Steven Soderbergh names his favourite James Bond movie: “You get to know who the characters are”

Despite having never met a genre of cinema he isn’t willing to tackle at least once, Steven Soderbergh has never been interested in hopping onto an established franchise.

While he did launch a multi-billion dollar behemoth of his own when he steered the Ocean’s trilogy to huge success at the box office before it was expanded with spinoffs and potential sequels to come, the closest he’s ever come to letting the studio system absorb him was when he directed second unit on The Hunger Games as a favour to friend and filmmaker Gary Ross.

There have been offers; it’s just that Soderbergh prefers to write his own ticket. That’s fair enough when he helped usher in a new era for independent cinema and has refused to let himself be pigeonholed as any particular kind of auteur. Instead, he solidified himself as someone ready to test out any new technological innovation, whether it’s shooting digital, making an entire movie on iPhones, or making a horror flick captured entirely from the perspective of an unseen entity.

He did have the opportunity to tackle one of the biggest properties in Hollywood, though, at least twice. Confirming that he’d fielded multiple inquiries from Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson, Soderbergh explained that the reason he didn’t take the plunge and helm a James Bond movie was because they “were at odds about some things that were important.” He wouldn’t compromise his principles; the producers wanted him to, and that was about as far as it got.

Soderbergh has dabbled in onscreen espionage several times, from the bone-crunching Haywire and the blackly comedic The Informant! to 2025’s spy thriller Black Bag, just not on a Bond-esque scale. He’s always been a fan of the long-running series, even if he prefers one of the earliest entries to the rest and doesn’t think it’s ever been bettered.

“I am a fan of the early James Bond movies,” he told Emmanuel Levy. “From Russia with Love may be my favourite. In those movies, you get to know who the characters are instead of just what they do. In more recent espionage action films, there isn’t a lot of time spent developing the supporting characters.”

Sean Connery’s sophomore outing under the tux remains one of the most popular Bond films, with the suave secret agent settling into his groove after Dr No introduced him to the masses and made 007 an instant cultural icon. There have been a further 23 globetrotting adventures for MI6’s most famous operative since then, and for Soderbergh’s money, none of them have come close to the intrepid hero mounting his second desperate battle against the looming threat of the nefarious SPECTRE.

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