Filmmaker Steven Soderbergh offers employment advice.

Excerpted from a long NEW YORK magazine interview with soon-to-retire-from-moviemaking director/producer Steven Soderbergh (his film SIDE EFFECTS opens February 8th).

This quote (highlighted by me) was preceded by the interviewer's query as to how Soderbergh was able to get a variety of films (in different genres) greenlighted by the studio system.

On the few occasions where I’ve talked to film students, one of the things I stress, in addition to learning your craft, is how you behave as a person. For the most part, our lives are about telling stories. So I ask them, “What are the stories you want people to tell about you?” Because at a certain point, your ability to get a job could turn on the stories people tell about you.  The reason [then–Universal Pictures chief] Casey Silver put me up for [1998’s] Out of Sight after I’d had five flops in a row was because he liked me personally. He also knew I was a responsible filmmaker, and if I got that job, the next time he’d see me was when we screened the movie. If I’m an asshole, then I don’t get that job. Character counts. That’s a long way of saying, “If you can be known as someone who can attract talent, that’s a big plus.”

Link to the full interview: http://www.vulture.com/2013/01/steven-soderbergh-in-conversation.html

Steven Soderbergh's hatred of Internet commentary goes back further than CONTAGION.

Yes, I liked CONTAGION enough to give it three Purell bottles out of four (you'll understand once you see the film), though it's not up to earlier Steven Soderbergh commercial dramas like ERIN BROCKOVICH and TRAFFIC.

CONTAGION's mildly marred by Soderbergh injecting some crankiness about labor unions and Internet bloggers (there's a line about blogging being "grafitti with punctuation.")

Here's Soderbergh from roughly a decade earlier moaning about Internet-commenter criticism from his book-length conversation with Richard Lester titled GETTING AWAY WITH IT:
"Made the mistake of reading a couple of messages posted


about me in the indie-film section of AOL. There's one snotty

cretin that keeps making insipid remarks about me and my work

and I'm really fighting the impulse to rip this guy (I'm assuming

it's a guy because of the attitude dripping off the screen) a

brand-new, shiny, three-bedroom, two-full-bath asshole. But

then I think, 'Why bother? Be big about it. Just make your

films and let the other stuff go.' That's the healthy attitude,

of course. But I still want to cream this guy. I guarantee

you this motherfucker hasn't made a fucking paper football,

much less an actual film. Jesus, why does this bug me?

It's really unappealing."

I don't know Steven Soderbergh personally, but I can feel his pain.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/jul/14/steven-soderbergh

Key passage for me from the article:
"I'm looking at the landscape and I'm thinking, 'Hmmm, I don't know. A few more years maybe,'" says Soderbergh. "And then the stuff that I'm interested in is only going to be of interest to me."
It would all sound depressing if Soderbergh didn't pepper his speech with fits of incredulous laughter. Perhaps the last few years – capped by his recent run-in with Sony over his revised script for Moneyball, a baseball movie starring Brad Pitt, that saw him elbowed off the project – have left him punch-drunk.
"In terms of my career, I can see the end of it," he says. "I've had that sensation for a few years now. And so I've got a list of stuff that I want to do – that I hope I can do – and once that's all finished I may just disappear."

I feel the same way. The kind of poetry I write isn't what the literary world wants. And the LA/OC scenes tend to want to play a Rotisserie Baseball version of Great Literature--where they think they're part of something like the Algonquin Roundtable, but it's actually another chapter of Rotarians or Toastmasters.