Seek And Destroy | Defector

"It felt like there was nothing to salvage,"

"In the immediate aftermath of that first screening, it felt like nothing worked. That's how scared we were at that moment."

"It wasn't written or shot to be put together the way it ended up being put together,"

Steven Soderbergh produced The Limey for a $10 million budget in 1998 and endured a difficult production and post-production process. An early screening left the filmmakers convinced the film had failed and that there was little to salvage. Over several months Soderbergh and editor Sara Flack performed reshoots and radically reconfigured the film in the editing room. The final cut became a lean, nasty, intermittently dreamlike 90-minute revenge story about a grieving, absent father seeking vengeance. The film returned less than a third of its budget at the box office. The Limey later achieved recognition as a distinctive and stylish thriller. Soderbergh avoided watching the film again until its twentieth-anniversary remastering and described the post-production as a "vortex of terror."

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