In director Steven Soderbergh’s “The Christophers,” Ian McKellen plays fictional aging artist Julian Sklar, who rose to prominence as a star of London’s 1960s and ’70s pop art movement. Having stopped painting decades ago, the now 86-year-old records personalized video messages (think Cameo) for money, while living a lonely existence amid his one remaining financial asset: two adjoining London townhouses.
According to Soderbergh, Julian is living every artist’s worst fear of becoming irrelevant, but his house is the director’s own personal horror film. “Julian’s townhouse is a nightmare,” Soderbergh told IndieWire. “That’s a nightmare to me of a place to live.”
Each cluttered floor of Sklar’s home is a reminder of a different aspect of his glory days. When Soderbergh and production designer Antonia Lowe were researching the film, they discovered a common thread: Many artists tend to be collectors, gravitating to hoarding multiples of the same things — a wall of mirrors, an abundance of clocks.
The worst part of Sklar’s clutter is the relics of his previous work. Soderbergh said he understands the trap of working “in a field that attracts things that become talismans and symbols of what you’ve done, or what you love.” Add to that the tendency to hold onto them because “you imbue them with emotions and ideas that they probably don’t have.”
It’s easy to imagine why this could be unsettling for Soderbergh, a filmmaker constantly striving to boil his process down to the essentials. He eventually decided to take some “cleansing” steps that Sklar never had in the Ed Solomon-scripted film.
“A couple years ago — and I’d been thinking about it for a while — I burned 44 years’ worth of notebooks,” he said. The notebooks contained work product from over four decades of film and TV projects — some made, some abandoned, but anything still relevant inside each had been typed into a computer file years ago. Soderbergh didn’t want to hand them over as part of his archive, and he realized he didn’t want them invading his space with a false sense that they were still important.
“I went to a friend of mine’s house outside the city, up in the Hudson Valley. He has a fire pit, and I sort of leafed through [the notebooks], and then would spray them with lighter fluid, and torch them. It was really cathartic,” said Soderbergh, who, after telling the story, realized it was the first time he’d thought about the notebooks since burning them, “which just proves that was the right thing to do.”
Doing the Zoom interview from his office, the “Christophers” director looked around the room as if taking stock. If you make things for a living, there’s a constant “acquisition mode” to the task — making Julian’s end-of-life clutter easy to imagine.
“I’ve been giving away stuff,” said Soderbergh. “I have this poster collection, too many, I don’t have enough wall space to put these things up. So what are they for? They should be seen. So for birthdays and [other events], I’m slowly giving those away. I’m really trying to strip it down to the essentials.”
‘The Christophers‘Courtesy Everett Collection
“The Christophers” largely takes place in Julian’s home, including a 33-minute sequence where McKellen’s character and his newly hired assistant, Lori (Michaela Coel), travel through all four floors, into the basement, and into the backyard. Soderbergh always saw the verticality of the townhouse, with each floor representing a different aspect of the life that now haunts him, as key to the film.
“There’s something psychological attached to the physicality of vertical living that played to the core of this movie, the idea of an attic above you being a place that you never go. The idea that a basement with a pool used to be this kind of netherworld where people would collect and have wild parties,” said Soderbergh. “And his age, having to go up and down, and that being something that you’re aware of when you see him do it. It just felt to me like that was all organic. If you were on a sort of straight floor plan, it’s not as dramatic, it’s not as visual, and it wouldn’t be as good.”
When in the house, the audience experiences it largely through Lori’s point of view, a perspective Soderbergh intended to be unsettling.
“Once you cross the threshold into his property, we are handheld,” said Soderbergh. “That threshold is the point at which anybody who crosses it becomes destabilized, to give you this sense of not being on solid footing once you enter his property.”
“The Christophers” opens from Neon in theaters on Friday, April 10.