NewsBusters reported earlier this month that Oscar-winning film director Steven Soderbergh believes Hollywood studios weren’t interested in his biopic about Liberace because it was “too gay.”
On Friday, Soderbergh repeated this claim during an interview with the Huffington Post saying that the HBO film starring Michael Douglas and Matt Damon is “pretty gay...'La Cage Aux Folles' on steorids.”
“It’s certainly indicative of a shift that’s happened in the last ten years or so in which a certain kind of audience I think has migrated to television," Soderbergh said of the difference between television and movies today. "It’s an audience that can accept more ambiguity in its protagonists. It’s an audience that likes to go narrow and deep as opposed to broad and superficial."
"So I think we were just sort of, you know, caught up in that dichotomy a little bit, and luckily, you know, HBO didn’t hesitate, and it all worked out." he continued. "We had pre-sold the foreign for most of the budget. We didn’t need very much money at all, and nobody would do it.”
When asked if the homosexual content of the film is so graphic that a financier would back off, Soderbergh said, “We weren't shy about the relationship. It's pretty gay, but it's also, it’s also really entertaining. I mean, Jerry Weintraub our producer referred to it as ‘La Cage Aux Folles’ on steroids.”
Ooooh. I’m all atingle.