Steven Soderbergh “retired” from feature filmmaking last year but has continued directing television, making t-shirts and painting. He also runs a nice little blog, periodically updated with smart posts about filmmaking, his voracious reading habits and creative edits of movies.
His latest classic movie edit is Raiders of The Lost Ark, in its entirety, made black and white. The original audio track is replaced with other bits of score, mostly Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.
Previously, Soderbergh mashed up the Van Sant and Hitchcock versions of Psycho into one film and cut Heaven’s Gate down to a bearable length. He mostly does this for his own research purposes, but he puts it out in case you’re curious about the way films are made. It really gets you out of the rhythm that John Williams’ famous score sets you in. Specifically writes that he wants you to “watch this movie and think only about staging, how the shots are built and laid out, what the rules of movement are, what the cutting patterns are.”
Even if you aren’t a filmmaker, it’s just pretty great to watch the iconic opening scored to pulsing Reznor-electro-doom. It’s not embeddable, so you’ll have to go to his blog to watch, but here’s an amazing advertisement for his personal Brandy label.
