A table for… Steven Soderbergh

Illustration by Lyndon Hayes

The interview is a boozy one – the kind you don’t get much these days. Eight shots each over lunch at Belvedere, Holland Park, four of them on the rocks. It is Steven Soderbergh’s own booze: Singani 63, his take on the fragrant white grape distillate he became enamoured with in the mountains of Bolivia in 2007 on a particularly gruelling shoot. The movie was Che, starring his longtime muse, Benicio del Toro – difficult terrain, pressurised days. “People really turned into zombies,” he recalls.

Four presidents have come and gone – and one has returned – in the time it has taken the director to raise singani’s profile. But he comes to life when recounting the challenge, as though hammering out the plot of one of his movie heists. “Bolivia, as Che found out, is landlocked, so getting it out of there is not easy. Then I’ve got to put it on a boat. I’ve got to get a warehouse!”

In 2011, 250 cases of Singani 63 arrived at a lock-up in New Jersey – but he had no distribution, so he’d drive up from New York and take them home for himself. “Bringing a spirit to the market is like campaigning for an election that never actually happens,” he says. “If you stop for a moment, your competitors roll over you.” One of those was George Clooney, another of Soderbergh’s favourite actors, whose brand of mezcal is now fantastically popular. “And I’m so angry. He knows I am. It’s done so well, and I got there first!”

Belvedere, once run by Marco Pierre White, is the former ballroom of Holland House. In the 19th century it was a political salon in the nineteenth century, where Lord Byron is thought to have met Caroline Lamb. Now it’s a world of warm terracotta, giant arches and even bigger palms, with Sardinia’s Lello Fafuzzi as head chef. There are warnings about wandering peacocks, but there are none on the menu; instead there’s Apulian burrata with charcoal sweet pepper, laced with a single Sicilian anchovy, far from home.

If dogs are like their owners, maybe drinks are, too. Soderbergh once said that as a film director, he’s not an “identifiable brand”; he hoped that meant he was less likely to go out of fashion. One mixologist described Singani 63 as “egoless”, as it works in so many classic cocktails, from daiquiri sour to martini.

The two Singani 63 cocktails on offer at Belvedere, which we order alongside bluefin tuna ventresca salad and an enormous truffle pizza that comes on its own stand, are the 63 Cooler, with white port and galia melon cordial; and the Cherry & Grape, with clarified lemon juice. The distillate is fragrant, full of notes, but soft to swallow and clean as a spirit can be. After our cocktails, we have a double on the rocks, which is how Soderbergh likes it best: “That’s called the Subwoofer,” he says.

A singani negroni uses Aperol instead of Campari: “Because Campari can be a bit of a bully – and a negroni with singani and Aperol, you can pound that stuff!” He brings his fist down, and there’s a ripple on the plate of extra virgin olive oil.

Soderbergh sees life as a movie, and he’s conceived a drama about a woman trying to launch a new spirit in the male-dominated alcohol industry. There’ll be a bit of Erin Brockovich, and a bit of Ocean’s 11, he admits, both of which he made. It is the perfect setting for a film: everyone inhabits the underworld; all the action takes place at night; the settings look fantastic. “Now, I’m just looking for the twist.”

He is far more interested in talking about the projects he’s just thought of than the ones he should be promoting. His new black comedy, The Christophers, starring Ian McKellen, premiered at the Toronto film festival, but you wouldn’t know it from having lunch with him.

Soderbergh is one of many Hollywood figures spending more and more time in London – celebrities from Ellen Degeneres and Eva Longoria to Rosie O’Donnell have left Trump’s US in the last year. “It’s the uncertainty he creates that makes people crazy. How do you plan for anything?” On US shoots, his teamsters – the men in charge of the trucks and trailers – invariably vote Donald. “They are the most dogmatic people when it comes to the rules. We’re out on the shoot at 6.30am and they won’t open the trailers until 7am, even if I’m there. I want to say to them, ‘You do understand that one of the core ideas of that president is the destruction of unions, and you are in one of the most powerful unions in the United States?’”

But he doesn’t you don’t say it? “What’s the line in Sunset Boulevard … ‘You don’t yell at a sleepwalker.’” He is in full flow now, with a long digression about how Keir Starmer needs to better communicate the international forces that drive the immigration crisis, so people stop blaming Labour. “Talk about narrative and storytelling!” he cries. “It’s not fair for any political party to use immigration as a wedge issue, because nobody knows how to fix this.”

Is immigration a good subject for a movie? “You’d have to come up with a metaphor, because nobody wants to watch that. You’ve got a better shot at getting people to think deeply by finding a metaphor. But it takes a true story to get them to act.”

Soderbergh has made an astonishing number of films. At the 2001 Academy Awards he was nominated twice in the Best Director category, for Erin Brockovich and Traffic. When his name was read out, you could see his shock, then see him craning to hear which film had actually won (Traffic). He hates Oscar season, though his films have won five times. “Let’s be clear, there’s no season in nature that lasts September to March. It’s like hanging out with somebody who every two weeks goes, “You know what today is? My birthday!”

Like every creative of a certain age (he’s 62) he finds himself bumping up against diminishing attention spans. Even someone with three dozen films to their name is now told by studios to “grab the audience in the first five minutes”. “I want to be sensitive to shifts in what’s working, while operating from a space of pure intention,” he says. “I can’t start second-guessing what I like, because then I’m lost.”

Soderbergh came to prominence at the peak of late-1980s indie filmmaking, winning the Palme d’Or at just 26 for Sex, Lies, and Videotape. But he doesn’t think an original idea is harder to find than it was. His smart spy film Black Bag, released in March and starring Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender, could have been the start of a new franchise, but it wasn’t a box office hit.

“Black Bag occupies a space that’s not growing: movies for grownups in the mid-budget range. Everybody is trying to figure out how to navigate a landscape in which there isn’t a lot of middle ground between a fantasy spectacle and a low-budget horror movie. All I can do is keep looking for ideas that I feel have the potential to find an audience, and be smart about the scale of the risk, you know?”

He has made two films on his iPhone, Unsane and High Flying Bird, but he still likes his big, classic canvases. “The question we’re all grappling with is this: is there, objectively, a peak form to be had? And at a certain point beyond that, are you just frittering around the edges? You could say, from Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour in 1959 to the late 1980s, the grammar of cinema was pushed as far as you can push it. You can keep trying stuff, but the audience taps out. If there’s another way to do it, I haven’t seen it. That doesn’t mean it’s not out there … ”

He is working on a documentary about the last ever radio interview given by John Lennon, just hours before he was shot. He’ll make impressionistic visuals to go with the audio, which has barely been heard in 50 years: “That’s what AI is good for!”

Film may have found its peak form, but as far as Soderbergh is concerned, drink had not – until now. We order one more Subwoofer.

Singani 63 is available from £30.95, Whiskey Exchange  and fGerry’s Wines and Spirits; singani63.com

Belvedere, Abbotsbury Road, London W8. Tel: 0208 191 1407

Photo by Lorna Roach