“I am focused,” Steven Soderbergh says calmly, hands outstretched in a yoga pose, “on bringing Logan Lucky to the American people. And the world.”

He’s joking, but he’s still telling the truth. The director’s new company, Fingerprint Releasing, is a distribution “conduit” that aims to connect filmmakers and exhibitors. Its inaugural title is Logan Lucky, the West Virginia-North Carolina-set heist picture starring Channing Tatum, Soderbergh’s first theatrical release since 2013’s Side Effects. Soderbergh is talking about Fingerprint on purpose—but it’s also his friendly way of telling me to quit it with questions he doesn’t want to answer.

Concerning his friend Christopher Nolan’s film Dunkirk and the raging cinephile debate about whether it is best to see it in digital IMAX or 70mm celluloid: “I’m going to wait to see it on my phone.”

Concerning the rumor he that he made a movie with Juno Temple and Claire Foy in secret: “It sure sounds like something I’d do. But show me it happened! Show me a call sheet! A photograph!”

Concerning the question of whether Logan Lucky’s screenwriter, the out-of-nowhere Rebecca Blunt, is actually a nom de guerre for Soderbergh himself—like Peter Andrews, Soderbergh’s pseudonymous cinematographer since 2000’s Traffic; Mary Ann Bernard, his go-to editor on most projects since 2002’s Solaris; or even “Peter Cellars,” the jokey name on the buzzer of his Manhattan film noir-inspired offices: “She’s a ghost.”

On this, at least, he elaborates. Blunt, says Soderbergh, is a real woman with a journalism background who is from West Virginia; the lived-in, hangin’ out vibe in her screenplay comes, so he says, from her direct experiences. The Charlotte Motor Speedway (the site of the picture’s big set piece) really did have sinkholes that required miners to patch up. “That sparked her imagination about what’s under there.”

But who is this woman? According to Soderbergh, she’s a friend of his wife (E! correspondent and former model Jules Asner), who gave him, as he puts it, “a Sophie’s choice.” As everyone knows, the least chill thing you can do is ask your friend to give your script to their big-time filmmaker spouse.

“If you enable this behavior, you’ve done something wrong.” Soderbergh shrugs. “But if you say no to your wife, you’ve done something wrong. There’s no good answer here.”

Luckily, the script—whoever wrote it—is a ripping good time, and of obvious interest to the man who made Ocean’s 11.

“I’ve always had an attraction to caper movies, and certainly there are analogies to making a film. You have to put the right crew together, and if you lose, you go to movie jail.”

“This seemed a way to reconnect with that kind of pleasure. And yet, you know, you are trading Armani for Carhartt,” Soderbergh says of the new film’s setting, compared to the international opulence of the George Clooney heist trilogy. “No money. No technology. No skill set, really. They are not professional thieves. They’ve never done this before. I like that aspect of figuring out how to do it.”

Logan Lucky is an extremely gratifying story (“Fellini used to say ‘figure out a way to somehow get all the characters together at the end of a movie’ ”) that hits all the necessary caper movie beats (“there’s always a heist within the heist”), but is still one of a kind—one of its most memorable moments involves “Gummi bears, fake salt, and bleach pens. Add heat to that, and it is a very dangerous combination of chemicals. It’s on YouTube.” But for a movie like this to work, casting really is key. Enter Channing Tatum, in his fourth project helmed by Soderbergh.

“I certainly consider him to be a kind of throwback to a classic American male movie star from another era,” says Soderbergh of his current go-to guy. “He is in reality as you’d imagining him to be. He is a fun hang, and a guy who’s got your back.”

Tatum, Adam Driver, Riley Keough, Daniel Craig, and Katie Holmes are joined by Jack Quaid and Brian Gleeson as two slightly hee-haw-ish yokels who border on parody. In a time when everyone is worried about being offensive, though, Soderbergh remains unconcerned. “There’s a lot of leeway in a comedy. The foundation of comedy is stereotypes. That’s where they start.”

He’s also keen to remind me that he was born in Louisiana himself. “When the Coen Brothers make A Serious Man, do they get attacked for indulging in Jewish stereotypes?”

The film’s villainous outsider is played by Seth MacFarlane, though you may need to wait for the credits to recognize the Family Guy creator beneath a ridiculous wig. “I told him he needs to generate, in nanoseconds, an instant loathing,” Soderbergh explains. “How you do that, I leave to you.”

Ultimately, the animation mogul decided to play his character, an obnoxious energy-drink founder (and race-car sponsor), with an exaggerated English accent. The film’s British distributor was, according to Soderbergh, “freaked out. I say, ‘So you are saying the whole country has no sense of humor about itself?’ ”

Our conversation jumps from Soderbergh’s love of editing (“you can make a movie mean something it wasn’t supposed to mean,” he warns) to the state of his desk (“yeah, it’s . . . kind of a mess”) to his Bolivian brandy, Singani 63, which makes a brief appearance in Logan Lucky and consumes far more of his time than one might realize. “The one-on-one of the spirit business is absolutely non-negotiable,” Soderbergh says. “It’s a few trips a month. Imagine me as Willy Loman.”

His shelves brim with DVD copies of Che (“Please. Take them all”) and no shortage of awards: “This is a Peabody. This is a Golden Tomato. This is just a paperweight.”

A prop from the 2004 omnibus film Eros leads to a conversation about Michelangelo Antonioni, who, along with Wong Kar-wai, provided the shorts that made up that movie. As Soderbergh recalls, “he had already had a stroke and couldn’t speak, but with hand gestures and sounds his wife would translate. He was painting a lot and was still cranking stuff out.”

“I tend not to grill them,” he says about meeting filmmaking legends. “You talk about normal stuff and maybe get a good anecdote. I haven’t met many of my heroes. The only one was Mike Nichols, but that was a special case.”

I ask if there’s any newer talent Soderbergh has his eye on, and he says he’s eager to meet Tangerine and The Florida Project director Sean Baker. “I got to meet [Green Room director] Jeremy Saulnier,” he adds, “who I think is talented.”

If the Fingerprint Releasing experiment works, Soderbergh intends for “other people” to take advantage of it as well. He’s also getting more involved in television production beyond The Girlfriend Experience—even if he decided to yank the cord on a third season of The Knick, his period Cinemax series. (“It felt like things were moving apart instead of coming together, the opposite of Logan Lucky.”) While he fires back a quick and distinctive “no!” when I ask if he looks forward to transitioning to a mentor role, Soderbergh does admit his current plan is to “bring on young writer-directors and turn them loose.” Thinking about all he’s got cooking, he cries out “I need talent!”

After all, there’s only so much one man can do.