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Steven Soderbergh burst onto the filmmaking scene in 1989 by winning the Palme d'Or with his debut feature, Sex, Lies And Videotape. He thought he had nowhere to go but down, and for a while he seemed right. Kafka, King Of The Hill and The Underneath were all interesting, but they barely worried the box office. That changed with 1998's Out Of Sight. Two years later, Erin Brockovich earned Julia Roberts an Oscar, while Traffic won four Oscars, including the gong for Soderbergh. His latest film, Ocean's Twelve, attempts to repeat the success of his 2002 remake of Rat Pack caper movie Ocean's Eleven.

We hear all these stories about larky behaviour on the Ocean's shoots. Was making 12 as much fun as 11?

Neither of them was enjoyable for me.

Why not?

They're really hard.

Aren't all films?

No, some are harder than others. Making a film that's supposed to be fun to watch is really hard - that's the weird irony of it. I had more fun making Traffic than either of the Ocean's films.

Is it the logistics?

Yeah, and the demands are very different stylistically. It's harder to come up with ideas of how to do stuff. You've got this huge machine, but you want the whole thing to feel breezy and light. That's really weird. But I wanted to do it because I felt there was somewhere else to go; it's a very, very different film than the first one.

So, no Ocean's 13 then?

Not if I can help it. Of course, the actors had a really great time. I think they had even more fun on this one than the first one. Brad Pitt would come up and go, "Tokyo, man. Tokyo on the next one." I said, "Brad, this is the wrong time to be talking to me about this."

When you have so many big egos to look after, do you sometimes feel like the head of a nursery where you have to tame the temperaments of people?

Yeah, but not in a bad way. In this case they all like each other so much that, yeah, sometimes it takes a while to shut them up so we can go to work. But that's good because it resolves in a kind of chemistry on screen that you can't fake. I just produced Criminal, this remake of Nine Queens, and one of the things that appealed to me about Nine Queens is that it was a performance piece, and that's the most fun. I guess why the Ocean's films are hard for me is because on the one hand you have to make sure the performances are there, but on the other hand it's a film that demands, to my mind, a very layered and complex visual scheme. That takes a lot of time to figure out.

Are there many criminals working in the film industry, and do you have to be a bit of one to succeed in the business?

Well, Richard Gaddis [John C Reilly's character in Criminal]... let's just say he was not a very difficult character to expand upon and Americanise, because I feel I have met a lot of people like that. But my sense in talking to people when I travel is that the film business is not that dissimilar from a lot of other businesses. You just don't read about those businesses the way you do ours. I have been on planes with people who work in the insurance business or in sports marketing and it's the same stories. Everybody's got people at work they hate, their boss is an asshole - it's the same political dynamic wherever you go. People are people.

You appear incredibly busy these days, directing, producing and writing. What's driving you?

I got lucky. I found something quite early in life that I felt like I understood and it turned out to be something you can never fully understand, so it keeps you going. But I think I will stop doing this at a certain point and do something else.

Like what?

Maybe I'll paint, do photography, just something else. I can see that.

Is this too exhausting?

In terms of directing, I think it's getting harder for me to come up with ideas that by my standards are interesting. I could see a point where I feel like I'm not doing as good a job as I ought to do and I should do something else. Hopefully, I will stop just before that. And there are a lot of aspects to doing it on anything but a private level that are really frustrating, and that I have less tolerance for as I get older.

What aspects?

Well, it's 15 years since Sex, Lies And Videotape, and if you hang around long enough you're having the same arguments with just a new set of people every few years and it gets boring. What can I say? You get tired of explaining what you're trying to do. I'm in the process of working out an arrangement to make some very, very, very small films in the midst of all these films and maybe that will help. But you get tired of talking. You just want to do it.

Ocean's Twelve is released in UK cinemas on Friday 4th February 2005.