Steven Soderbergh and Taylor Swift are never, ever, ever getting back together. Soderbergh, who admitted he has a fascination with the aura of Swift, is desperately trying to catch The Eras Tour but, like many of us, can’t seem to snag a seat.
Speaking with The Hollywood Reporter, Steven Soderbergh said he would absolutely see Taylor Swift live “if I could. I can’t get in [because tickets sell out so quickly]. But I watched the film.” According to his annual watchlist, Soderbergh caught The Eras Tour on December 13th. The Eras Tour – which is officially the highest-grossing ever, topping Elton John’s Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour – is currently on its European leg before it comes back to North America. Across the globe, Soderbergh has heard nothing but praise. “David Koepp [writer of the Soderbergh-directed Kimi and Presence] took his teenage daughter to see this show. And he was like, ‘You cannot believe what it’s like to be there. It is elemental. To be with that many people with that level of emotion. You cannot not be a part of it. It’s just overwhelming.’ He loved it.”
But even if Soderbergh can’t manage to grab a ticket for The Eras Tour, he recognizes just what sort of impact Swift is having, even citing the tour as a demonstration of the human ability to cooperate and collaborate on a large scale, saying, “You look at a Taylor Swift concert, well look at that whole tour, and just go, ‘Okay, it works.’ All these people, all this effort, the coordination of it, and it works.” He added that there is a lot to learn from the pop icon. “Look, people laugh at how there’s a college class being taught about her in business school. There should be. What she has done, what she’s doing in the way she’s doing it, nobody has ever done this before. The amount of control that she has taken. And she’s doing this all herself. Nobody has ever done this. It’s working. And it’s a great model…I would like to know more about how she is on a granular level, how is she doing all of this? How does the business work? What’s her brain trust? How is the money? How does all the money move? How does it work? I’m fascinated by that because it’s a success story.”
Steven Soderbergh might be taking it to a level that most Taylor Swift fans don’t – they’re a bit more into bracelets than financial analytics – but that’s just how he operates.
What do you make of the Taylor Swift phenomenon? Does it have more of a positive or negative impact?