Steven Soderbergh talks about his latest film, The Informant!, at the Toronto film festival last week. The comedy stars Matt Damon. (Michael Peake, Sun Media)

American filmmaker Steven Soderbergh is both anonymous and famous -- and desperate to keep it that way to maintain his freedom.

"I have certain rules about things that I won't do," Soderbergh tells Sun Media after his latest film -- the nimble dramatic comedy The Informant! -- made its world premiere at the Toronto filmfest, launching a campaign that may lead to Oscar nominations.

Soderbergh will talk, at length, about his cinema. But he won't do TV interviews in North America.

"This gets into whole issues about anonymity. Because I don't want to be stopped on the street. I need to be able to observe. If I can't observe, then my work suffers. My well of experiences and my references shrink."

His approach is in stark contrast to how filmmakers such as Quentin Tarantino and Steven Spielberg have became celebrities.

"I can't!" Soderbergh explains. "Not for the kind of films that I like to make. I can't be that. It would f--k me up. So I've kind of got the best of both worlds. I can get a table (in a good restaurant) because people, they know the name. But I don't get stopped."

His famous friends do. One of Soderbergh's friends and collaborators is George Clooney, executive producer on The Informant!. Clooney stars in many of Soderbergh's films, along with regulars such as Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts, Don Cheadle and Matt Damon, who plays the eccentric corporate whistleblower in The Informant!.

They all handle fame with aplomb, Soderbergh says, especially Clooney.

"He really does. But let me tell you, it's a prison. And what makes it even worse is that nobody wants to hear you complain about it -- and he would be the first to admit that. Nobody cares what a drag it is. But it is a drag. I've seen it."

Soderbergh's cinema focuses on human behaviour and individual characters. It could be a fictional person, such as James Spader in his dazzling 1989 debut, sex, lies and videotape, or the crazy criminals of the Ocean's franchise. It could be a real-life protagonist, such as Marxist revolutionary Ernesto (Che) Guevera in the epic Che, or Damon's Mark Whitacre in The Informant! or flamboyant pianist Liberace in Soderbergh's next biopic (Michael Douglas is slated as Liberace, Damon as his boytoy).

The Informant!, a project Soderbergh kicked around since reading the original Kurt Eichenwald book in 2001, finally clicked because the director became fascinated by Whitacre's pathology. The real-life Whitacre blew the whistle on price-fixing at the Illinois food giant Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) in the 1990s. But Whitacre was guilty of something, too, and suffered from bipolar extremes.

"I wasn't interested in it because it was a movie about corporate corruption," Soderbergh says. "I don't get attracted to subjects. There has to be something specific. I felt that it was both bigger and smaller than the issue of big bad corporations.

"It's bigger because this particular form of ambition and greed and deception is part of human nature. It doesn't just exist in the boardrooms of large corporations. It's everywhere. You can find it in a homeless shelter."

For Soderbergh, that is modern Darwinism. But Whitacre, who Soderbergh says was eager to see the film himself, is an extreme case.

And that is what makes the story "smaller" than corporate corruption. He is an isolated, eccentric example of survival of the fittest.

"It takes up a larger percentage of his personality than it does for most people," Soderbergh says of the character, whom Damon plays as charismatic, a little crazy and also sad.

Whitacre's greed and his lying reach astonishing levels.

"It's a big slice of the pie wedge and that's what was interesting to me," Soderbergh says.

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