All these questions have been tabled for now until another one can be answered: Where is Godard?

Nobody knows. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that everybody is delighted that nobody knows — that’s the real story. The Hollywood Reporter quoted an academy source last week saying, “We’ve been attempting to reach him since 7 o’clock Tuesday evening and we have as yet had no confirmation.” Bruce Davis, the academy’s executive director, said late Wednesday afternoon: “We have tried by telephone, by fax, by emails to various friends and associates. We have sent a formal letter by FedEx. But we have certainly not been told he will show up at this point.”  The film blogosphere has seized the story and stumbled drunkenly down the street with it like Jean-Paul Belmondo at the end of “Breathless.”  ”Where in the world is Jean-Luc Godard?” asked Entertainment Weekly, playing off the title of a certain long-running PBS series.  Moveline mocked up a missing persons poster.

And of course there was a bit of push-back, with Richard Hyfler of Forbes sniffing that this was “a classic non-story.” It would only be necessary to say that this is a non-story were the press collectively unaware of Godard’s long history of cranky anti-establishment posturing, including his grousing about the evils of Steven Spielberg, his hatred of long flights (perhaps mainly due to his still-prodigious cigar habit) and his failing to show up for a press conference that followed a screening of his latest feature, the semiotic head-scratcher “Film Socialisme,” at Cannes this past spring. I doubt anyone thinks the director has been kidnapped by space aliens or that his carcass will be discovered at the bottom of a gorge somewhere. The missing person poster is a joke, and the speculation about where he might be is just the online version of water cooler conversation.

The “Where’s Godard?” buzz isn’t about Godard. It’s about the film industry. And it’s about us.

Godard is one of an elite number of filmmakers who more or less do their own thing, and he has been doing his own thing for decades now, on his own time and for his own reasons. No doubt it’s tremendously difficult to get his films financed — even during his enfant terrible heyday it was probably never easy, and it doubtless only got harder in the ’70s, when he traded a semi-narrative, dramatic format for an aggressively anti-narrative aesthetic that was deliberately dense, off-putting, at times impenetrable. (“Film Socialisme,” for example, is subtitled, but it’s not an English translation of what’s being said on-screen — the captions are cryptic sentence fragments, sometimes just collections of nouns.)

Nevertheless, Godard chose his own path and stuck with it, accepting only that bare minimum of BS that one must accept in order to make movies while ignoring, downplaying or actively grousing about the rest. Godard doesn’t go along to get along. He pisses everyone off. You don’t see Godard at ribbon-cutting ceremonies or appearing regularly on French talk shows or reality programs or being interviewed by bloggers. He doesn’t have a Facebook page or a Twitter account. His last theatrical feature, 2005′s “Notre Music,” was shot on 35mm film, in the old-fashioned, squarish, 4 x 3 format, the format Godard first used when he was starting out as a director in the late 1950s.

And when the academy tells him he’s won an award, you don’t instantly see his face on CNN or the Sundance Channel. In fact, it takes a while for the institution that voted him the award to figure out if he even knows about it, and whether he’s decided to show up and accept it in person or send Sacheen Littlefeather.

I love this. Normally the academy says, “Jump,” and almost any director alive says, “How high?” Godard can’t be bothered. In fact he can’t be found.  Whatever one thinks of his output — and I’ve found something to like or dislike in every phase of his long career — there’s something heartening, perhaps inspirational, in his blasé refusal to do things according to the memo.  He’s too old for that — too Godard for that.

There aren’t many directors like him. One is Terrence Malick, who has made exactly four films since 1973, and who reportedly (you have to say “reportedly” because Malick himself never talks to the press) won’t deliver his fifth movie, the epic family drama “Tree of Life,” this fall as originally promised (by the studio, not by Malick) because … well, nobody quite knows why. Apparently because the director feels it’s not done yet. That sort of rationale doesn’t normally fly no matter who uses it, but somehow Malick gets away with it, just as he got away with casting George Clooney in his 1998 film “The Thin Red Line” and cutting his part down to just one scene. If more filmmakers were as “eccentric” and “difficult” as Godard and Malick, there would be a lot more art in movies and a lot less naked shilling. Or at the very least, movies would be less predictable, less deserving of being called “product.”

And what about you, reader? Right now you’re probably reading this with two or three other windows open on your computer screen and your cellphone on. When a new e-mail or phone call or text message comes in, maybe you hear a little noise, a “ding,” like the bell that made Pavlov’s dog’s ears perk up.  And you look to see who’s trying to reach you and what it’s about. Maybe you answer immediately, maybe you wait, but you always pay attention because you feel like you’re missing out on something, and on some level you’re terrified that the world’s going to stop turning if you’re not on top of it all. Godard could not care less.  The world keeps turning. I bet he’s sitting in a park right now, reading Le Monde and smoking his fourth cigar of the day.

Except, of course, when I like the result. I’m flighty that way.

Recuts are irksome. They’re hit-and-miss, and they’re fueled by such idiosyncratic agendas that it’s hard to state that they’re always a bad or a good idea.

While trying to frame this issue, I realized it doesn’t make sense to group all recuts under a single umbrella. There are many kinds of recuts, created for different reasons, under different circumstances. Whether you consider a second or third or fourth cut valid (or superior) to the first depends on what you liked or disliked about the first cut, and the circumstances that produced that first cut, and what you think was gained or lost in revision.

Since one viewer’s revelation is another’s crime against cinema, to attempt a ranked list of recuts would be pointless. Instead I’ll try to get a discussion going by classifying categories of recuts, taking swipes at certain films and filmmakers, then opening the floor to readers.

Category No. 1: Revisions

Definition: A recut overseen by the director, who expands, contracts and otherwise messes with the cut, but doesn’t substantially alter the essence of the story or themes.

Examples: Ridley Scott has produced multiple versions of most of his films. His 2003 theatrical recut of “Alien” was a straight-up revision, a nip-and-tuck job that subtracted five minutes (mostly by chopping the heads and tails off some languorous establishing shots) and added four (including Ripley’s encounter with a chestburster-impregnated Capt. Dallas, seen in home video supplements but never officially included in the film proper).

William Friedkin’s 1998 “Exorcist” recut added some horrifying images deleted from the 1973 original (including a now-CGI-assisted “spider walk” scene) and coda that almost no one liked. The Coen brothers’ 1998 recut of their debut feature, “Blood Simple,” trimmed four minutes and swapped one song for another due to rights issues. James Cameron rightly called his “Expanded Edition” of “Terminator 2″ an “exercise” rather than an alternate version.

Michael Mann’s alternate versions of “Heat,” “Thief,” “Manhunter,” “Mohicans” and “Miami Vice” (the feature) were mostly futz jobs that made the films different but not markedly better (except the alternate home video edition of “Vice,” which nullified the film’s boldest stroke by sticking a gratuitous action scene in front of the original’s in medias res nightclub opening). Steven Spielberg’s many incarnations of “Close Encounters” made mostly small tweaks (a conspicuous exception is the second cut, a 1980 theatrical reissue, which rejiggered the spectacle-to-intimacy ratio and showed the inside of the mother ship). Richard Kelly’s second cut of “Donnie Darko” explained things that were left undefined in the theatrical version. George Lucas added digitized landscapes and creatures to the original “Star Wars” trilogy starting in 1997 — ostensibly to visualize what he saw in his head 20 years earlier, but could not create because the technology wasn’t advanced enough.

My take: Revisions tend to be the least defensible or fruitful type of recut. They’re of interest mainly as academic or “What if?” exercises, different but rarely better. And they tend to create as many problems as they solve.

Mann’s second cut of “Last of the Mohicans,” for instance, is superior to the original in terms of character development, but the action sequences feel choppy in places, where before they had a sharklike elegance. All the editions of “Close Encounters” sort of blur together in my head; when I watch a particular version, I’m always relieved to see certain scenes and disappointed that others aren’t included (except the 1980 finale inside the ship, which Spielberg rightly realized was a mistake and deleted from future cuts). Lucas’ CGI futzing made the original “Star Wars” trilogy busier but not better, and some of his changes (Greedo shooting first, the new songs in “Return of the Jedi,” Luke’s shriek as he plunged into the air shaft in “Empire”) were just stupid. (At least Lucas cut the shriek for the DVD release of the futzed-with “Empire.”) And don’t get me started on Kelly’s “Donnie Darko” recut. It’s an obscenity that suggests Kelly is a genius flake who needs to be protected from his worst impulses — by force, if necessary.

Bottom line: What’s wrong with leaving well enough alone?

Category No. 2: Rescues

Definition: A rescue is a recut overseen by the director, or by allies of the director acting under his supervision. The intent is to restore sections of a film that were lopped out for time or pacing reasons, or to perfect a work the filmmaker thought was compromised by a lack of time or money, or by studio meddling. This type of cut is usually (but not always) longer, more complex and more digressive than the first cut.

Examples: James Cameron’s longer version of “The Abyss” fleshed out the main couple’s rancor and distress and explained what those glowing underwater aliens were up to; the changes intensified the story’s already extravagant sense of melodrama and sentiment, and made the aliens seem like Greek gods passing judgment on humanity, rather like the extraterrestrials in the original “The Day the Earth Stood Still.”

Ridley Scott’s 1992 recut of “Blade Runner” removed a monotonous, Raymond Chandler-with-a-head-injury voice-over narration forced on Scott by the distributor; over the next 15 years he cut three other versions. Scott also did a longer, yeastier version of “Legend” (restoring a Jerry Goldsmith orchestral score that the studio had replaced with Tangerine Dream synth tracks) and an extended cut of “Kingdom of Heaven” (more character development, political detail and atmospheric imagery). Oliver Stone recut “Alexander” twice. Or was it three times? I’ve lost count.

Francis Coppola’s 2001 effort, “Apocalypse Now Redux,” restored 50 minutes of footage deleted from the 1979 rough cut of “Apocalypse Now,” including the French plantation sequence, a comic interlude with boat crew stealing Col. Kilgore’s surfboard, and a scene where Kurtz reads a Time magazine story to Willard. “Redux” covers the same narrative ground as the first cut, but the characters are more psychologically plausible and Vietnam feels like a geographic rather than figurative space.

My take: The rescue is the Hail Mary pass of recuts. It aims to add luster to a troubled, incomplete or imperfect production that divided critics and viewers, and show what might have been “if only” the director had more time, money, freedom, etc. But the result often fails to convince.

Cameron’s longer “Abyss” was better: more comprehensible, melodramatic, substantive and satisfying. “Apocalypse Now Redux,” however, feels more prosaic and “realistic” than the 1979 cut — more like a novel or a miniseries and less like the hallucinatory, sound-and-picture-driven original. Some intriguing and even striking qualities were gained, but something essential was lost. The third, fourth and fifth versions of “Blade Runner” don’t feel terribly different from the second cut to me (although many people I respect consider the fifth cut definitive and near-perfect). The recut of “Legend” is stirring, and the orchestral score adds heft and makes the film feel less like a mid-’80s product. But the movie is still pretty thin stuff, and after a while I missed Tangerine Dream, which at least gave the thin story and anemic characters a veneer of freshness. The recuts of “Kingdom of Heaven” and “Alexander” improved those films but failed to overcome fundamental screenwriting and casting problems. The same could be said for most rescue efforts: If a film’s basics aren’t spot on, no amount of reediting will fix them.

Category No. 3: Resuscitations

Definition: Cuts undertaken by parties other than the director, often with the purpose of reassembling a film that was cut down, reworked and in some cases butchered without the director’s consent.

Examples: I’ll fixate on just one example here, because it exemplifies pretty much every factor involved in this sort of cut. Orson Welles’ 1958 thriller “Touch of Evil” was recut, remixed and partially reshot during postproduction by Universal without the director’s supervision or consent. Or so Welles claimed: The studio countered that it had asked Welles to return from Europe, where he was working on his next movie, to supervise and revise “Evil,” but Welles declined.

Thirty years later, film editor and sound designer Walter Murch (who worked on many Coppola films, including both versions of “Apocalypse Now”) supervised a “restored” version, working from a wish list memo that Welles sent to Universal in 1957. You could almost call the 1998 cut an alternate universe version of “Touch of Evil” for its good-natured attempts to visualize the film described by Welles. The biggest change is in the legendary opening tracking shot, which removes the studio-mandated Henry Mancini score. As the bomb-rigged car rolls through the town, you still hear the film’s main theme issuing piecemeal from barrooms and apartment windows, arranged in different musical genres.

My take: Resuscitations are sometimes satisfying but nearly always problematic. I have no doubt that the 1998 version of “Evil” is closer to what Welles intended; it’s right there in the memo. But would Welles, who died in 1985, have “restored” the film in exactly this way? Maybe, maybe not — we’ll never know. So should the 1998 version be considered any more or less valid than the 1958 cut, or the slightly longer, better 1976 version that Universal released theatrically? Is it a heroic act or just a glorified editing experiment?

Also troublesome (if only to aspect ratio geeks): “Touch of Evil” was originally shot in the squarish, 4×3 “Academy” ratio, but cropped to 1:85-to-1 for its 1998 theatrical release. Glenn Kenny argues, persuasively, that Welles and his cinematographer, Russell Metty, framed each shot to work equally well in both formats, and that the shots may even seem more dynamic with a narrower crop. On the other hand, though, when the director is Welles, how much more dynamic can a shot be?

A less troublesome resuscitation is the 1989 rerelease version of “Lawrence of Arabia,” which restored cut footage that fleshed out Lawrence’s life (including his rape by Turkish captors) while preserving the character’s core of mystery. Director David Lean supervised or approved every change. The previously unseen material made a great film greater.

Category No. 4: Reimaginings

Definition: The director revisits a favorite title, producing a new cut that feels less like a second-thoughts reconsideration than a new movie constructed from the same raw material.

Examples: I’ll just offer just two here. The first is Francis Coppola’s “The Outsiders: The Complete Novel,” a 2005 recut of his 1983 youth melodrama that was 22 minutes longer than the theatrical version and a lot shaggier and more naturalistic-seeming, with extra scenes of the teen characters sitting around shooting the breeze on various topics not directly related to the plot. Coppola also replaced the original cut’s sweeping orchestral score (by his late father, Carmine Coppola) with a wall-to-wall tapestry of period pop. Everything in the “Complete Novel” feels different: the pace, the tone, the overall sensibility.

The other example is “The New World,” the 2005 epic about the romance between John Smith and Pocahontas, written and directed by Terrence Malick. Malick released the film on Christmas Day, 2005, in a 150-minute version that played in a handful of cities to qualify for end-of-the-year awards. Then he cut 15 minutes for the film’s national release a few weeks later. In 2008, he released a 172-minute version to DVD.

My take: These two cases represent the extremes of the “reimagining” strategy. One example is dreadful, the other fascinating – and in my opinion, brilliant. I loathe Coppola’s “Complete Novel” and consider it a misstep rivaling Richard Kelley’s “Donnie Darko” atrocity. Beyond the tedious rap sessions that should have stayed on the cutting-room floor, the director’s substitution of period pop for orchestral music makes the whole film seem smaller and less special. When Coppola released the 1983 cut, he called it “‘Gone With the Wind’ for teenagers,” and the combination of overripe color photography and a borderline-hysterical score showed that he wasn’t kidding. Whatever its flaws (and it’s by no means a consensus classic) the first version of “The Outsiders” pulses with life. The 2005 version is as lifeless as a stuffed-and-mounted moose head.

Malick’s three versions of “The New World,” on the other hand, strike me as remarkable. The first cut is cosmic and ruminative, drunk on pseudo-Emersonian poetry. The second is more intimate, more tightly focused on the main characters. The third is broken up into chapters with printed title cards; it includes many long, real-time encounters, plus detours into the lives of supporting players whose experiences enrich the film’s main themes. The first two cuts are like fraternal twins born of the same mother. They’re clearly related but nowhere close to identical. The third cut is the twins’ baby brother, a unique creation built from the same DNA. What Malick is doing here goes way beyond futzing. He’s an architect challenging himself to build three different cathedrals from the same pile of bricks.

But, of course, your mileage may vary.

So tell me, what director’s cuts do you consider essential? Or misguided? Or satisfying but troublesome? Are there any that turned your opinion around on a film? Are there any types of recuts that should not be tolerated? Pile into the Letters section and let’s discuss.

And I very much appreciated the many comments that came in from the readers — including those of one of my most avid readers, who hates everything about me with the kind of passion that can only be love. The various misadventures that went into the creation of “City Island” are by no means unusual in filmmaking — all movies really are well-prepared accidents. Writing about the making of this film gave me perspective on the craft I’ve chosen to pursue and also made me realize how deeply committed anybody who makes a film must be just to follow it through to some sort of completion.

Whenever I’ve wrapped a film, I find it impossible to watch another movie for a while because all I see is the outside of the frame filled with the set and its complications. Unable to lose myself in the story, I can only identify with the director and the difficulty and tedium he or she must have experienced while shooting their movie. I remember turning on “Oliver” shortly after we wrapped “City Island” and watching the “Consider Yourself” number — normally a delightful cinematic treat. All I could think of was the assistant directors and what they had on their hands: Crowds! Kids! Horses! Playback! Oy. I turned it off, grateful to not be on their set in their shoes. You really do think that you might never do it again. And then a few weeks later, the pain has faded and you’re on the phone to your agent.

Such is the life of a film director.

Ever since I was quite young, I was fascinated by directors — not just by the job but by the peculiar combination of qualities that it takes to make up a personality that can actually handle (with enthusiasm) this taxing, strangely addictive profession. I early on began to identify several traits that seemed to unify most directors: they are punctual, rarely late — even the ones that go over schedule and over budget. They are always the ones that end the conversation at hand — they never stay too long at any party. They fear little socially — confidence is essential for the profession. Yet their sociability is highly selective. The charm can be turned on and off at will. Let’s say that they tend to be emotionally efficient. Charm, anger, aloofness, delicacy, friendliness, ruthlessness … these qualities are available at all times but accessed only in order to achieve the necessary result. Long ago, the New York Times Magazine ran a profile of Mike Nichols and I’ve never forgotten the cover photograph of him. He was snazzily dressed, holding a cigar and smiling. But his eyes told a different story. They clearly showed a man determined to have everything — including that particular photo session — go his way.

Maureen Lambray, in the forward to her wonderful portrait collection “The American Film Directors,” also noted that they “smoke a lot and their eyes are attracted to accidents.” I’m not sure what she means by the last comment but I like its dark implications. As for smoking, yes they did. But they’re all dead now. And I quit years ago.

Being humans who perform a superhuman — or perhaps subhuman — job, directors have advice to give. I always find directorial aphorisms amusing and instructive. So why not close out this column with a few of the choicest of these nuggets I’ve collected over the years?

“The first thing to go is the legs.” So said the late Sydney Pollack. He’s correct. By the end of week two, you’re usually sitting down — often lying down–whenever it’s convenient.

“Just tell Raymond not to work too hard.” This from Robert Altman, who told this to Peter Gallagher. Peter, who appeared in my first movie, “Café Society,” told me one day that he would be having dinner that evening with Altman — long a hero of mine. I asked Peter to ask him for any advice for me on my first movie. The above was his response. I later got to know Altman and he told me: “Listen to everyone’s suggestions and use the good ones, because you’ll get all the credit anyway.” 

From my friend Peter Bogdanovich, when asked by Tom Sizemore, who was playing Pete Rose in a Bogdanovich-directed biopic, how to make such an unlikable character acceptable and interesting: “Where’s the redemption?” asked Sizemore. P.B.’s unruffled answer: “In the close-ups.”

Henry Hathaway on compromise: “If you compromise only once a day on something and your shoot lasts 50 days, that’s 50 fucking compromises in the finished picture.” 

On the other hand my old teacher Eddie Dmytryk said: “In films, compromise is a way of life.”

When I was a student at the American Film Institute, the late Dan Petrie — a marvelous fellow and fine director — did a seminar in which somebody asked him what the most important single element in a film was: acting, script or photography? Without pause, Dan answered: “The budget!”

Then there are the words of the great Josef von Sternberg: “”Man has yet to invent a machine more complicated to build, impossible to use or unpredictable in the quality of its finished product, than the motion picture.”

James Cameron suggests: “Pick up a camera. Shoot something. No matter how small, no matter how cheesy, no matter whether your friends and your sister star in it. Put your name on it as a director. Now you’re a director. Everything after that, you’re just negotiating your budget and your fee.”

“Masterpieces are films that come to you by accident.” From Sidney Lumet.

And from Alfred Hitchcock: “The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder.”

Long ago I noticed that a number of films I liked to watch whenever they played on TV all were written and directed by a man who went by the professional name of Billy instead of “William” and whose last name was Wilder. He wrote with one of two partners — the lawyerly sounding Charles Brackett and a name that always sounded to me like it belonged on an antique computer — “I.A.L. Diamond.” Some of the films were funny, others were dark and brooding. But I could tell early on that they came from the same mind and this, more than anything, made me realize that filmmaking could be a personal art. So why not close with a handful of Billy Wilder quotes as my way of thanking him for having played such a large role in getting me involved with this delightful mess of a profession.

On having relationships with actresses: “I never get involved with my actress. If I have a yen, I fuck the stand-in.”

On subtlety in films: “In movies everything must be made obvious.” (The person he’s talking to:) “But Billy, what about subtleties?” “Make the subtleties obvious also.”

On female characters: “Unless she’s a whore, she’s a bore.”

On Marilyn Monroe’s chronic tardiness: “My Aunt Minnie would always be punctual and never hold up production, but who would pay to see my Aunt Minnie?”

“Now what is it which makes a scene interesting? If you see a man coming through a doorway, it means nothing. If you see him coming through a window — that is at once interesting.”

To Louis B. Mayer, after the great mogul saw Wilder’s masterpiece “Sunset Blvd.” and lambasted the director for having the temerity to have made a movie that was critical of Hollywood: “Fuck you.”

And finally the immortal: “A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard.”

And why put Soderbergh on a list of important filmmakers when he hasn’t made a paradigm-shifting, spotlight-grabbing conversation piece since 2000, when he released “Traffic” and “Erin Brockovich” and won fistfuls of awards for both?

I have a definite answer to that last question: Because Steven Soderbergh is, in every conceivable sense of the phrase, state-of-the-art. He’s a total filmmaker, with all the splendor and baggage the adjective and noun imply.

The other questions I can’t answer because I can’t get a handle on Soderbergh. I’m not sure anyone can. To rework a great line from “The Limey,” in some ways his vision seems less a vision than a vibe. And the elusiveness of every aspect of this multifaceted filmmaker — the question mark at the center of his 20-year career — seems inextricably bound up with the way that changes in technology and distribution have made filmmaking (now more often videomaking) a part of daily life.

From the high-profile output of some of Soderbergh’s nearly-as-workaholic contemporaries (Clint Eastwood, Spike Lee, Michael Winterbottom and Takashi Miike are also lifetime members of Filmaholics Anonymous) through the rarely distributed microbudget indies cranked out by the thousands each calendar year on down to the home movies and amateur music videos and cartoons and found-footage mash-ups that dominate YouTube, we’ve become a society of filmmakers — people who instinctively view life as if it had a frame around it, even if we’re not consciously aware that we’re doing so. Life and movies, documentary and drama, virtual and real have become a big blur.

Soderbergh anticipated all this in his semi-autobiographical 1989 debut, “sex, lies and videotape.” That breakthrough indie was built around a drifter named Graham (James Spader) who punished himself for sexual and romantic sins by withdrawing into a voyeuristic cocoon, videotaping women’s rawest sexual confessions and presumably jerking off to them. (I say “presumably” because Graham frankly admits that he’s “incapable of getting an erection in the presence of another person,” and he’s never seen pleasuring himself while watching the videos — just staring blankly at the screen as if hoping some cathartic meaning will emerge.) Many of Soderbergh’s subsequent films were likewise concerned with the allure and consequences of voyeurism and self-deception — with the thrill that comes from watching and the fear of being watched, and every person’s daily struggle to present themselves as they wish to be seen and avoid confronting what they are. This fascination flowered in the aughts as the director embraced video (from consumer-grade digital to hi-def) and became a one-man band.

Soderbergh’s semi-improvised 2002 feature “Full Frontal” could have been titled “more sex, lies and videotape,” for its hand-held mini-DV visuals, its exploration of how the clichés of movie romance distort our expectations of the real thing, and its fascination with lonely and deluded people writing self-flattering autobiographies in real-time via monologues. To quote critic Daniel Kleinfeld, “The question ‘Full Frontal’ worries at obsessively is: If we imagine love through an unreal medium, does that threaten the reality of our love?”

This year’s “The Girlfriend Experience” might have been the third panel in this unofficial triptych. It shows how social media have not just made people’s constructed selves seem more real — almost tactile — and empowered individuals to enforce boundaries on friendship and intimacy, creating their own little alternate realities and denying entry to those who can’t or won’t validate it. (The movie’s title refers to what a high-class prostitute’s johns all want: not a girlfriend, but the girlfriend experience — not intimacy but a carefully circumscribed, mutually agreed-upon imitation of intimacy.)

The TV series that Soderbergh coproduced with frequent collaborators George Clooney and Grant Heslov — HBO’s underrated “K Street” and “Unscripted” — dug into this phenomenon as well. The former showed how legislators, consultants and lobbyists were all performers in a drama titled “Washington, D.C.” The latter explored the world of actors, and showed how the act of committing imagination to fiction could falsify offstage emotion and distort perceptions of life.

Another one of Soderbergh’s fruitful blurs is the interaction of art and entertainment, underground filmmaking and Hollywood. Whether he’s working with $50 million budgets or pocket change, you never know which part of the spectrum he’ll emphasize. And his directorial decisions are usually as interesting (often more interesting) than the action on-screen.

Soderbergh gave “Erin Brockovich” touches of grubby, Cassavetes-like spontaneity that grounded the film’s give-the-star-everything screenplay and made the whole thing bearable. Soderbergh’s canny strategy is exemplified by that early moment where Erin stands in her kitchen late at night eating pineapple out of a can. She hears her infant stir awake. Rather than drop everything and run to check on him, she listens to see if he’ll go back to sleep of his own accord, and when he does, she continues eating her pineapple.

Soderbergh’s pan-national, multi-character social drama “Traffic” was natural Oscar bait. But Soderbergh mostly avoided pandering, and instead balanced the film’s commercially required “big” scenes with smaller moments of disappointment, ambiguity and paralysis, and gave it the look and feel of a hit-and-run indie (with jagged cutting and photography that Soderbergh, working as his own cinematographer for the first time, freely admits was pretty crude). He shot his no-budget neorealist experiment “Bubble” in a very classical style, nearly Kubrickian in its coldness, at a time when most directors working at that level (including Soderbergh) reflexively worked in the hand-held hokey-pokey mode. He seems to want to keep surprising people, most of all himself — an admirable desire.

When Soderbergh engages head-on with film history, the results are spottier. His reworking of Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Solaris” was considered as brazen an act of effrontery as Gus van Sant’s “Psycho” remake, but even though it was too unfocused (narratively and visually) to be as devastating as it plainly wanted to be, it was fascinating and altogether defensible, because it was as intuitive as the original was analytical. (It’s probably Soderbergh’s second most moving film after “The Limey” — still his masterpiece, and one of the most formally audacious commercial features of the last quarter-century.) “The Good German” was a disaster from which everyone involved was lucky to escape — shot with old movie equipment but not fully cognizant of old movie grammar and texture, and sullied by modernizing touches that seemed more glib and crude than shocking or revelatory. “Che,” while honorable and serious in its determination to be an anti-biopic biopic, left me cold; it felt too dry — too much like homework, or a Ken Loach film without the spark of righteous fury that makes Loach so valuable.

But I’ll give Soderbergh this much: He fails big. His missteps are more fascinating than most directors’ successes. And even when he’s selling out, he’s not really selling out.

He gave the super-slick “Oceans 11” personality by putting the project’s express-train-to-the-box-office shamelessness at the center of the story; it’s a faintly postmodern heist picture that presents its thief characters as actors grabbing a ton of money by putting on a great show. Its first sequel, “Oceans 12,” was a dissection of the original, a deconstruction of a deconstruction that denied nearly every satisfaction people took from the first movie. Its masterstroke was having costar Roberts play a character who looked so much like Julia Roberts that she ended up being enlisted by the crooks to impersonate Julia Roberts. A more prankish summation of movie stardom is hard to imagine, and thanks to Soderbergh’s interest in the intent and mechanics of role-playing, the fact that Julia Roberts was rather boring playing Julia Roberts seemed not like a failure, but the whole point of the exercise. (The movie’s stubborn determination to piss off everybody who had fun watching the first one was a statement, too — the post-Godardian intellectual filmmaker’s version of what Martin Scorsese did in “Cape Fear,” punishing the audience for wanting that sort of movie, and perhaps expressing his disgust with himself for being able to give it to them.) The third “Oceans” film pulled the franchise into the headspace that birthed “sex, lies, and videotape,” “Full Frontal” and “The Girlfriend Experience,” showing a bunch of old dogs learning new technological tricks. The result was a weightless but clever time-killer that might have been as autobiographically driven as Soderbergh’s smaller films, considering it showed hardheaded experts adapting their skills to prosper in a changing world.

Soderbergh should be insufferable, yet he and his films are charming, sometimes outright self-deprecating. This is the man who titled his quasi-memoir “Getting Away With It: The Further Adventures of the Luckiest Bastard You Ever Saw,” devoted much of the book’s page count to transcripts of conversations with one of his filmmaking heroes, Richard Lester, and adorned the book’s cover with the most hideously clownish photo ever taken of anyone, ever. This is the man who invited the writer of his 1999 film “The Limey,” Lem Dobbs, to sit in on that film’s DVD commentary track and ream Soderbergh for altering his script. To act like this, you have to be supremely arrogant, supremely masochistic, or so devoted to your craft that you have no ego to bruise.

I find him frustratingly opaque and half-baked a lot of the time — too obscure in his motivations, too much a slave to the adrenaline rush of process, and although I’ve praised some of his work this decade (particularly the HBO series), I’ve beaten up on him, too, giving “Full Frontal,” “Oceans 12,” “The Good German” some of the harshest reviews I’ve ever published. At the same, time, though, I’ll admit that revisiting Soderbergh’s output while researching this series made me see patterns I’d overlooked, and wish I could take back some of the negative things I’ve written about him. It’s hard not to appreciate his grounded attitude and be grateful that such an idiosyncratic and decent filmmaker can prosper in a mostly vicious, stupid industry. And wouldn’t you know it: Just when I was ready to say that he hadn’t made a truly great film since “The Limey,” along comes “The Informant!” a satire on business ethics and self-delusion that’s as corrosively funny as the best of Billy Wilder.

Soderbergh is cinema in the aughts. That statement, like so many Soderbergh films, can mean whatever you want it to mean. But he should take it as a compliment. 

“Crude” sometimes seems like improbable fiction, a story co-authored by Charles Dickens and Che Guevara in which a former oilfield worker named Pablo Fajardo, who still lives in the two-room house where he grew up, is now the plaintiffs’ lead attorney, threatening to bring the world’s fifth-largest corporation to its knees. One of the story’s many oddities is that Chevron was never involved in Ecuadoran oil exploration, or in the alleged systematic and deliberate discharge of oil sludge and contaminated water that has sometimes been called the “Amazon Chernobyl.” But when Chevron acquired Texaco in 2001, it also took on that company’s assets and liabilities, and now must defend itself in a case that has had many unexpected twists and turns.

After lawyers for the 30,000 or so Ecuadoran plaintiffs filed suit in the United States, Chevron fought for years to have jurisdiction returned to Ecuador, probably assuming that that country’s traditional pro-business oligarchy would make the whole thing go away. Sometimes you need to be careful what you wish for: Now Ecuador has a left-leaning president, Rafael Correa, who is allied with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and openly sympathetic to the anti-Chevron case. As Berlinger’s camera captures, the trial was largely conducted outdoors, on the site of the alleged contamination, with soil samples taken in public with the cameras rolling. Chevron’s attorneys respond with various contradictory claims: That sludge in the ground isn’t dangerous; it isn’t ours; it wasn’t taken from the right place; people shouldn’t be living here anyway.

Over the course of four years in diverse and difficult conditions, Berlinger captures Fajardo and his American consultant, Steven Donziger, as they travel from Ecuador to New York to Houston and back. He meets residents and nurses in the Cofán indigenous community who discuss the cancer clusters and epidemic skin diseases found in the area around the contaminated waterways. He follows Trudie Styler, the jet-set fashion-plate spouse of Sting, as she tours the region and renders it an international cause célèbre. At the last minute, just as Berlinger was preparing the film for Sundance this year, he was granted interviews with a senior Chevron scientist and a corporate counsel, who assured him that A) everything is fine in the affected region, and B) we’re off the hook, legally speaking, even if it isn’t.

Berlinger is a leading practitioner of the cinéma-vérité method, which avoids voice-over narration or other devices aimed at directing the reader toward a specific conclusion. This is somewhat unusual in a film that seems so clearly a work of advocacy, but as he explained during a phone call that was scheduled for 15 minutes and stretched to 45, his job is to convince the uncommitted viewer that what Texaco did in the Amazon was an immense moral crime — not to create agitprop on behalf of the plaintiffs in a specific lawsuit. First, here’s the official trailer for “Crude”:

Joe, I was thinking that the vérité method must have posed a special challenge in this case. You’re not in the business of telling the audience who is right and who is wrong, and that comes with certain advantages and certain disadvantages for a storyteller.

Definitely. I don’t believe in voice-over narration, but voice-over narration helps you speed the story along and gets you through difficult moments you may not have coverage on. This film was one of the hardest editing challenges I’ve ever faced, because there’s a complicated 13-year history behind this lawsuit, which you have to dole out to the audience so they understand the context. Then you can get to the present-tense story.

I think my point of view is all over this film. This film has been criticized at film festivals by more activist-oriented folks, who think I’ve given Chevron too much screen time and think that I need to have a clearer point of view. But I have a certain view of how to engage an audience. I’m a pretty active television producer and executive producer, and I see a lot of environmental and human-rights films that have this style of banging a singular message over somebody’s head. That’s a very different theatrical experience from engaging the audience to be a judge or a juror, to weigh the pros and cons of all the issues.

I think it makes a more persuasive film, and, ironically, a more effective advocacy film, if you allow people to arrive at a point of view on their own. When you whitewash certain troubling aspects of a situation because you think, oh, it takes away from the main point of view that Chevron is evil — that makes the film less honest and less interesting and less real. You end up just preaching to the converted, when the mission ought to be to bring people who aren’t sure about what they think into your camp. A non-narrated approach, a warts-and-all portrait of all sides, is to my mind a more persuasive moviegoing experience.

Right. I mean, just in terms of the lawsuit, I didn’t come out of this film absolutely sure who was going to win, or who should win. The issue of liability seems immensely complicated, and I’m not sure if anybody really understands it.

People have said to me, “You give Chevron too much airtime. You don’t seem utterly convinced that they should lose the lawsuit.” Well, I’m not utterly convinced that they should lose the lawsuit, because I’m coming at it from a different perspective. Specifically, I’m not smart enough or well enough equipped — I’m not a judge or a scientist, and I haven’t read the 100,000 pages in binders in that judge’s office. I can’t tell you whether Chevron has wrapped itself up in enough legalese to prevail in that lawsuit. But I can tell you that some things are larger than the lawsuit, and that the moral responsibility lies at their door. You don’t go into somebody’s backyard and treat it the way they treated it. I don’t care about the legality. Manifest destiny was a legal philosophy that justified all sorts of terrible acts in this country. The Nuremberg racial laws made discrimination against Jews legal in Germany. So I can’t tell you whether Chevron should win or lose in this lawsuit, but I don’t think they have morality on their side.

The film to me is not about the lawsuit. After having spent almost four years on this situation, I see a certain inadequacy to the legal structures in place to deal with these human rights and environmental crises. It has taken 17 years to get to this point, and it will probably take another 10 or 15 years for the whole thing to be appealed and counter-appealed and worked out, and then God knows how long before payment is made. That’s just too long. Generation after generation are suffering. While this legal proceeding goes on, people are dying and generations are being affected.

So I’m comfortable showing both sides of the lawsuit, to show how messy it is and how long it takes. Also, I think truth rises to the top. No matter how much corporate-speak legalese they wrap themselves up in, the ultimate message of the film is that for 600 years white people have treated indigenous people abysmally. It’s a part of our history we really don’t grapple with. I mean, at some level we know, in the back of our heads, that that Jack in the Box over there used to be a Cherokee village, and we moved these people out of sight.

Here was the big epiphany for me in making this movie — it seemed like that was something that happened in the distant past, but the reality is that multinational corporations of the late 20th century, particularly in the extractive industries, are just the modern-day continuation of this shameful treatment of indigenous people. The Chevron lawyer in the film says, “People shouldn’t be living here. This is an industrial zone.” No, sorry. People have been living here for millennia. So I think this is an advocacy film. It’s an advocacy film on behalf of indigenous people who were fucked over by Catholic missionaries, and then by their own governments, and then by the oil companies.

On one side you have this enormous oil company, and on the other side you have this former oilfield worker just out of law school, and they’re fighting it out in the legal system of a country that, let’s face it, has a long record of cronyism and corruption. It doesn’t seem like a fair fight.

Chevron fought for years to get the case moved to Ecuador, and I don’t think they ever imagined it would go to trial. At the time Ecuador was run by a military junta that was very pro-business, run by the Spanish-descended oligarchy. It was a very comfortable and cozy relationship: extracting minerals and fucking over the indigenous population. I don’t think they counted on a couple of things that have taken place that happened that, luckily for me, were very cinematic. One of them was the emergence of this local populist hero, Pablo Fajardo. A local oilfield worker, impoverished but horrified by the humiliation of the workers and the environmental degradation, pulls himself up by the bootstraps and gets educated, gets a law degree, and his very first legal case — which gains traction and results in at least a moral victory — is against the fifth-largest company in the world. You simply couldn’t make that up.

Chevron also didn’t count on the emergence of a global environmental movement and the rise of mistrust of large corporations and their way of doing business, of pursuing profit at all costs. Then there was the change of regime in Ecuador, the election of Rafael Correa, who gets a bad rap in this country as a left-wing, anti-corporate protégé of Hugo Chávez. And a lot of that is accurate, to be fair. But he’s the first president to visit the region, the first one to have some sympathy for the indigenous people and the first one to eschew cozy relationships with the extractive industries. Ecuador actually passed certain constitutional rights for flora and fauna last year, as a demonstration of their new commitment to the environment. Correa is having mixed results, but instead of extracting the oil, he wants to sell the oil rights to people who will keep it in the ground.

There are a lot of fascinating characters in the film, but I was really interested in Sara McMillan, the environmental scientist Chevron supplied to you at the last minute. She says everything is fine in Ecuador, there’s no problem, if people are getting sick it’s not our fault. She’s very reassuring and comes off as really sincere. If she’s lying, she’s doing an extraordinarily good job of it.

She does come across as sincere, and I think she is. That’s one of the deeper and more troubling aspects of those interviews. I think she believes every word coming out of her mouth. She’s been down there, but she’s drunk the Kool-Aid.

It reminds me of our earlier film, “Paradise Lost” [about the dubious conviction of the "West Memphis 3" on murder charges], when co-director Bruce Sinofsky and I were so flabbergasted at what was going down that we’d pull the judge aside, or the prosecutor, and ask them, “Are you guys kidding?” It became very clear that the judge, the prosecutor and the chief inspector had utterly convinced themselves of the righteousness of their mission and the evilness of Damien Echols [accused of masterminding the killings]. It’s not that they were covering something up. It’s more difficult to change that mind-set than it is to expose a coverup.

It’s the same thing with this woman from Chevron. I believe she believes every word that comes out of her mouth. That to me is scary, and it’s a signal of institutional denial. We’re not talking about bad individuals, we’re talking about an institution with no regard for indigenous people.

Another ambiguous area in “Crude” is the presence of Trudie Styler, Sting’s wife. On one hand, she’s clearly done a lot for the Amazonian people, and has raised the international profile of the case tremendously. On the other hand, you’ve got the bogus architecture of celebrity, and this beautiful, well-mannered English lady showing up in an outfit that cost more than every physical object in the Cofán village, all put together.

Absolutely. I have tremendous regard for Trudie and Sting. The only tangible benefit these people have received in 17 years of outside involvement are the water-filtration systems Trudie brought to the region. She and Sting have been talking about the rain forest and the rights of indigenous people for many years, long before celebrity drive-by cause-embracing had become favorable.

But the film is observing and commenting upon that uncomfortable intersection between celebrity culture and social activism. It is a shame that only when the wife of a rich and famous rock star comes to town, this case gets kicked up a notch. There are many places around the world that don’t have a film and don’t have a rock star or a celebrity to help them.

To go back to “Paradise Lost,” Damien Echols is alive today — and I don’t say this arrogantly — because the film produced a great outpouring of support from people like Eddie Vedder, Johnny Depp and Norman Lear. There were a tremendous amount of people who saw that movie and joined an international movement. The film came out at just the right time, just when the Internet was becoming a communication device in a big way. Lots of money has been raised, and if it hadn’t been for that outpouring of support, Damien might not be alive today. I don’t think the state of Arkansas has the balls to inject the guy, because of all the international attention and celebrity involvement.

I bring that up because that’s an example of a guy being lucky, because a film was made. I can’t tell you how many letters I’ve gotten over the years from wives or mothers or girlfriends of people on death row who claim they’re innocent. Of course, not everybody is innocent, I’m not that naive. But those people don’t have a film or a celebrity, and it’s the same thing with these human-rights cases and pollution cases. This is just one part of the world that’s been ravaged by the oil industry. They happen to have a celebrity involved and a film being made. The film is definitely a comment on that — not just on Trudie’s involvement but the film’s involvement. It’s a shame that that’s what it takes to move the needle.

“Crude” is now playing at the IFC Center in New York. It opens Sept. 18 in Los Angeles; Sept. 25 in New Orleans, San Diego and San Francisco; Oct. 1 in Toronto; Oct. 2 in Chicago; Oct. 9 in Philadelphia, Portland, Ore., and Austin, Texas; Oct. 16 in Coral Gables, Fla., Denver and Santa Fe, N.M.; and Oct. 23 in Seattle and Washington, with more cities to follow.