From www.pasadenastarnews.com- Casting a porn star as the lead of new movie will inevitably raise eyebrows. But Steven Soderbergh, the director of such high-end entertainment as “Erin Brockovich” and the “Ocean’s Eleven” franchise, doesn’t think that’s nearly the most interesting thing about his film.

“The Girlfriend Experience,” which opens today, falls into the category of Soderbergh’s other smaller movies, going back to his first hit, the 1989 “Sex, Lies, and Videotape.” The new film is almost a quasi-documentary – a structured shell that is allowed to unfold dramatically in improv fashion.

It stars 21-year-old adult film star Sasha Grey, who plays Chelsea, a high-end New York City escort who charges more than $2,000 an hour or $20,000 a night to give her clients more than her body – like kissing and conversation.

The project had its beginning about three years ago when Soderbergh was in New York City having a drink with writers Brian Koppelman and David Levien at a hotel bar in midtown when he noticed “this woman who stood out in a way that I couldn’t quite articulate. They both said, `Oh, she’s a GFE’ (Girlfriend Experience). I didn’t know what that term meant, and they explained it to me, and I thought that was interesting, paying a surcharge for intimacy.”

The script was written in 2006, but by the time Soderbergh went to shoot it during some 18 days last October, a number of real-life events had changed the dynamics of the situation.

The Eliot Spitzer scandal had made high-priced female escorts a hot topic, and the economy was in the tank. So the people the director had hired from the worlds of Wall Street and show business to play versions of themselves as johns, what did they talk about with Chelsea? Money, what else?

Soderbergh says he’s not worried that such things will date “GFE” (“It’s hardly central to the movie. It’s a nice filigree.”) What intrigued him more was Chelsea’s relationship with her live-in boyfriend, Chris, a professional trainer (played by trainer Chris Santos), who is aware of his girlfriend’s profession. (By the way, despite Grey’s presence, there is no sex, only a bit of nudity in the film.)

“In theory everything is on the table, and that’s what makes it possible for Chelsea and Chris’ relationship to exist and to continue. But there is something else under that – that isn’t being spoken.”

Eventually, a client wants to take Chelsea away for a weekend, which punctures the pair’s relationship. What Soderbergh was looking for is something that is common in all couples – just in an extreme form.

“For me `GFE’ was really about those blind spots that everyone has. We tell ourselves a story about why we’re in a relationship. We have this narrative that we create about ourselves, about why we’re in a specific relationship. There’s a lot of delusion there, otherwise you’d kill each other. I’m not judging it. But in this case, since they pride themselves on being totally open it turns into a problem. … The sex-for-

money aspect of it was interesting as far as it goes, but the movie was really more about delusion than anything else – as it is in `Sex, Lies.’ ”

The 45-year-old Soderbergh says he recently watched “Sex, Lies,” which is being reissued in a 20th anniversary edition, and was struck by the “quaint nature” of the obsession of his main character (played by James Spader). “It’s really almost sweet. What he was doing in that film compared to what Sasha does online. That was funny.” And also slower.

What has changed, the director believes, is that the nature of relationships has really accelerated.

“I have an 18-year-old daughter whose relationships are much different than mine were at that age. I read a lot of articles where people say that constant communication is a bad thing … that they don’t have real relationships, etc., etc. I don’t necessarily look at it that way. I can only – from my extremely small sample size – say that she seems very centered and calm and she talks about her relationships to me and to the people she’s involved with in a way I didn’t talk until I was in my late 20s. … She’s learning about what she wants out of a relationship faster than I did because of this abundance of information that’s flowing back and forth. So I don’t judge it at all.”

Nor is he judging the relationship being Chelsea and her clients.

“What is real?” he asks. “It’s a philosophical question. For instance, if Chelsea has a relationship with one of her clients for two years, for all I know she knows more about him than any other woman he’s dated. … You may say there’s money involved with one and a different transaction involved in the other. I guess the glib answer is I don’t care because I’m not sure whether it matters other than for those two people in the moment.”

Money does have other impacts, though. This summer the filmmaker is going to shoot “Moneyball,” based on the Michael Lewis book about the story of Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane, who successfully fielded a winning baseball club on a budget.

“Look at sports. I’ve been doing all these interviews for `Moneyball,’ talking to people about how the sport has changed, how scouting changed in the last 25 years, and they’ll say it’s money. Money has changed everything. … It changes how people feel. It’s a force.”

So call the “GFE” film sex, lies, money and digital, which is how it was shot, but its reported $1.7 million budget is a pittance when you consider that Julia Roberts made around $20 million for her Oscar-winning role in the 2000 “Erin Brockovich.”

“GFE,” which is already available on pay-per-view, is part of a deal Soderbergh made with HDNet, which allows the director to make small movies on subjects that interest him.

Coming out this fall for Soderbergh is “The Informant,” with Matt Damon, based on a true story about a whistleblower in international price-fixing conspiracy. In “Moneyball,” he will bring some of his documentary style to a bigger budget film. It stars Brad Pitt as Beane, but they’ve also reassembled 60 percent of the 2002 athletes for the shoot.

With all these different projects, it inevitably raises the question: What is a Steven Soderbergh film? Many people find him a bit of a chameleon, but the director sees it differently.

“If an idea engages me, I look at it and try to determine what’s the best way for it to be presented. … Should it be a comedy? Should it be a drama? You know, `The Informant’ is a comedy. A lot of people who read that book would assume that it was going to be like a Michael Mann film, and it really isn’t. … It took me four or five movies to really land in a place where I stopped trying to impose a style on things.”

Perhaps that’s what’s most fascinating about Soderbergh. “GFE” has a number of tantalizing aspects to it, some of which may or may not be intentional. Chelsea, for instance, has her services “reviewed” by a self-appointed escort critic (played by former Premiere film critic Glenn Kenny). And while the film was shot in sequence, the director mixed it up in editing.

After screening it for the cast, one of the nonactors called him up the next day to tell him that the movie was all out of whack, “which I thought was a perfectly accurate description,” Soderbergh says wryly.