Celebrated for constantly pushing his own creative boundaries, Steven Soderbergh recently shot a feature film— “Unsane”— using an iPhone. In a Wired interview, Soderbergh called the project, which features Claire Foy, “a super low-budget thriller/horror type thing.” While he didn’t reveal the plot, he did explain that he found shooting with a phone liberating. “The ability to put the lens anywhere I wanted in a matter of seconds, if not minutes, was incredibly freeing. You want to put a camera above somebody’s head, you’ve got to lash a rope to it and tie it to something so it doesn’t kill them. This, you just stick it on a piece of velcro and shoot.”
Now in post-production, “Unsane” will have a theatrical release. “It’s a 4K capture,” he said. “I’ve seen it on a giant screen; nobody, if they didn’t already know, would ever suspect. It looks like a normal movie.”
You’ll find the entire Wired interview—which gives Soderbergh’s opinions on many topics including Virtual Reality and the Weinstein scandal—here.
You can follow the development of “Unsane” on IMDb.
I believe that this is just the beginning of the iPhone video revolution. I’ve been a professional filmmaker for 17 years and have worked with every type of camera you can imagine. For the 4K documentary work I do I only need my iPhone 6 plus, a Zeiss Telephoto Ecolens, a good mic, and lights and I can go anywhere and shoot anything.