Steven Soderbergh was only 26 when he won the Palm d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival for "Sex, Lies and Videotape," which kick-started a rise in independent film.

He's also won an Oscar (for "Traffic"), made overtly commercial films (the "Ocean's" movies) and experimented with form and casting (the recent "The Girlfriend Experience" starred adult film actress Sasha Grey).

His latest film, "The Informant!," starring a doughy Matt Damon as a whistleblower in a price-fixing scandal, opens today.

Soderbergh talked about the movie recently.

Why did you make "The Informant!" a comedy?

It became that because it didn't seem to work as anything else.

Because of the precedent of other films about this subject, if you're trying to bring your own special sauce and you're looking at "The Insider," you don't want to compete with that on its home field, because that's a really good movie. This was a decision that was being made in 2002. Now, of course, I'm really, really happy we went that way, because I think dropping this film in this environment is kind of interesting. It's a more entertaining way to have a conversation about a serious subject.

One of the enjoyable things about the film is how, little by little, more and more is revealed.

I like that, where you're kind of dropping into something mid-stream. People are making references to things that you haven't been told. As long as you play fair and catch them up.

You direct comedies, dramas and combinations of both. Are comedies harder?

Yeah, no question. Absolutely. You can kind of fake your way through a drama. You can make a drama and somebody comes out of it not moved and you can sort of say, "Well, they were moved inside" or something. You can subjectify it to the point of saying it worked, even if it didn't.

"... (With comedies), people are either laughing or they are not. That's what's good about it, in a way, because the problems are so obvious — which is, they are not laughing.