The great Steven Soderbergh is back from his Frank Sinatra-styled retirement, which was basically a recharge. In a chat with Entertainment Weekly‘s Kevin P. Sullivan he talks about Logan Lucky (Bleecker, Fingerprint Releasing, 8.18) and his plans to self-distribute:

Logan Lucky costars Channing Tatum, Riley Keough, Adam Driver.

“On the most obvious level, Logan Lucky was the complete inversion of an Ocean’s movie,” Soderbergh says. “It’s an anti-glam version of an Ocean’s movie. Nobody dresses nice. Nobody has nice stuff. They have no money. They have no technology. It’s all rubber-band technology, and that’s what I thought was fun about it. It seemed familiar to me, but different enough. The landscape, the characters and the canvas were the complete opposite of an Ocean’s film. This is a version of an Ocean’s movie that’s up on cement blocks in your front yard.”

I’m betting that a majority of your megaplex douche nozzles want people in a heist film to dress nice, have nice stuff, nice technology, be flush, drive cool cars, etc. They like their meat loaf and mashed potatoes. Not me — I love what Soderbergh is describing here — but nothing makes mainstreamers more uncomfortable than originality.

The plan to self-distribute came from “a combination of components,” Soderbergh says. “There have been advancements in technology that make it a lot easier to get a movie out in 3,000 screens than it was even two years ago. The economic model is pretty simple. You sell the foreign to cover the cost of the [film] negative. We sell the non-theatrical rights to cover the cost of the [prints and advertising], and that’s it. It’s really simple. People have done this before. The distribution part is only a little different because we control it in a way that you normally don’t get to control distribution.”