The Guardian catches up with the hardest working man in show business, Steven Soderbergh, to chat about The Girlfriend Experience and the upcoming Moneyball. Screening the former at the Tribeca Film Festival, Soderbergh describes the low-budget Experience as “a very myopic view of a very small cross-section of people who are doing a certain thing in October of 2008.” The movie, which centers on a high-end escort played by porn star Sasha Grey, has the director seeing the world in XXX-ray vision.

"Porn is beyond everywhere now," he says.

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That Steven Soderbergh can do damn near anything, can't he?

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In his obituary for Marilyn Chambers yesterday, our own Phil Nugent noted that “Chambers became perhaps the only established hardcore star to play the leading role in a ‘mainstream’ film by a major North American director (at least, until Steven Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience opens) when David Cronenberg cast her in his second feature, Rabid.” The star of the Soderbergh film is Sasha Grey, until now best known for her work in such mature adult fare as Squirt Gangbang, Blow Me Sandwich 11 and Cum Fart Cocktails 5.

You’d expect Grey’s first mainstream role to be something of a change of pace, but the actress herself wasn’t so sure about that.

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Screengrab editor emeritus Bilge Ebiri reports from the frontlines of Park City.

I’m a bit late in getting to The Girlfriend Experience, which Steven Soderbergh premiered two nights ago night at a secret Sundance Sneak Preview. (Full disclosure: I had to first write about it for my other outlet.) I was initially hesitating to review the film, simply because the director deemed it a “work in progress” and I have this weird feeling that he’s still trying to find his movie. But then everybody else went and reviewed it, so I guess that shouldn’t stop me. Yet it still sort of does: Maybe it’s because I had some more issues with it than most other writers seemed to...

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That sneaky Steven Soderbergh screened his latest work-in-progress, The Girlfriend Experience, in the “Sneak Preview 2” slot at Sundance this week. In Entertainment Weekly, Owen Glieberman describes it as “one of the director's wee, semi-improvised, non-star-cast, shot-on-easy-to-tote-video doodles,” and apparently means that as a compliment. The movie is already semi-notorious for Soderbergh’s casting of an actual porn star (pictured here in one of the few photos we can, uh, picture here). The director address the issue in a post-screening Q & A: “Even though the film's not very explicit," Soderbergh said of Sasha Grey, "there's a comfort level she obviously has from making all of those films that I think is difficult to fake. There's a kind of attitude.”

Good news for fans of Nazi zombie comedies!

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