January 22, 2006 | Director Steven Soderbergh is an Oscar-winning A-lister, with credits ranging from the gritty Traffic to the fizzy Ocean’s Eleven. But he’s also still the same bad boy who rocked Sundance with sex lies & videotape. With Bubble, opening Friday, the maverick moviemaker returns to his indie roots: His latest is a low-budget, stripped-to-essentials drama, shot in high-def DV, about lives of quiet desperation in the dark heart of Middle America. The actors – hired on location in Belpre, Ohio and Parkersburg, West Virginia – are nonprofessionals. But their director is a master at his craft.

Q: How difficult is it to move back and forth between glossy Hollywood product like Ocean’s Eleven and indie films like Bubble?

A: You just have to keep aware of what the boundaries are for whatever you’re making. You have to determine the aesthetic that you feel is most appropriate for the material. And then you have to give yourself some rules to sort of live by.

Q: Such as?

A: You have to take something off the table. You can’t just have everything. And determining what you’re going to take off the table is key, I think. In the case of Bubble, it was: No hand-held camera. No dollies. That’s not the aesthetic of this movie. I was trying to strip everything down a little bit. It’s a really simple movie. And I wanted to make it very simply.

Q: No camera movement. Non-pro actors. Long, single-take scenes. Hey, who do you think you are? Rainer Werner Fassbinder? Robert Bresson?

A: [Laughs] Well, you certainly won’t get a lot of people stampeding to the theater by saying, “I watched a lot of Bresson when I got ready for this.” But, hey, I did watch a lot of Bresson when I was getting ready for this. For obvious reasons. The key being his use of non-actors. Or, more accurately, how he uses actors – and how he doesn’t use them.

Q: How did you get non-pros to give such spot-on performances? Typecasting?  Hypnosis?

A: Part of our process was to talk with them at length, and incorporate their own lives, their own back stories, into the movie. Like, when Kyle is in the bar, and he’s talking about leaving high school because of his anxiety disorder -- that’s really true for Dustin James Ashley, the actor who plays him. And it was so fascinating to me that I had to ask Dustin: “How did you get up the courage to call us and actually make the appointment to come in for an interview?” And he said: “I don’t know. I just picked up the phone and dialed it before I could talk myself out of it.”