The pandemic scuttled those plans but by early fall, after he helped create return-to-set safety protocols, Soderbergh remounted it — albeit without one star, George Clooney, who withdrew out of health concerns for his asthmatic son.
Still, “No Sudden Move,” which debuts July 1 on HBO Max, doesn’t lack for stars.
Twenty-three years later, “No Sudden Move” returns Soderbergh to the Motor City with Don Cheadle, who memorably played Maurice “Snoop” Miller in “Out of Sight.” Since then, Cheadle has co-starred in four more films with Soderbergh .
“No Sudden Move” begins with three hired guns , but in a multiplying series of double-crosses, expands in scope to encapsulate some of Detroit’s original sins, a little like how “Chinatown” does for Los Angeles.
“We were able to talk about redlining and community and the devastation of Detroit and the greed of the car manufacturers without proselytizing or hitting it on the head,” says Cheadle.
The director managed the shoot without incident by frequent testing in two mobile COVID-19 testing units that were personally paid for.
The telecast was handsomely shot, opening with a fluid tracking shot of Regina King, and it made an often impersonal ceremony warmly intimate.
“As far as I know, we’re the first show in a long time where nobody ever got played off, and I’m proud of that.
But Soderbergh did walk away from the experience — a satisfying and unique one, he says — with a gnawing sense of a larger existential crisis for movies.
“No Sudden Move,” a period crime film for adults, is very much the kind of movie that before the streaming flood gates opened would have been unlikely to get made.
Nobody knows what’s a cyclical thing as opposed to a real secular change,” says Soderbergh.
“No Sudden Move” is Soderbergh’s sixth heist film, a cycle begun with “Out of Sight” that includes the three “Ocean’s” films and “Logan Lucky,” a self-financed meta-heist movie in that it sought to pull one over on Hollywood, too.