Steven Soderbergh is going back to where he started: two people in a room, with no safety net.

His new film, The Christophers, which bows in Toronto’s Special Presentations section, was made entirely outside the system. There’s no studio, no sales company, no distributor. “Yeah, we’re going old school,” Soderbergh says. “We’re going to world premiere it and see what happens. It’s risky, but if it works, the best-case scenario is to get multiple parties interested. So as soon as I saw how the calendar was going to lay out, I already had Toronto in mind because I’ve always had good experiences there.”

That sense of risk has defined Soderbergh’s career from the beginning. In 1989, he burst onto the scene with Sex, Lies, and Videotape, the low-budget indie that premiered in Sundance and went on to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes, helping spark the ’90s American independent film boom. From there, Soderbergh proved he could master both franchise spectacle — he re-invented the studio caper with his Ocean’s Eleven trilogy — and prestige drama, securing best picture Oscar nominations in the same year for Traffic and Erin Brockovich. (He won the best director trophy for Traffic.) Yet alongside the hits, he has consistently returned to experimentation: shooting films on iPhones (Unsane, High Flying Bird), blurring form with interactive storytelling (Mosaic) and even re-cutting his earlier work (Kafka, reissued as Mr. Kneff).

That instinct to keep re-inventing himself takes new form with The Christophers, a chamber drama set in London’s art world. Ian McKellen plays Julian Sklar, a once-celebrated pop artist now broke and long estranged from his children. His kids, played by James Corden and Jessica Gunning, enlist Lori (Michaela Coel), a restorer and former forger, to finish Sklar’s abandoned canvases so they can one day inherit them. The story begins as a heist but evolves into a duel between artists, one at the end of his career, the other desperate to forge her own.

The idea came, like many Soderbergh projects, over cocktails. He pitched a “sentence and a half” to co-writer and frequent collaborator Ed Solomon about a younger artist insinuating herself into an older artist’s life. “Within 15 minutes, a general shape formed about a woman who’s hired by the children of this artist to forge some works of his that he’s had buried in storage,” Solomon recalls. “We thought you could do a story that begins as a kind of elevated concept heist idea but really turns into a story about art and mortality, legacy and ambition, and failed dreams.”

What happened next broke every rule of the business. Solomon and Soderbergh wrote a script specifically for McKellen and Coel — without knowing either actor. “Well, you know, we violated rule number one, which is, don’t write a script for a specific actor because you probably won’t get that actor,” Soderbergh says. “And we did it. We doubled down on that.”

They got them. McKellen and Coel both said yes. Financing came quickly from Michael Schaefer’s new company, Department M. “It all just kind of took on a critical mass very quickly,” Soderbergh says.

The production was just as fast. Solomon, McKellen and Coel spent 10 days at McKellen’s house going through the script, line by line. Then Soderbergh came in and shot the film in 19 days flat. “On The Christophers, there’s really no safety net,” he says. “The movie lives or dies on the text and the performances and coming up with ways to keep it interesting to look at. [Doing that] without acting from a place of insecurity is a challenge.”

For Solomon, the rehearsal was the high point. “It was a spectacular experience, maybe the highlight of my career, sitting with Ian and Michaela and watching these two great actors of two generations piecing the characters together, line by line,” he says. “Sometimes, Michaela and I literally pinched each other and went, ‘Can you believe we’re getting to watch this happen?’ “

Editing — as always under the pseudonym Mary Ann Bernard — Soderbergh says the postproduction was about streamlining. “Every shot, every scene, every line has to prove that it deserves to be in the movie,” he says.

That drive to pare things to their essence echoed the film’s subject itself: an artist confronting what remains when all the noise is stripped away. For Soderbergh, that theme cut close to home.

“Irrelevance is the nightmare, I think, for any artist,” he says. “Even being hated is an active state. Irrelevance is a non-state. And there are many examples of artists and filmmakers whose work as they got older became less relevant, less compelling. That’s something I think about a great deal.”

Solomon, whose career has included penning big franchises (Bill & Ted, Men in Black), saw The Christophers as part of a larger turn back to first principles. “After the success of Men in Black, I suddenly found myself in this very rarefied, studio-writer world where a lot of things were coming to me,” he recalls. “But, creatively, I found it really increasingly depressing. It actually was a conscious choice I made about 16, 17 years ago to get off that train. And that’s when Steven and I came together creatively.”

That philosophy has guided their collaborations — Mosaic, No Sudden Move, Full Circle — all developed on spec, with no guarantee of backing. “I appreciate the gamble,” Solomon adds. “It’s a no-risk, no-reward thing.”

In Toronto, their latest gamble will be put to the test. It’s a fitting stage: Across his career, Soderbergh has brought to TIFF everything from Gray’s Anatomy and Schizopolis to Che, The Informant! and, most recently, Presence. Each marked a different phase of his restless career, and with The Christophers, he’s once again using Toronto as the launchpad for a stripped-down experiment in how risk-taking cinema can feel urgent and alive.

“The Christophers is a reminder that you can make a movie that is simple and character-driven and is also a roller coaster and exciting and dramatic, funny, sad and satisfying,” he says. “We all need to be reminded of that.”

This story appeared in the Sep. 3 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.