What’s the best way to celebrate a 63rd birthday? If you’re Steven Soderbergh, you throw a film festival — and invite some incredible bartenders to make themed cocktails to go along with the movies.
It doesn’t hurt that the Oscar-winning director has his own booze to throw behind the project. Launched in 2014, Singani 63 is a Bolivian spirit distilled from Muscat grapes. The “63” represents Soderbergh’s birth year (1963) and, now, his actual age.
So to celebrate his birthday and the success of his spirit line, the Ocean’s Eleven director is combining his two passions. He’s curated a film series taking place over 63 days with Brooklyn’s Nitehawk Cinema entitled “A Man Under the Influence,” where he’s selected a movie to represent each of the last nine decades and then chosen an NYC-area bar or restaurant to create a Singani 63 cocktail tailored to each flick. Before each screening (which starts Feb. 18 with Trouble in Paradise at the Nitehawk Prospect Park location), there will be a happy hour featuring the themed drink.
Soderbergh, however, will not be present. “The plan was for me to just record intros, because I’m a completionist and if I go to one, I have to go all of them,” he admits. And he’s a busy guy! During our recent video call, the director spoke about his love of mixology, the slow burn of success with Singani 63, his thoughts on phones in movie theaters and what he’s up to now that he’s not doing the next Star Wars.
InsideHook: What was the inspiration for turning your birthday into a film series?
Steven Soderbergh: The team came to me with this idea. And I suspect my daughter, who’s the head of marketing, had an outsized role to play. But I said yes, because it kind of made sense. I mean, we were always looking for ways to integrate my day job with my night job. New York was our first market, and is still a very significant market for us. We’ve done some stuff with Nitehawk before that we felt came off really well. So I think everybody was trying to combine all these things.
The challenge for me was, how do I curate this? To pick nine movies out of thousands of potential titles. So they had to be English-language titles, doing one per decade and having them be an influence on me personally, or, if beyond me, an influence on the film community and movie business at large. In the case of something like The 5,000 Fingers of Dr T., that’s an influence on me personally, and it has no cultural influence whatsoever. And then you have something on the other end of the spectrum, like Jaws, which hits all of those markers.
The list took me about a week and it’s very subjective. It’s the product of my upbringing, being raised as a straight white kid in a college town. This list is not meant to be representative of anything except my background.
There’s a New Official Spirits Category in the US and You Can Thank Steven Soderbergh for It
The movie director pushed the TTB to recognize the Bolivian distilled spirit SinganiHow did you pick the bars?
These are places that have been supportive of the brand, and also places that our team likes — top-tier mixology cocktail programs. That’s where we’ve had our early success and continue to have our most success.
Did you have any say or collaboration in the drinks they came up with?
Oh, none of us had any desire to tell them what to do. One of the greatest pleasures of this business has been realizing and witnessing how creative the people are behind the bar, making cocktails. It never gets old to watch somebody experiment and build a cocktail in front of you.
I’ve had situations where they almost treat it like an improv class, where somebody throws out an idea, like “name me a certain ingredient that you like” or a “classic cocktail that you like,” and they will improvise a cocktail from the ground up. And it’ll be amazing.
We last spoke about Singani around 10 years ago during a Brooklyn bar crawl. Since then, you’ve won TTB approval to categorize Singani as its own drinks category, and I’ve certainly seen the bottle up more often on shelves. What else has changed?
The good news is, in an industry that’s currently pretty flat and in which a lot of the larger companies are closing their indie spirit divisions and certainly have stopped scooping up bespoke brands, we’re still growing. That’s encouraging and reflective of the groundwork we’re doing. There are no shortcuts to accomplishing. You just have to be there and keep plugging away, working with good people and good accounts and being smart.
Simon Ford told me once, “Don’t confuse expansion with growth.” We’ve tried to be really careful about that, of not moving into markets just because we can. We’ve been strategic. And to your point, I get people now saying, “Oh, I was in such and such city,” and they’ll send me a picture of the bottle on the back bar.
Look how long it took mezcal to become ubiquitous. Yeah, it seemed like it was overnight, but that’s been 20 years.
Outside of this fest, what’s next for you?
We have The Christophers come out in April. I actually have multiple projects I’m working on. Once Star Wars went away, it kind of left a hole. And so I spent the months this summer and fall, and through the end of the year, kind of building up a cachet of things that I want to do. I did a lot of writing for the first time in a long time.
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You’re doing these films at the Nitehawk, which is one of those theaters that has waitstaff come by, and it’s also anti-phone. Alamo, which pioneered this, has now moved away from this. Does that bother you as a filmmaker and movie fan?
I guess there are two schools of thought on that. The fewer times that somebody has to walk in front of people to come to you, the better. So if you can get on your phone and they’ll bring it and that’s the only time they have to walk and talk to…I could argue that’s okay. I can understand how these curated experiences are designed to be better than being at home — you would want people to have a cocktail while they’re watching a movie.
The no phones thing — it’s really hard to police. And it can be a powder keg if people have been drinking. I guess I’m just resigned to it all. I’m taking the attitude that people made the effort to get out of the house and go to a theater. I’m not gonna handcuff them too much.
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