Steven Soderbergh Gives Update On John Lennon Doc & Takes Potshot At Expanded Awards Season: “It Doesn’t Look Very Fun” – Doha Film Festival

Steven Soderbergh has revealed he is close to finishing his untitled feature documentary built around John Lennon’s final interview which took place just hours before the music legend was shot dead outside his New York apartment in 1980.

“It’s almost done,” he told a press conference at the Doha Film Festival which he is attending alongside Michael Coel for the MENA premiere of The Christophers.

“I’m excited about it. It’s an incredible historical document, this interview, and so the job is to obviously present it in such a way that enhances the interview and doesn’t sort of distract from it. I’m not looking to reinvent the form. I’m just hoping to create a film that gets as many people to hear what John and Yoko had to say on that afternoon before he was killed as possible,” he continued.

“They were both so free in their discussion as someone who’s been interviewed many times, I was surprised at how open and excited they were to talk. You would think they’d never been interviewed before… I want that to come across to the audience, and everything that they said 45 years ago is not just relevant today. It’s possibly even more relevant in terms of relationships, politics, how we treat each other, how systems work on the individual and above all, the importance of love in in our daily life and our work.”

Deadline first revealed that Soderbergh was prepping the documentary back in April. EPs on the project include Soderbergh, Michael Sugar and David Hillman of Sugar23, and Nancy Saslow and David Hudson of Mishpookah Entertainment Group.

Soderbergh – who won the Best Director Academy Award for Traffic in 2001, a year in which he was also nominated in the same category for Erin Brockovich – was also asked about his feelings about the expansion of the awards season in recent years.

“I think it’s appropriate to occasionally acknowledge the work of your colleagues and your peers. What I’ve witnessed over the course of my career is the expansion of this acknowledgement from one evening into six months of activity. It’s a season that lasts longer than almost any season in nature,” he said.

Soderbergh went on to suggest that the films up for consideration were “obscured” by the act of putting them forward for awards.

“The reasons why we make the work become subsumed in a conversation about strategy… I don’t think it’s going away. It’s a little bit like somebody coming to you every two weeks and saying, ‘It’s my birthday’. It loses some of its luster… there seem to be so many awards,” he said.

“It’s been 25 years since Traffic and Erin Brockovich were at the Oscars, so I’ve been very removed from it for a long time. I still watch the show, but I have to say, when I see what the people campaigning and the people who are nominated have to go through, it doesn’t look very fun.”