SOURCE: Soderbergh, Steven, and Gavin Smith. “Hired Gun.” Film Comment 37, no. 1 (January–February 2001): 26–31.

In the following interview, Soderbergh discusses the making of Traffic and his shift away from independent films to directing Hollywood features.

He used to be everybody's favorite indie maverick. Now he's Hollywood's favorite … Steven Soderbergh follows up his box-office smash Erin Brockovich with Traffic, an epic multi-character docudrama about the war on drugs.

“The Further Adventures of the Luckiest Bastard You Ever Saw.” That's the subtitle to filmmaker Steven Soderbergh's new book Getting Away with It, and it sums up a career that stands on its head Fitzgerald's line about there being no second acts in American lives.

The book consists of Soderbergh's interview with director Richard Lester on his life as a filmmaker, oddly interspersed with the younger director's own journal entries from 1996 and 1997, the “wilderness years” of his career. This was the interval...