There is no better X-ray of a filmmaker’s soul than the list of movies he would program if you handed him a theater and told him to show off. Steven Soderbergh just handed himself exactly that, and the result is worth studying whether or not you can get anywhere near the venue. To mark his 63rd birthday, the man behind Ocean’s Eleven and sex, lies, and videotape has curated nine films, one from each decade running the 1930s through the 2010s, and is screening them across a London autumn alongside cocktails made with his own Bolivian spirit. The booze is the gimmick. The list is the gift, and the list tells you everything.
Here is the news, a beat behind the point. The series is called A Man Under the Influence, a title doing double duty, winking at the Cassavetes classic and at the fact that everyone in the room will be a couple of cocktails deep. It runs Thursdays at an Everyman cinema in West London through the end of October, and it follows a sold-out New York run earlier this year. But you, like me, are probably not going to be in West London on a Thursday night, so let us talk about the part you can actually use.
Look at what he picked: Trouble in Paradise, Notorious, The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T, The Servant, Jaws, Do the Right Thing, Fargo, Lost in Translation, and Phantom Thread. Read that as a sentence and a personality snaps into focus. Nearly every one of these is a film about control, seduction, and surrender, about someone falling under the spell of a person, a place, or an obsession they cannot shake. Lubitsch’s jewel thieves running a long con on each other. Hitchcock’s Notorious, where love is a spy handler’s weapon. Losey and Pinter’s The Servant, in which a manservant quietly takes possession of the master. Phantom Thread, a two-hander about a control freak and the woman who learns to poison him just enough to keep him. This is a director telling you, through other people’s movies, exactly what fascinates him. The series is called A Man Under the Influence, and the films are all about being under one.
Then there is Jaws, a stated Soderbergh all-time favorite, sitting in the middle of that list like the beating populist heart of it. That is the other thing this syllabus reveals. Soderbergh has never been a snob. His taste runs from the most rarefied European chamber piece to the greatest summer blockbuster ever made, and he treats a perfectly engineered shark movie with the same respect he gives a Pinter script. The man who made both Solaris and Magic Mike does not believe in guilty pleasures. He believes in pleasure, executed well.
The whole enterprise is also the most Soderbergh thing imaginable, because he controls every single layer of it. He picked the films. He recorded a personal video introduction for each one. And the spirit in your glass is not a brand he signed a deal with, it is a company he built from scratch. He tasted singani while shooting Che in Bolivia in 2008, became so obsessed that he turned himself into its importer, and then spent years wrestling the U.S. government into recognizing it as its own distinct category of brandy. This is a filmmaker who edits his own movies under a fake name, shoots them himself, distributes them himself, and now pours you a drink he personally dragged across the Andes. The curated screening series with the bespoke cocktail is not a marketing exercise for him. It is a control freak’s idea of the perfect evening, engineered down to the ice.
Here is the practical rundown, kept in one place, mostly for any UK readers lucky enough to be in range. A Man Under the Influence runs every Thursday from September 3 through October 30 at the Everyman cinema in The Whiteley in West London, with doors and a 63-minute happy hour at six, a different top London bar crafting a bespoke cocktail for each film, and a Soderbergh video intro before every screening. Tickets are available through Everyman. The signature drink, the Spiced Soderbergh Sour, rolls out to all forty-nine Everyman cinemas across the UK in late September, and the spirit itself lands at fifteen Amathus shops, if you want to chase down a bottle of the stuff and taste what all the fuss is about.
So here is my flag in the ground, and it is aimed squarely at those of us stranded on the wrong continent. You cannot make the Thursday screenings, but nothing is stopping you from stealing the syllabus. Every one of these nine films is available in a gorgeous edition on disc, most of them lovingly restored by exactly the kind of boutique label this site lives to celebrate, and running your own nine-week Soderbergh season at home costs a great deal less than a plane ticket and a round of Bolivian brandy. Start with Jaws on the biggest screen you own with the lights off, work a decade forward each week, and let one of the best living curators of other people’s movies quietly reprogram your taste. The candle, as the man says, is lit. You just have to hold the match yourself.
