Age: 63
male
Steven Andrew Soderbergh (born January 14, 1963) is an American film director, producer, screenwriter, cinematographer, and editor. A pioneer of modern independent cinema, Soderbergh later drew acclaim for formally inventive films made within the studio system. Soderbergh's directorial breakthrough, the indie drama Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989), lifted him into the public spotlight as a notable presence in the film industry. At 26, Soderbergh became the youngest solo director to win the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and the film garnered worldwide commercial success, as well as numerous accolades. His next five films, which included King of the Hill (1993), were commercially unsuccessful. He pivoted into more mainstream fare with the crime comedy Out of Sight (1998), the biopic Erin Brockovich (2000) and the crime drama Traffic (2000). For Traffic, he won the Academy Award for Best Director. He found further popular and critical success with the Ocean's trilogy and film franchise (2001–18); Che (2008); The Informant! (2009); Contagion (2011); Haywire (2011); Magic Mike (2012); Side Effects (2013); Logan Lucky (2017); Unsane (2018); Let Them All Talk (2020); No Sudden Move (2021); and Kimi (2022). His film career spans a multitude of genres, but his specialties are psychological, crime and heist films. His films have grossed over US$2.2 billion worldwide and garnered fourteen Academy Award nominations, winning five. Soderbergh's films often revolve around familiar concepts which are regularly used for big-budget Hollywood movies, but he routinely employs an avant-garde arthouse approach. They center on themes of shifting personal identities, vengeance, sexuality, morality, and the human condition. His feature films are often distinctive in the realm of cinematography as a result of his having been influenced by avant-garde cinema, coupled with his use of unconventional film and camera formats. Many of Soderbergh's films are anchored by multi-dimensional storylines with plot twists, nonlinear storytelling, experimental sequencing, suspenseful soundscapes, and third-person vantage points. Description above from the Wikipedia article Steven Soderbergh, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
The film tells the 1993 Memorial Day story of a 13-year-old German American boy, Kyle Vogel, who finds his Grandpa Bud's World War II footlocker during a game of hide and seek. Kyle strikes a deal with his grandfather to tell the stories behind any three objects he picks out of the footlocker, and the film proceeds to flash back to Bud's combat experience with the 82nd Airborne Division in World War II while also flashing forward to Kyle's future experiences with the 34th Infantry Division, also known as the "Red Bulls," in Iraq. The three objects that young Kyle picks: Walther P38, Fragmentation from "potato masher" - Stielhandgranate (German for "stick hand grenade"), and a picture of Bud with Sgt Jack O'Hara.
