Porn star Sasha Grey in Soderberg’s ‘Girlfriend Experience’

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Shot in 16 days with a cast of non-professional actors and a crew of barely a dozen, The Girlfriend Experience is Steven Soderbergh’s 20th feature in as many years. Recently, the prodigiously industrious film-maker has yomped from the tentpole glitz of the Ocean’s franchise through the strategic and tactical challenges of an ambitious Che Guevara diptych into this, his latest shoestring experiment. Sitting with journalists at the Tribeca film festival, where The Girlfriend Experience screened this week, Soderbergh mulls over the practical differences between big-budget and small-scale productions.

“They’re both like math problems, it’s just one has a different set of integers than the other,” he offers nonchalantly. “What’s helpful about the small films is you’re closer to the ground if you make a mistake, you know? You can try things knowing, ‘If I fall off this rope, I’m going to sprain an ankle. I’m not going to die.'”

With its budget of $1.7m (£1.15m) and use of HD video and available light, The Girlfriend Experience is low to the ground in financial and technical terms, but it’s also a film with calculatedly restricted concerns. “By design, this is a very myopic view of a very small cross-section of people who are doing a certain thing in October of 2008,” Soderbergh explains. The film comprises a series of semi-improvised conversations, all more or less transactional in nature, conducted by performers who play versions of themselves, more or less, or at least characters to whom their professional experience gives them informed insight.

At the film’s centre is Christine, a high-end Manhattan escort who also goes by the name Chelsea, played by porn star Sasha Grey. The Girlfriend Experience follows her professional life, which involves a little sex and a lot of business strategy; the lucrative service she offers, which simulates the emotional as well as physical intimacy of a genuine relationship and after which the movie is named, is apparently recession-proof. Her boyfriend Chris, however – a personal trainer played by personal trainer Chris Santos – is struggling to stay solvent.

Conceived three years ago, the story was aptly realised against a real-life perfect storm of political and economic upheaval. “Even when we weren’t shooting, it’s all any of us was talking about: the election and the economy,” Soderbergh recalls. “And that was fine with me, because I was always trying to find a way to make a scene about money, somehow or other … Since the design of it is that people are speaking for and as themselves, that’s just where everybody’s head was.”

The Girlfriend Experience extends the interest in non-professional performers that Soderbergh explored in films such as Schizopolis (1996) and Traffic (2000), as well as the 2003 HBO series K Street. But however good the professional actors in those titles were, he says, “I still felt like there were two universes colliding.” This time round, he decided to “just hire real people and turn them loose”.

A dramatic interest in the dynamics of non-professional filming can be seen as far back as the director’s celebrated debut feature, sex, lies, and videotape, in which James Spader’s character records women talking about their sexuality. The picture was shown again this year at Sundance, where it premiered in 1989. “It was kind of hilarious to think that 20 years ago what James Spader was doing would be outré and scandalous when the shit you can see now at a double-click will sear your brain forever,” Soderbergh notes. “It was kind of quaint, almost like watching a movie that took place in the world of gas lamps.”

Today, taking sex work as the central concern of a feature no longer offers the transgressive frisson delivered by sex, lies or such precedents as Godard’s Vivre Sa Vie. Nor did Soderbergh fear provoking any cognitive dissonance by using a star of adult movies. “Porn is beyond everywhere now,” he says. “Everybody on television looks like they’re in porn, you know? I mean, the people that give you the news every day look like porn actors. The degree of coiffing that’s going on is kind of disturbing.”

Rather, it was Grey’s experience in sex work, as well as in front of the camera, that made her so compelling a casting option. “I wanted somebody who in sexualised situations feels totally in command and powerful.” Grey’s presence is magnetic, partly because of a sense of controlled yet indulgent distance. “What a lot of people might see as a problem, I felt was crucial to the core of the movie,” Soderbergh says, “[her] sort of disconnected quality. A lot of people are like, ‘She seems really kind of flat.’ Yeah, exactly.” He mentions a scene that exemplifies “the way that she looks completely relaxed, she looks completely in control, she looks content … I don’t know how you fake that. It’s just like Zen, totally Zen.”

Grey’s fans of long standing will also be getting something new: a girlfriend experience. “With Sasha, you can within seconds see her do anything you can imagine with her clothes off,” Soderbergh acknowledges. “What you can’t see is what it’s like to be her boyfriend, to hang out with her and be emotionally intimate with her. So my whole theory is that’s the fantasy for those who’ve been double-clicking – that they want to spend 77 minutes being her boyfriend.”

This extended experiment in casting from life will be further explored in Moneyball, a large-scale project shooting this summer. Brad Pitt will star as a strategically-minded baseball manager but “at least 50-60% of the film is going to be populated by real people playing themselves,” Soderbergh says. (“There are a lot of very nervous people at Sony right now,” he adds.) Meanwhile, The Informant, starring Matt Damon as an agribusiness whistleblower, is set for an autumn release and the 3D rock musical Cleo remains on the cards. Doesn’t the director ever feel like a break?

“No,” he says. “What’s going to happen is that at a certain point I will just stop. I don’t have, like, two speeds. I’ll just stop.”