Full Frontal
Short description
Set in Los Angeles over a single day, Full Frontal follows several connected people in the hours before a birthday party. A magazine journalist who also writes screenplays is convinced he understands why his wife is unhappy, while she works as an executive at a large company. Her sister earns a living as a hotel masseuse and worries about finding a partner. Elsewhere in the city, a television actor has moved into film work, appearing in a production whose producer is the man celebrating his fortieth birthday at a Beverly Hills hotel. The film was made in a deliberately loose, experimental style with a large number of small roles.
Steven Soderbergh directed the film from a screenplay by Coleman Hough, with Gregory Jacobs and Scott Kramer producing. It was the tenth film Soderbergh directed in chronological order, following Solaris and preceding Ocean's Twelve. The cast includes David Duchovny, Nicky Katt, Catherine Keener, Mary McCormack, David Hyde Pierce and Julia Roberts, among sixty-one credited performers and seventy-five credited crew members. Made for roughly two million dollars, it returned about three million worldwide.
Full Frontal received a critics' rating of 5.4 out of 10 from 143 reviews. On IMDb it holds 4.7 out of 10 from around 12,000 votes, and on TMDB 4.6 out of 10 from about 115 votes. The audience scores and the critics' score are comparatively close, with little sign of a strong divide between the two.
What's left behind the scenes
- David Duchovny later recounted that during the massage scene, the director demanded an erection from him, but the actor was unable to achieve one "on command," so a prosthetic was used.
- When Blair Underwood's character raps to Julia Roberts' character in the limousine, one of the lines contains the words: "to kiss the beauty under the pelican moon." This is a reference to two films starring Roberts – the melodrama "Pretty Woman" (Gary Marshall, 1990) and the legal thriller "The Pelican Brief" (Alan J. Pakula, 1993).
- Steven Soderbergh couldn't find anyone to play the director, so he appeared on screen himself (his face is hidden by a black square).
- Filming took 18 days. Steven Soderbergh primarily shot using portable digital cameras – a rather unusual step for the time, considering the participation of renowned actors in the film. The director worked here in the style of "Dogme 95" – an avant-garde movement in cinema, whose ideologues were Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg.
- When sending the film's script to renowned actors, director Steven Soderbergh attached a sheet outlining the conditions under which the actors would have to work. Citing the film's modest budget ($2 million), he warned that actors would be responsible for their own transportation to and from the set, rather than being provided with limousines, and would also need to take care of their own costumes and makeup. The filmmakers would not be responsible for the quality of food on set, individual trailers would not be provided, improvisation on set was encouraged, and actors would be interviewed about their characters and other aspects, with some of the interview potentially being included in the film.
- Steven Soderbergh shot most of the film with a Canon XL-1s camera, which records onto MiniDV tapes. The scene in which Blair Underwood's character interviews Julia Roberts' character was shot on film. Later, Danny Boyle would film the post-apocalyptic film "28 Days Later" (2002) using the same camera.
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