Steven Soderbergh: Love, loss, guilt, redemption in outer space

In the Sixties and Seventies the space race between the Russians and Americans extended beyond space itself, to the movies. Four years after Stanley Kubrick's seminal 2001: A Space Odyssey, came Russia's retort: Solaris. Based on the science fiction novel by Stanislaw Lem, and directed by one of the great poets of Russian cinema, Andrei Tarkovsky, Solaris shared 2001's metaphor of space travel as a journey within oneself. However, while Kubrick's film thrilled audiences as a visually stunning, psychedelic trip, Tarkovsky's was overlong, portentous and dull; the cinematic equivalent of stalling on the launch pad.

Now, as a cute reminder that the space race, not to mention the cold war, is long over, the American film maker Steven Soderbergh has remade Solaris, with the square-jawed George Clooney as his hero. Cerebral, low-tech sci-fi, it's yet another departure for the mercurial and prodigiously talented director.

Clooney plays a psychologist, Kelvin, who travels to the space station Prometheus, orbiting the planet Solaris, to examine the allegedly strange behaviour of the scientists on board. When he arrives he finds that the station commander has committed suicide and the remaining scientists are in a paranoid frenzy, the reasons for which they refuse to explain. But when Kelvin awakes in his cabin to find his own, long-dead wife lying alive and well beside him, he starts to understand why.

Lem's novel is both a densely detailed evocation of a seemingly cognisant planet – replete with scientific histories and theorising – and a plethora of moral conundrums; not least: faced with a second chance at a relationship that ended in misery and suicide, would you risk it all again?

"I would never have thought of making Solaris if a friend had not suggested it to me," says Soderbergh. "But it seemed to be about everything that I'm interested in: memory, guilt, love, loss, redemption, and the possibility of other forms of intelligence. It was about all the stuff that rattles around in my head."

The director, fresh off an extraordinary run of success that included the drug-saga Traffic (which won him an Oscar), the Julia Roberts vehicle Erin Brockovich, and the glitzy caper movie Ocean's 11 (also starring Clooney), wrote the script for Solaris himself. While a fan of Tarkovsky, he says that "this is a different take on the book, rather than a remake of the film."

In fact the result is different to both in that Soderbergh's spin is very much a love story – albeit a strange, metaphysical one in an unusual milieu. Soderbergh departs from his sources by showing us the history of Kelvin's relationship on earth with his wife Rheya (Natasha McElhone), adding resonance to the dilemma that confronts them on the space station.

"In both the book and Tarkovsky's film, the fact that you didn't go into the past kept Kelvin and Rheya's problem psychological instead of emotional," says Soderbergh. "You didn't really know what was at stake. That's why there is so little technology in my film. I just didn't want to distract from the emotional core of the story. So what year it is and what city this is and what gadgets will exist seemed totally irrelevant to me. I just didn't care. I didn't think of the technology, I thought of the central, emotional conflict. The fact is," he smiles, "at the end of the galaxy you always have to confront yourself."

Solaris looks a treat – from the cool, blue-grey world of the Prometheus and the dreamy lava-lamp emulsions of the eerie planet, to the meta-detailed interiors on Earth. But this is no Blade Runner or Alien, where the set design fuels an action-packed drama. Soderbergh, who started his career with the enigmatic arthouse hit Sex, Lies and Videotape (which won him the Palme d'Or aged 26), is back in experimental mode with Solaris: with extended passages of little or no dialogue, a cosmic mystery and an ambiguous ending, the audience has to work hard to stay with it.

"This was the hardest film I've ever made," says the genial, 40-year-old. "I was being pickier than I've ever been before, about everything. It just seemed to be a movie in which the specificity of choices was crucial. I felt that I was hanging on by my fingernails every day".

Sadly the work hasn't paid off, in the States at least, where Solaris has bombed at the box office. "We've been talked about like road kill," he says dejectedly. "I've been through this before, I've made films which audiences didn't turn up for or were polarised by. That's neither here or there. But I do like the people who finance my films to get their money back. And I like it when I can create an opening for a director behind me to do something similar or even more challenging. But if the perception is that you can't make a movie like Solaris and find an audience, then that becomes more difficult."

Perhaps European audiences will help him. In the meantime Soderbergh is planning a follow-up to Ocean's 11 – cheekily titled Ocean's 12. That will keep the box office ticking over, while the maverick director plans his next surprise. "With Solaris I was trying to push the medium and trying to push myself to do something different," he says. "But I know I can go much further."

'Solaris' (12A) is out on Friday