It’s the year 2053. Kerning Fealty has died on the way to Mars, but computers have learned enough about him to create an A.I. version of the late billionaire. A.I.-Kerning is now recruiting three of his employees to travel back to 2023, via a wormhole located in a tumble dryer, to influence his past self and other titans of industry to change their Earth-damaging ways. 

“A silly Soderbergh for our silly times,” writes Letterboxd member Josh Lagle of the sci-fi comedy web-series Command Z, which stars Michael Cera as the billionaire attempting to save the future from his past-self. Not content with releasing Magic Mike’s Last Dance and the noir series Full Circle this year, Steven Soderbergh recently dropped yet another surprise on fans. Clocking in at eight short episodes, Command Z adds up to a bingeable, feature-length fable soaked in wormhole juice and comes with an ear-worm thanks to ‘The Theme from Mahogany’. (“Do you know where you’re going to?”)

Command Z grew out of broadcaster and author Kurt Anderson’s book Evil Geniuses, which Anderson and Soderbergh adapted together, alongside writer-comedians Roy Wood Jr., JJ Malley and Chloe Radcliffe, who play Kerning’s trio of employees. Made last year, before the devastating, record-breaking heat, floods and fires of this northern hemisphere summer, the series lands at an anxious time and asks: can we turn back the clock?

Soderbergh, of course, is not new to activist art: he’s tackled issues like mass chemical poisoning, whistle-blowing, money-laundering and America’s war on drugs, in films such as Ocean’s Eleven series are comments on the myth of American exceptionalism and the realities of working-class life. 

But something about how things are going right now has sparked a drive to do more. Even though the Oscar-winning filmmaker (who received his first Academy Award nomination in 1990 for his sex, lies, and videotape screenplay) agrees with Anderson’s thesis—that rapid reversal will only come if billionaire heads of business dismantle the self-serving systems they built to enrich their own—he’s also sure that, useless as we may feel, there is always something individual citizens can do. 

As Soderbergh tells us in a special episode of The Letterboxd Show: “You don’t have to do everything, you don’t even have to devote your whole life to it. Just pick a thing, pick one thing that you’re interested in that might improve things, and just do that one thing. At this point, everything helps and everything matters.” 

Read on for edited highlights of the conversation, and for Soderbergh’s comments on the current WGA and SAG-AFTRA strike from the same interview, read our Best in Show coverage. 

You yourself are a famous list-maker, which is how we discovered that you’re a Below Deck fan.
Oh, yeah.

Can I ask, what is it about Below Deck?
Well, it’s about work. And unlike some shows, this is activity that would be going on whether there were cameras there or not, and so it’s not manufactured in the way that some reality shows are. Obviously they cast hoping for the most drama possible between the crew and the captain, and they’re pretty good at that. But as a process show and a problem-solving exercise, I find it really compelling and helpful. 

I think people who have jobs where they have to interact with people can watch a show like Below Deck and see themselves in it—and you’re constantly yelling at the screen. Mostly, I think the show is a really strong example for people, if they choose to view it this way, of when to keep your mouth shut and when to speak, which is one of the harder things to learn in life.

I got some Below Deck vibes from Command Z in that you’ve got workers being sent in to do tricky and intimate jobs. And not just that, but workers paid at a certain level of income being sent to do those jobs by a person with squillions of dollars. It’s a level of living that is kind of impossible to imagine to you and I, I guess.
Well, it sort of begs the question of how we establish for ourselves and the culture: what is enough? I feel lucky that I grew up in a resolutely middle-class environment. My father was a college professor, I was one of six kids, so I never went without. We didn’t have a lot of stuff, but my parents were fortunately not interested at all in status or anything like that. Money wasn’t spoken of, not because it was off limits, but it wasn’t part of my parents’ desire. They didn’t view success as being tied to how much money we had.

At the time, to be fair, when I was growing up, there weren’t shows like Below Deck and there wasn’t social media, and there wasn’t as much focus on status and the sort of trappings of being wealthy as there are now. So I was lucky in that regard as well.

Stephen Gillespie writes that Command Z is “a cool thing advocating for greater causes. There are two clear points, powerful individuals are a root cause of our ever widening dystopia. And secondly, change needs to happen on a wider systemic level if it’s going to do anything.” But he does talk about how it’s self-satirical, and I wondered how much of the humor was directed back at the series itself?
It has to fire in every direction, or it just becomes a lecture. And so, to acknowledge and make fun of the entire construct, which is a bunch of artists sitting around telling people how to fix the world. I mean, the Jamie character kind of articulates that in her last scene with Kerning Fealty on the street where she’s like, “I hate that you think this is how things are going to get fixed, and I don’t need you to tell me that things need to be fixed or how to fix them.” She’s right. It is arrogant.

But that being said, if the alternative is that you do nothing, or the alternative is that I do nothing to contribute to a conversation in the hopes that somebody gets activated enough to want to do something, that’s worse. That’s kind of the point of the show that’s also explored, which is, you don’t have to do everything, you don’t even have to devote your whole life to it. Just pick a thing, pick one thing that you’re interested in that might improve things, and just do that one thing. At this point, everything helps and everything matters.

I just finished yesterday reading the scariest book I’ve ever read, which is called The Heat Will Kill [You] First by Jeff Goodell. And it’s terrifying, it’s absolutely terrifying. When was James Hansen’s speech to Congress, 30 years ago? Maybe more. We don’t have time to debate this, we got to start really doing things now.

One of the three pivotal organizations you point people to, if you’re watching Command Z on the website, there’s the wonderful 350.org, an incredible organization, but you’re also pointing people towards a disinformation network [CheckMyAds.org]. Do you want to talk about that?
The fact is bad ideas scale faster than good ideas, and bad information is more exciting and activates, lights up our brain more than good ideas. Peace is boring is really the problem.

Yeah, there are certain people who are drawn to chaos, even a fake chaos.
No, because it’s exciting and they get a dopamine hit from that.

Go to karaoke!
Exactly.

That’s what the chaos agents need. Karaoke is chaotic.
Good ideas require more complex thinking. They require large-scale cooperation over long periods of time. They’re harder to implement and sustain. Bad ideas are, like I said, more exciting, scale faster. Often if they don’t require you to do nothing or at least just say no to something, they involve you getting activated, doing really dramatic things.

So again, this is a human problem, is making good ideas sexy. And it’s the cliché: it takes a year to build a house; you can burn it down in half an hour. So in the world that we live in, assholes have a disproportionate destructive power. You can be having the best party in the world with the 50 coolest people that you can think of. One asshole rolls up and suddenly the cops are there and it’s over.

There’s a really good book actually called Assholes: A Theory, by Aaron James. You got to read this because he’s taking the position, I think it’s true, of “we need to figure this out”. These people are a problem. They feel that the rules that we all live by do not apply to them, and they navigate the world with that belief and they’re incredibly destructive. I don’t know what the answer is. I wish some of the various texts that were dictated from on high thousands of years ago had language, a magic string of words, that could neutralize assholes, but there’s nothing there that I can find. It’s a real problem.

Do you ever think though, that sometimes you need to fight asshole with asshole, that we’re all a bit too polite?
I don’t know. I hope not. I want there to be a better way to deal with assholes than being an asshole back to them. Well, this is a question for the world. Is it okay to discriminate against an asshole? This is an open question because the easiest way to deal with them is to just avoid them and not allow them to be around you. But how does that work? I mean, look, in my business, we have a no-asshole clause. Everybody knows who they are and I won’t hire them. So there’s that.

Well, she was just unique in that she was unabashedly personal and operated from a place of absolute subjectivity and felt that was kind of the whole point of being a critic. And she pulled from so many other art forms. I mean, you’d read reviews and end up with a list of things to look at or see or read that had nothing to do with movies, but that she had sort of wound into her review. There was nobody like her before she showed up and I would argue there’s nobody that’s any good since that isn’t standing on her shoulders.

Now, she appeared at the perfect time. Suddenly, a movie critic mattered in a way that a movie critic hadn’t mattered before at a time when movies were starting to matter in a way they hadn’t before in the mid ’60s through the end of the ’70s, that whole American New Wave. Movies just don’t occupy the cultural real estate now that they did back then. It’s much more fragmented, movies are not the dominant cultural art form that they were in the 20th century. Movies were, I think, the dominant art form of the 20th century. They will not be the most dominant art form of the 21st century. 

And so she just was the right person at the right time. And as I said in the little piece, she just taught you how to look at movies. I disagreed with her on things all the time. There are things that she likes that I don’t, and there are things that I think are fantastic that she didn’t get or didn’t like. That wasn’t the point. It was having a take, having a specific take on something. That’s the point. That’s what a director needs, and it’s what a critic needs. I just find myself regularly kind of dipping in. I’ve got all of her books that she published with her reviews, and they’re fun just to go back and spin through and read her take on a specific film. And it’s unfortunate that that role doesn’t really exist anymore.

My goal is to facilitate in such a way that I don’t have to do a lot. But I enjoy doing it and it’s fun. It’s especially gratifying when you feel like a thing would not have come to had you not helped. That’s a good feeling, as opposed to something that was going to happen anyway.

To travel through time, your Command Z trio must listen to the theme to Mahogany, the Diana Ross film directed by Berry Gordy and Terry Richardson, whilst pressing a button on a reworked tumble-dryer and drinking some worm-juice. It’s a great, very, very funny and perfectly lo-fi time travel device. Does Mahogany hold a place in your cinephile heart, or is it the lyrics to that song?
Well, the lyrics are pretty perfect for almost anything. It got stuck in my head when I was working with Elvis Mitchell on his documentary Is That Black Enough for You?!? while we were working on that, and this was a process that played out over a couple of years, I was going back and revisiting a lot of the films that were discussed in the documentary, and Mahogany was one of the films that I wanted to go back and watch. I’d seen it in the ’70s, but I hadn’t seen it since and I was reminded of what an earworm that song was and immediately sort of put it in my back pocket as an element to be used in some very, very different context.

And then as we were coming up with the conceit of how they time travel, I thought, “Okay, this is where we’re going to get to use Mahogany. There’s going to be three things: there’s the juice, there’s the song and there’s the dryer.” So again, this is how things work. You sort of snatch things out of the air, put them in a bucket, and wait for the moment where they become useful.

I love a good time travel conceit that’s in the everyday. My all-time favorite will always be Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, because I just love how crowded that phone booth gets. It’s not the TARDIS, it’s still just its own size. Do you have any favorites?
That one. That’s a really good one and I was very happy to have been involved with Ed Solomon and was just really happy it got made because everybody wanted to be there, everybody wanted to make it. That was not a salary play, that was, “We really want to go back and finish this.”

It was so good.
It’s really fun. And Dean [Parisot, the director] did a great job and I was just really pleased that that is out in the world. Look, it’s hard to beat the DeLorean [from Back to the Future]. That was pretty inspired, similarly kind of lo-fi, even though it had some technology. Part of what made it so fun was how absurd it was. Nobody really embraced something that silly as being a workable time travel model, so that’s hard to beat, but I’ve often wondered what’s left to explore in of time travel. I wouldn’t know how you make a time travel movie that isn’t at some level a comedy. You know what I mean? I think it would be tricky. I mean, I know there are shows that do it, but I think, me being me, I wouldn’t be able to make a serious time travel movie. I wouldn’t be able to do it. 

I’ve got it! It’s a J.Lo song. You have to sing a Jennifer Lopez song at karaoke.
That’s interesting. A lot of options there.

Boom, can’t wait. Call me up when you’re going down the club.
Yeah. Well, I think everybody needs to be prepared for the fact that this may happen in a room where I’m alone and this whole empathy talk doesn’t get explored at all.

No man is an island, Steven.
I don’t know.