Interview: Timothy Olyphant on ‘Full Circle’ and the Collaborative Energy Steven Soderbergh Brings to Set

Via Collider.
This interview was conducted prior to the start of the SAG-AFTRA strike.

Collider: This is such a fascinating character study. It’s one of those projects where, as the audience, we start not knowing what’s going on or how any of the pieces, which really are these characters, fit with each other. How much did you know? How did you keep track of how it all fit together?

TIMOTHY OLYPHANT: I read all the scripts, before I even met Steven [Soderbergh] and Ed [Solomon]. I’d read all six, and I loved them. They were amazing. They were riveting and thrilling, and they were what people call page-turners, for every episode. After that, you dive in and start learning your lines and working the scenes, and you trust that it will all fit together. I don’t worry too much about that because that’s Steven’s problem.

With this being such dense material, do you just compartmentalize, as far as like your character and how he fits in, in any given moment?

OLYPHANT: Yeah, any conversations about the overall piece or scenes, for the most part, happened early. And then, maybe you address those conversations, once you have time, if you can find time while you’re in the midst of shooting. Sometimes Ed and I would get together and look at scenes, but it was based on our initial back and forth, from the jump. After that, you’re just playing the scene. That’s what I do. I don’t know about all the other people that do it other ways. All I know is that what I do is learn my lines and try to get out of my own way.

How does a Steven Soderbergh project work? When you’re working with somebody like that, who is also carrying the camera around and who seems to be a filmmaker who wants to be just in the middle of it, what’s that like to work with and interact with?

OLYPHANT: It’s wonderful. It just doesn’t get any better. You feel his energy, and you feel his interest. I worked with Walter Hill. He was one of those old school guys, who sits on an apple box right next to the lens, and I remember loving that. Any time you can connect to an audience, in this case it’s Steven because you can sense him right there, it’s wonderful. It’s like theater. The audience is telling you what the scene is. I much prefer that to the director behind the monitor watching the footage in another room. Even then, you can sense it, but this is wonderful.

Read more at Timothy Olyphant on ‘Full Circle’ & the Energy on a Steven Soderbergh Set (collider.com)