Venice, Italy ? Steven Soderbergh, who used a cast of nonprofessionals to make “Bubble,” a murder story set in a bleak Ohio town, says fiction on screen is more real than reality TV.

Reality TV is “as far from reality as you can imagine and more fictionalized than the movies you see,” said the Oscar winner for “Traffic,” and director of “sex, lies, and videotape” and “Erin Brockovich.” He was in Venice this weekend for the out-of-competition premiere of “Bubble.”

“They’re forcing the issue onto characters,” Soderbergh said of reality TV, contending its goal is to “force these people to be humiliated.”

In “Bubble,” Soderbergh said he was “taking a real environment and taking real people in a way that’s much more fluid and much less aggressive” than reality TV.

“I tried very hard not to disturb the cast. We designed the story to fit the town,” Soderbergh said at a news conference Saturday. He said he wanted to “incorporate much of their own lives into the story.”

“Bubble” is being released simultaneously in movie theaters and on DVD, pay-per-view cable and satellite television.

“This is where the business is going. Give consumers a choice for how they want to see films,” he said.