Steven Soderbergh Intended Secret Series ‘Command Z’ for TikTok, but Switched to a Format He Felt a ‘Facility for’
It’s a good time to be a Steven Soderbergh fan. Last week saw the premiere of his deliciously twisty new crime thriller “Full Circle” on Max, and on July 17, the prolific director dropped a surprise web series, “Command Z,” on his Extension 765 site. The series — split into eight episodes and around an hour and 40 minutes total — is a playful and hilarious satire that sees the director back in his “Schizopolis” mode, with Michael Cera as the AI-generated ghost of an Elon Musk-esque tech guru who implements a plan for select employees to travel back in time and clean up the mess he and other titans of politics and industry made of the world. The series is deadly serious in its substance, reckoning with ambitious ethical and philosophical questions related to mankind’s most self-destructive tendencies, yet the delivery mechanism for its ideas is the most gleefully entertaining comedy Soderbergh has made in decades.
It’s also something that started out in a completely different form that Soderbergh scrapped before going back to the drawing board. Initially, he shot the story as a series of TikTok videos, only to discover that that particular medium was not the best outlet for what he does. “It’s not really suited to the kind of narrative that I’m built for,” he said during a recent roundtable interview. “For things to work in that format, they have to fall within a certain style of storytelling, and it’s not one that rewards something that takes a little time to set up. The amount of time you have to hook somebody with a TikTok video is… we’re talking seconds. Especially if you want the algorithm to keep pushing it out to more people. It just became obvious once we looked at all of these videos: These are not gonna get shared. These are not gonna get pushed anywhere.”
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Soderbergh and his collaborators made 18 videos for TikTok, but “their storytelling rhythms were too slow,” he said. “We spent a lot of time and effort making these, but it was obvious that we should return to a format that I feel more comfortable in and that I feel I have a facility for. I felt old for sure, but the ideas that we were trying to present just didn’t lend themselves to the things that TikTok does well.”
Directing the version of “Command Z” that finally made it to audiences led Soderbergh to make a change on his crew: longtime collaborator “Mary Ann Bernard” — a pseudonym for Soderbergh himself — handed over cutting duties to another editor for the first time in over 10 years. “It wasn’t the plan for me to direct all of ‘Command Z,'” Soderbergh said. When the plan changed, Soderbergh had to shoot “Command Z” while finishing “Magic Mike’s Last Dance” and prepping “Full Circle,” which meant there was no way around him bringing in another editor. “It became obvious, I can’t do all these things at same time. Like, I need a break here. Hiring a proper editor was the only way to go.”
Soderbergh offered the job to documentary editor Francesca Kustra, who he met when she was working on Eugene Jarecki’s “The King,” a movie Soderbergh executive produced. “I’d spent a couple days with Eugene and his editorial team going through that movie, and she and I were having conversations during that time,” Soderbergh said. “I thought she was talented, smart, hardworking. And so when I realized there’s no universe in which I can edit ‘Command Z’ while I’m shooting and editing ‘Full Circle,’ I called her up and said, ‘I know you haven’t done anything exactly like this before, but if you’re up for it I would really like you to do this.’ And she ended up doing a great job. It was really desperation-slash-practical necessity that made me look outside the tent a little bit, but I’m really glad I did. It was nice to have another set of eyes on that particular project.”
“Command Z” is available now at Extension 765. All proceeds will be donated to Children’s Aid and Boston University Center for Antiracist Research.
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