would talk through the script

Steven believed in outlines and I didn’t, so I submitted to that cess, and we outlined it together

Then I went off and wrote it. ” Soderbergh concurs: “He and I spent a lot of time together, working on the adaptation

But it never ran into any of the typical obstacles that we all run into on most things

Everything seemed to go right until it came out [laughs]

So it was a happy memory — the whole experience of it for me, anyway. ” The biggest challenge of shaving Kanon’s nearly 500-page tome down into a manageable shooting script (the final runtime is just under two hours) was trying to keep the subject matter accessible to a wide demographic. “You have to contend with an audience expectation for what a World War II film is [and] at same time, you need to present a film for a new audience that maybe doesn’t know anything World War II, which would obviously be a younger audience," notes Attanasio

As for Kanon’s involvement, Cosgrove remembers the author being very helpful to the duction. “He had a lot of resources for us [because] he had done a lot of re for his novel

He was there [on set and] I think his son was even an extra in the movie …

I had a lot of conversations with him the story, and he was very thoughtful it, because the movie is significantly different [from the book] … In his own mind, he was able to say, ‘I wrote my book

It’s one thing, the movie is a different thing, I see where they cross over, and I see where they diverge. ’ He was totally fine with it. ” Though the final result up being a more of a loose adaptation of Kanon’s work, the general bones of the story remained the same, laying the foundation for a paranoid yarn chock full of harsh lighting, stark shadows, cynical characters, voiceover narration, and a conspiracy that goes all the way to the top: American journalist Jake Geismer lands in Berlin to cover the Potsdam Conference and ends up in a snarled web of sex, lies, and murder involving his black marketeering driver, Patrick Tully, and the German woman he once loved before the war, femme fatale Lena Brandt. “The basic thing we were going for was [the famous saying from] Casablanca: the blems of these people ‘don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world,’” reveals Attanasio. “That these people, who are on the fringes of this kind of grotesque historical scandal, got swept into and crushed by it. ” And who better to play these hardboiled characters than the biggest movie stars of the day, as would be the case in Golden Age Hollywood

George Clooney, a handsome and strong-jawed A-lister, would play the Bogart-ish role of Jake Geismer, while Tobey Maguire and Cate Blanchett tackled Tully and Lena, respectively

It was going against what you’re doing most of the time, which is to to be natural, and I needed this kind of performance that was italicized [in order] to fit inside of the style of the film … It was just a completely different way of apaching performance

And, as you might have read, we didn’t use any body mics, no lavalier mics

So generally, they did have to ject more. " The director purportedly didn’t want the actors to get dialect coaches, but Blanchett “got one anyway," Cosgrove says. “She wasn’t to have that. ” “Cate loves to play dress up and loves to transform,” concedes Soderbergh. “And so, for her to become a brunette and wear these brown lenses and really alter her way of moving and speaking

I think she’s really good at that and she enjoys it. ” As for Jake, Soderbergh compares Clooney’s character to another film noir icon with the same name: Chinatown’s Jake Gittes. “George’s performance is really wonderful and subtle

There aren’t a lot of actors who could pull off what George is pulling off here

He’s got to play the of movie star, but it’s got to be undercut with this layer of self-incrimination

It’s a really delicate balance and he gets everything wrong in a way

It really is Jake in Chinatown

He gets everything wrong. " Maguire was the black sheep of the top-billed stars, having been cast against type

A far cry from the mild-mannered Peter Parker in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man films, Tully is an abusive, hot-headed, and greedy slime ball who leverages post-war desperation into a thriving criminal

He doesn’t last long, however, once he starts asking dangerous questions Lena’s supposedly dead husband, Emil (the late Christian Or), a member of Hitler’s rocket gram and the titular “Good German. ” When Tully’s body washes up on the shores of Potsdam early on in the runtime, the story pivots over to Jake’s crusade to uncover the truth. “I think the beauty of not having to carry the entire film is being able to do something wild play that character,” Soderbergh says of Maguire’s performance. “I think you have to be careful how you use movie stars

They bring with them a certain expectation that’s been built around the persona that made them movie stars … We start with Tobey McGuire’s character, [who then] hands the movie over to George

And then George, at a certain point, hands the movie over to Cate

That was a Paul Attanasio’s idea that I thought was really interesting. " Attanasio, however, is rather hard on himself for the Psycho-esque bait and switch. “The pass-off structure I invented was more clever than good in my view,” he fesses. “Because if you introduce the audience to a character and then you [suddenly] kill him, that’s bracing and shocking

But it’s also kind of saying, ‘F— you for in this. ’ You can do that, but you have to be careful it … As much as I love all the stuff with Tully, is that the best way to get into this story

It was in the book, but I don’t know…" If he could do it all over again, the screenwriter says he’d juice up the relationship between Jake and Lena, tighten the plot a little more, and vide a greater narrative context for critical plot points the US government’s desire to nab as many Nazi eggheads as they could before the Soviets. “I think it’s really crying out for a Hitchcock-ian treatment," he muses, self-effacingly. "It needed to go further into that Hitchcock-ian direction and just be more densely plotted with more twists. ”(L-r) TOBEY MAGUIRE stars as Tully, GEORGE CLOONEY stars as Jake Geismer and CATE BLANCHETT stars as

More Lena Brandt in Warner Bros

Pictures' and Virtual Studios' dramatic thriller "The Good German," distributed by Warner Bros

PHOTOGRAPHS TO BE USED SOLELY FOR ADVERTISING, MOTION, PUBLICITY OR REVIEWS OF THIS SPECIFIC MOTION PICTURE AND TO REMAIN THE PERTY OF THE STUDIO

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MELINDA SUE GORDON With a script and cast in place, Phil Messina (Soderbergh’s collaborator on Solaris and the Ocean’s trilogy) began to formulate the physical world of The Good German. “I was so jazzed [] being able to work on something that was kind of experimental a studio level — and with Steven, who’s pretty fearless that way,” he says. “I had my hands full on trying to figure out what this thing was going to look. " In keeping true to the ductions of the ‘40s, it was decided that principal photography would solely take place in Los Angeles, with the Universal Pictures backlot standing in for the bombed-out ruins of Berlin. “A lot of filmmakers in the immediate aftermath [of WWII] went to Berlin and shot films there, Billy Wilder being one of them,” Cosgrove says. “They were known as this sub-genre called ‘rubble films,’ which were films that were shot in the rubble of post-war Berlin. ” “I went to both the backlots [Warner Bros

And Universal], did a scout, and took extensive photos,” Messina adds. “I realized very quickly that true to the style of those films and also because of a lot of restraints, that we had to really pick frames

It wasn’t a camera moving

It was not a modern day methodology for making the film … We had these conversations, ‘Can you even make a film that has constraints that no longer exist

Can you put yourself back in time. ’ They did it this way because they were forced to do it this way, not because they’re choosing to do it this way

And that’s a big conceit and whether that was successful or not, I’ll let others decide. " For reference material, the duction designer watched old film noirs and hired reers to sift through “a ton of photos of post-war Germany, [a lot of which] was pretty destroyed, so rubble was going to be a big part of what we were adding,” he continues

And since rubble was a lot of our language, we literally had a rubble department … Between scouting and film and pictorial re, it started develop a scope for what were going to do

So in some ways, I was doing the same thing that they were doing

We had a little bit of CG, but even 20 years ago, we had to pick and choose our shots for set extensions

So the goal was to keep it most of it in camera

I feel we really kind of dipped into their methodology, pretty one-to-one. ” At the end of the day, his job was to capture the archaic, yet charming, simplicity of '40s-era movie magic

The most notable instance of that philosophy can be found in the scene where Jake and Lena are framed against a painted bac.