Xeni interviews Steven Soderbergh in WIRED

For this month's Wired Magazine, I interviewed director Steven Soderbergh about copyright, remix, and why his new movie Bubble will be released by Mark Cuban/Todd Wagner's 2929 Entertainment on DVD, cable, and in theaters all at once.

# Should hardware manufacturers be obligated to build copy protection into their devices?

Soderbergh: It's a tricky question. I don't think somebody who creates something should have their rights violated. Yet we have a culture in which creating something like [Danger Mouse's] The Grey Album can get you thrown in jail. That's sad. It's an astonishing, amazing piece of work that should be heard.

# Have you thought about making a mash-up?

S: I have ideas like that – video mash-ups. Some of them I've done privately. But there's no way for them to be seen legally. I wish we could come up with a system that allowed someone to do a Grey Album without having to pay millions of dollars for music rights. A system in which rights holders share profits of a new piece of work and people can access it without breaking the law.

# Give me one idea for a video mash-up.

S: I was channel surfing the other night and Gus Van Sant's Psycho was on. It would be fascinating to do a mash-up of Gus' version with Hitchcock's version, because the whole thing with Gus' version was that he duplicated the original shot by shot.

# I'd watch that!

S: Yeah! So right now, I could do that at home and give it to a friend, just as something for them to watch on a Friday night. But we don't live in a world where that can be made commercially available. So it goes underground. And underground is just a sexier word for illegal. It's frustrating.

Link to "Thinking Outside the Box Office"

Reader comment: Jared Nielsen says,

The artist Andrew Neumann created a mash-up of van Sant's and Hitchcock's psycho, mixed in real time with software he wrote.
Here's a link to his bio at Bitforms gallery.