Director Steven Soderbergh looks back on “King of the Hill” 30 years later

While there have been many films set and shot here in St. Louis, one hidden gem among that group is 1993’s King of the Hill. Adapted from A.E. Hotchner’s memoir of the same name, the film is a coming-of-age story set in Great Depression–era St. Louis that follows a bright 12-year-old boy and chronicles his time living on his own at a seedy motel after his parents are forced to leave and his brother is sent off to live with a relative. The film starred Jesse Bradford alongside a cast that also included Adrien Brody, Karen Allen, Spalding Gray, Katherine Heigl, and Lauryn Hill. 

King of the Hill was released at a pivotal time in celebrated director Steven Soderbergh’s career, his third film after breakout hit sex, lies, and videotape and follow up Kafka. So, just in time for the film’s 30th anniversary this year, we sat down for a chat with Soderbergh about his experience filming in St. Louis, what he finds interesting about stories set in the Midwest, and how the film helped to hone his voice as an early-career director. 

How would you characterize where you were in your career when you came to King of the Hill?

Well, let’s see. We rolled up in the summer of ‘92. This would have been July, August. At that point, Kafka came out at the end of 1991 and did not make a ripple. It was viewed as this sort of classic sophomore slump. But during the making of that, in the interim between sex, lies, and videotape in the summer of ‘92, I’d been working on the adaptation of King of the Hill, so I was getting that ready to go. Fortunately, Universal Studios had decided to start a sort of independent division called Gramercy Pictures, and King of the Hill was going to be one of the first films made under this new arrangement. So I was fortunate that the timing allowed me to get that into production without having to wait. [King of the Hill]] was a book that I’d admired for some time, but A.E. Hotchner had resisted all attempts to gain the rights to turn it into a film. It wasn’t until Robert Redford made a sort of personal plea that he agreed to license the rights, and we were able to make the movie. For me, it was an exciting period, because I was very much attached to the book and happy to be making the film. I was also hopeful that, with the Kafka response in the rearview mirror, I would get back on track in commercial and critical terms. So it was a period of real optimism. And I’d never spent any significant time in St. Louis other than doing location scouts for the film. I remember showing up and being led to my office in the bowels of the Kiel Auditorium and thinking, “Here we go.”

What was it like shooting the St Louis of 1992 to look like St. Louis of the early 1930s? 

It wasn’t easy, but I would imagine that within 10 years it would have been demonstrably harder. We were able to find some areas in town that hadn’t been touched too radically in the many decades between when the story took place and when we were shooting. I mean, that’s 60 years. So we found a couple of blocks that were fairly intact and we kind of centered our street shooting around those areas. And then the Kiel, in addition to functioning as our production offices and production center, was our soundstage. We built all of our sets inside the auditorium. So it was a fairly efficient production in that regard. We were shooting six-day weeks for eight weeks, which is not something you do as much anymore. It was fairly common on independent films with tight budgets during that period, but shortly thereafter, with some exceptions, most everything else I worked on reverted to a five-day week. So it was an intense shoot. There was a lot of work to be done. But I remember there being a real, very positive spirit amongst the crew and that the local people we worked with were very capable and had great attitudes. There were softball games every Sunday. The one weird aspect for me, well, for everybody who was coming to St Louis to work—and I don’t know if this is still possible—but the hotel that we were staying in was inside of a mall. And so you looked out of your window onto a mall, which was completely covered. So there was no sort of air circulation. It was very strange. And I don’t know if that’s still there anymore. It was right near the train station.

When you were scouting locations, were you using specific locations that are called out in the memoir to inform where you were shooting?

Yeah, I mean, that’s where you start. And then, as you can imagine, pretty quickly you realize, “Oh, some of those neighborhoods don’t really exist in that form anymore.” But it was fun, in those early days, to kind of go down the list of areas that Hotchner had mentioned just to see what they look like now. It was really hot that year. I remember that. I was, as we were going, sort of continually trying to make sure I was calibrating the screenplay to take advantage of what the cast was capable of. When you’re adapting anything, but especially in this case with a memoir, it’s very difficult to not get completely handcuffed by the fact that it’s factual. At a certain point, in order to make it work as a movie, I allowed myself to sort of combine characters and invent small things in order to link the anchors of what actually happened. And I talked to Hotch about it and sort of described to him what I was doing. And he felt this was well within the range of staying true to what the story was. But even at that point in my career, I understood that I can’t go direct this thing on my knees. I have to transform it into a movie that will work for an audience who probably isn’t familiar with his book, because it had been published many years prior. So that was, for me, something I was constantly aware of, of trying to make sure I was finding the line between being true to Hotch’s experience, but adding tiny little things that made it work better as a movie. 

One of those big inventions that I’ve seen you talk about in some past interviews and on the Criterion Collection release of the film is Spalding Gray’s character, Mr. Mungo.

Yeah. Again, if you invent a character like that, it can become a nodal point to enhance these other pillars that you want to retain that were true to the book. And that was one of the things that I talked to Hotch about. I was sending him drafts and saying, “Look, I’ve created this guy across the hall to accomplish X, Y, and Z.” And he said, “That’s fair.” And then I think, if I’m not mistaken, Spalding’s brother lived in St. Louis during that time. I think he was working at Washington University. I remember him visiting the set, so I’m pretty sure that was one of the reasons that Spalding ended up being intrigued by getting on the project.

You’ve done a number of other period pieces in your career since King of the Hill, whether that’s No Sudden Move with Detroit, or New York with The Knick. Was there anything that you learned from what you did on King of the Hill that you applied to some of those later works? 

Well, I mean, only to try and be smart about the scale of the transformation. And that means having very specific conversations with the production designer about what we’re going to see and what we’re not going to see. The worst case scenario when you’re going to make a period film is only shooting 60 percent of what was actually done on your behalf to make a place look like it’s from that period. So I was very conscious of talking to Gary Frutkoff, the production designer, and being really specific about what I was going to show and what I wasn’t going to show. And that extends from when you’re out on the street and me saying, “I’m only going to look from here to here,” to being on the set, building the interior of the hotel and saying to Gary, “I’ll never be in that room. I’ll never be in that room,” to make sure that they weren’t spending calories creating things that I’m never going to shoot. That was something that was sort of the rule of the day on Kafka as well, which was also a period film. Because the money was limited, we had to be really, really specific about what we were going to show and what we weren’t going to show. 

But I think in retrospect, overall, I wish the film had a rougher feel to it. It’s an attractive film to look at. At some times I think almost too much. Now, there are two schools of thinking there, that since it’s a memoir, and it’s the memoir of a young person, that the film is essentially being remembered by Aaron in a way that might be a little glossier than the reality. That’s one way to sort of think about an approach. The other would have been to make it just a lot grungier overall. And, for whatever reason, at that time, I went with something that was a little more pleasing on the surface photographically. And I don’t think it wrecked the movie. But I remember later on thinking, “I wonder if it should have been less pretty.”

I can see what you mean, especially with it being set during the Depression and covering some rough situations for Aaron.

Just the camerawork, the style of it, could have been a lot rougher, and still, I think made its points. But this is part of the learning process. I might have come to that realization sooner if, at the time, I’d been able to edit footage immediately after shooting it like I am now. This was still in a period during my career, the first three films, where, since I was the editor and the turnaround time wasn’t as quick as it became, I didn’t start cutting until we finished shooting, which is just unthinkable to me now. I think, if I’d had the ability to cut as I was going, the film would have come out differently. But, you know, that’s just timing. I’ve gotten to see over the last 30-plus years a lot of the technological advances that allow you to iterate more rapidly, which I think is a good thing.

I know you also spent some time, relatively recently, with other films from the early part of your career. Kafka, which you’ve brought up a couple of times here, you re-edited as Mr. Kneff, a new film that played at TIFF a few years back. Getting back into that mindset of what you were making 30 years ago, how does King of the Hill strike you, outside of it feeling a little bit maybe too beautiful or not grungy enough? Is there anything else you would do differently? 

Well, if that was the approach I was going to take, I feel that I kind of left it all on the field. The only thing in retrospect that I might have lost my nerve about was that we did some amount of reshooting of the ending, though not a crazy amount. We previewed the film three times, and the film, I felt—and the studio felt and the producers felt—was improving each time we showed it, especially the third time when we had this reshoot material in it, wherein they finally got to the new apartment. That didn’t exist in the original script. And yet the scores, which were not good, never changed. And that was kind of baffling. You could feel the response in the room improving with each version. But the scores were just miserable. Like, they just wouldn’t budge. And I think in that last week before locking picture, I cut a couple of things out because I felt anxious that it was running too long and it was too digressive. In retrospect, it wouldn’t have made any difference. I could have kept those scenes in and it wouldn’t have made the film demonstrably better or worse. It just would have been a little more detailed. But that’s the last thing that I sort of left the room with. Maybe I was a little harsh on it out of fear at the last minute. But, you know, overall, I really enjoyed making it. And I like being on location. It creates a very unique atmosphere when you’re all there together, especially when you’re all staying in the same place. It becomes like movie camp. And I really, really love that aspect of it. I think we all had just a very fond memory of the city itself, which was very welcoming and happy to have us there. 

On that note, this is also one of your first projects set in the Midwest. You’ve done that a couple of times with The Informant and Bubble as well. What is it that draws you to some of these Midwestern stories?

I don’t know if that’s a conscious thing. I’m usually following an idea first and not really thinking about what comes after. The first thing I need to have happen is that I become activated. This was a book that a friend of mine had given me in the mid ‘80s to read and that I just fell in love with. That being said, there’s an aspect of what I consider superficially to be a “Midwestern character” or point of view that I think is interesting because of its ways of communicating and not communicating—and that plays out a lot in King of the Hill especially—which is you don’t burden other people with your problems. There is a real effort to play things sort of tight to the vest when they aren’t going well and make sure that appearances are kept up. That was a big part, obviously, of the plot of King of the Hill. That, to me, I’ve always associated with a sort of Midwestern stoicism, which in cinematic terms can actually be very dramatic. And as somebody of Swedish descent, it felt familiar. So I embraced that. 

What was the response to King of the Hill like both at the time and now as part of your overall body of work?

When it came out, it didn’t do well commercially at all. In retrospect, we made the mistake of going to Cannes. Now, you have to bear in mind, at that point in my career, so close to sex, lies, and videotape, you are being tracked by the festival in the hopes that they’ll get your next thing. The timing of Kafka didn’t work out because the movie was going to be done at the end of the year, and it was never in the cards. But King of the Hill was going to be finished in the spring. So we screened the movie for the festival and they accepted it in competition. I didn’t know enough then to understand that this was not a good Cannes film. It just isn’t. There’s a certain kind of film that goes over well there, and it’s not this kind of film. And so I remember the first day that I was supposed to do press. I go down to the area near the Palais, where you’re supposed to do your interviews, and the woman working for Universal comes up to me and she’s got a certain look on her face. She goes, “Yeah, well, Farewell My Concubine screened last night, so all these interviews that we had for you today, they’ve all bailed because they want to talk to Kaige Chen about Farewell My Concubine. And I’m so sorry.”  And I just laughed because I realized, four years ago when we were here with sex, lies, and videotape, I’m sure somebody else experienced what I’m experiencing now. They got kicked to the curb because somebody had the hot feet about sex, lies, and videotape. And I viewed this as, you know, the universe goes around and comes around. So I ended up having a pleasant couple of days, not doing a lot of press for King of the Hill at Cannes. 

In those days, I was very concerned that people not think I was just going to make sex, lies, and videotape over and over again. I was purposefully choosing projects that were designed to kind of annihilate my connection to that film and send a message: “I’m going to go all over the place. So you people just need to strap in.” What was helpful about King of the Hill—my memory is that it was generally well-viewed critically, and people weren’t trashing it—but at least now they had another sample to triangulate off of to figure out, “So, what kind of filmmaker is this guy? He’s made three movies that are completely different. What is his deal?” It was very conscious on my part to continue to make things that would keep people kind of unable to pin me down,  because I felt in the long term that’s going to benefit me. In that regard, it was a very helpful new data point for people trying to figure out what was going on with me. If you look at sex, lies, and videotape, Kafka, and King of the Hill, it’s not dissimilar from picking three movies in a row that I’ve made in the last three years. I’ve continued to move from genre to genre, style to style, subject matter to subject matter. I like the idea that somebody who is going to see something that I’ve done sits down, the lights go down, and they’re very aware of the fact that they don’t have any idea what’s coming. 

King of the Hill is currently unavailable to stream, but the film can be purchased as part of the Criterion Collection.