What inspires Steven Soderbergh?

It’s not uncommon for creatives (particularly writers) to keep a media diary and catalogue their creative consumption habits. Steven Soderbergh is no exception.

Soderbergh has written and directed seminal indie fare ("Sex, Lies and Videotape"), prestige Oscar winners ("Traffic"), popcorn classics ("Oceans Eleven" and "Magic Mike") and mischievous heist films (the underrated "Logan Lucky") and today comfortably sits in film and TV’s elite upper echelons.

A voracious consumer of pop culture, Soderbergh maintains a blog that painstakingly archives every film he watches, television series he binges, play he sees and book he reads. This week he unveiled his list of media consumption for 2018 and it’s fascinating reading for creatives.

Soderbergh began the year by devouring Michael Wolff’s expose "Fire and the Fury" and is seemingly a big fan of the TV series "Atlanta," "Better Call Saul," "Silicon Valley," and "Billions." He burned through two buzzy Ottessa Moshfegh novels within two days mid-year and intriguing chose December 25th to revisit the Tom Cruise film Minority Report. He actually returned to several Spielberg movies through the year, including Jurassic Park.

Last year I sat down with him to talk about his craft and also a series he directed for HBO starring Sharon Stone called "Mosaic."

Next month, Soderbergh’s new film "High Flying Bird" is out exclusively on Netflix. Like his last movie, "Unsane," he filmed most of it on an iPhone.

“I can’t imagine why anyone would make a movie for a big studio now,” the maverick director told me.

Although much of his creative inspiration is derived from films and television he views at home, Soderbergh says watching movies at the theater remains a unique experience.

“I don’t think movie theaters are going away,” he says. “There use to be a big difference between home and the movies. But the difference between the movies experience and the home experience is getting narrower. Growing up, the TV screen looked s***. Now I have a 65 inch, 4K HDR monitor in my room and it looks incredible.

"Then you add the fact that people today don’t know how to behave when they go out in public and it can be unpleasant. People think they are in their living room. So I still go to the movies, but every time I go, I think, this is driving me back into my house. I grew up worshiping the movies, so that’s heartbreaking to me.”

Having filmed his last two features on an iPhone, he’s certainly not precious about how viewers consume his work, either.

“Instead of being someone who got upset that my work was screening on a phone or an iPad and viewing it as a diminishment of my work, given that everybody is on these, why not make something that is designed to be on this, so it’s actually not a diminishment, it is the perfect expression of the idea, from the beginning.”

As you’ll see from his list, Soderbergh is an avid consumer of television and is eager to produce more in the medium.

“The good news is there are no rules,” he says. “David Chase when he made "The Sopranos" blew up all the rules that use to be ascribed to TV: how many episodes to make, what time of year it would drop, that it has to be every year.”

Take a look at Soderbergh’s media diary here.

Do you diarize your pop culture consumption? Do lists like these inspire your creativity?