Steven Soderbergh
Steven Soderbergh is an American film producer, director, screenwriter, cinematographer and editor. His indie drama Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989) won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and became a worldwide commercial success, making the then-26-year-old Soderbergh the youngest director to win the festival's top award. Film critic Roger Ebert dubbed Soderbergh the "poster boy of the Sundance generation."
He is best known for directing critically acclaimed commercial Hollywood films like the crime comedy Out of Sight (1998), the biographical film Erin Brockovich (2000), the crime drama film Traffic (2000), the 2001 remake of the comedy heist film Ocean's 11, the medical thriller Contagion (2011) and the comedy-drama Magic Mike (2012). He has also directed smaller, less conventional works, such as the mystery thriller Kafka (1991); the experimental comedy film Schizopolis (1996), which has a non-linear narrative; Bubble (2005), which uses no script and non-professional actors; the experimental drama film The Girlfriend Experience (2009), which starred the then-active pornographic actress Sasha Grey; and the biopic about Marxist revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara, Che (2008).