Steven Soderbergh is a director who works with non-actors to create intimate indies (Bubble, his latest The Girlfriend Experience). Steven Soderbergh is also a director who works with gigantic stars like Brad Pitt and George Clooney (you remember, don't you?)

And apparently in Moneyball, one of several projects Soderbergh has in development right now, he'll do both. "We've got a lot of real people playing themselves. It's going to be interesting. I'm going to try and fuse normal actors with real people. I feel like if I pull it off, the level of reality and detail that's going to be present will be really exciting."

At a roundtable interview for The Girlfirend Experience a few weeks ago (more on that later), Soderbergh said Moneyball isn't just his next project, but one that's been in the making for a long while. "I think it's the perfect piece. This is going to be the culmination of something I've been playing with for 10 years now, the real people idea. This is the perfect place to bring it all together."

As for the non-real people in the movie-- a.k.a the actors, Demetri Martin and Brad Pitt-- Soderbergh said he hadn't seen Martin's performance in the upcoming Taking Woodstock before he cast the stand-up comic to play Paul de Podesta, a Harvard economics student who applied his statistical know-how to baseball. "I thought there's a whole aspect to his personality that isn't part of what his stand-up persona is that plays exactly to what Paul de Podesta is. They're very similar in a lot of ways. I think he's going to be a great foil for Brad. "

We'll have more on our interview with Soderbergh tomorrow, and hopefully a lot more about Moneyball as this perplexing, possibly amazing project makes its way toward theaters.