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Soderbergh returns to film

NEW YORK (AP) — “Populist Pictures” reads the buzzer to Steven Soderbergh’s Tribeca office. You might easily mistake it as ironic. It’s a grand title for a little nameplate on an otherwise nondescript Manhattan building.

But he means it.

Four years after dramatically quitting moviemaking, Soderbergh is back with “Logan Lucky.” His hiatus — in the end so abbreviated as to be nonexistent — hasn’t been spent toying with a Major Artistic Statement to be showered in Oscar buzz.

Nor has he drastically remade himself as a filmmaker. “Logan Lucky” is a heist movie so similar to his “Ocean’s Eleven” films that the more down-and-out West Virginia characters of his caper even refer to their plot as “Ocean’s 7-11.”

“I thought the first line of every review would be, ‘He came out of retirement for this?'” said Soderbergh in a recent interview. “Of course my answer to that would have been: The only thing I would have come out of retirement for is to make something like this. I wasn’t going to come out of retirement and not make something fun. Why would I do that?”

“Logan Lucky” isn’t just a comeback movie, it’s a grand experiment. Soderbergh independently financed the film, selling distribution rights to foreign territories to pay for the budget and then making ancillary deals (like Amazon) to pay for prints and ads.

It’s a way to prove that the broad-appeal movie can be made by a filmmaker with a plan, without committee or corporation.

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