Just a few years in the past, there was a ghost in Steven Soderbergh’s Los Angeles house. One night, whereas a good friend was cat-sitting for the filmmaker and his spouse Jules Asner, she noticed somebody — or one thing — stroll from the toilet into the bed room, although nobody else was house. Soderbergh and Jules later found {that a} girl died in the home within the late Eighties, apparently from suicide. It was this expertise that led Soderbergh to make “Presence,” an evocative, melancholy movie that’s unexpectedly one among his most private efforts so far.
“We called our ghost Mimi,” Soderbergh, 62, remembers, sitting within the London manufacturing workplace the place he’s at present placing the ultimate touches on “Black Bag,” his different upcoming movie. It’s the Sunday earlier than Christmas, though nothing within the sparse, trendy loft area suggests the vacation season. The director of revered movies like “Traffic,” “Erin Brockovich” and “Magic Mike” slouches as he speaks, however is alert and engaged all through our 90-minute dialog. He continues, “It got me thinking about how Mimi would feel about us being in her house. Is Mimi pissed at us living here?”
Though Soderbergh himself by no means encountered Mimi, she grew to become an inspiration for “Presence” (in theaters Jan. 24), which facilities on a household that strikes right into a home inhabited by an unknown spirit. It marks the filmmaker’s second collaboration with screenwriter David Koepp, who additionally wrote 2022’s “Kimi,” in addition to March’s “Black Bag.” The story, influenced loosely by the 1944 traditional “The Uninvited,” attracts on the grand custom of haunted-house motion pictures. Strikingly, although, the digital camera, operated by Soderbergh himself (as he virtually at all times does, beneath the alias Peter Andrews), takes on the angle of the spirit all through the film. The viewer sees what the ghost sees, an uncommon method to the style that pays off in a third-act twist.
“I gave David a few pages of setup: an empty house with something in it, the camera moves at eye height like a person, a Realtor shows the house to a family,” Soderbergh remembers. “Like, ‘Do something with that.’ He built it out from there, including the ending, which I didn’t have. I had an idea of who the presence might be, but he surprised me.”
“Presence” is a ghost story, however the supernatural component will not be meant to frighten. As a substitute, it’s a method to perceive a disconnected couple, Rebekah (Lucy Liu) and Chris (Chris Sullivan), and their teenage youngsters Chloe (Callina Liang) and Tyler (Eddy Maday). One thing is amiss between the mother and father, though it’s by no means absolutely clear what, and Tyler, determined to be accepted at college, bullies his sister Chloe, who’s grieving the demise of her finest good friend. Soderbergh describes his selection of the horror style as a Computer virus, through which the ghostly component acts to disclose “a family under duress and in danger of coming apart.”
Steven Soderbergh on the Sitges Movie Pageant in 2024.
(Borja B. Hojas / Getty Photographs)
“It might be the simplest idea I’ve ever had,” he says. “The camera’s the ghost. It doesn’t get any simpler than that. And part of the luxury of having this job, which I do think is the best job anybody’s ever invented, is that you don’t sometimes know why you’re doing something now. It just felt like a good idea.”
Soderbergh financed and produced the movie himself earlier than promoting it to Neon after its world premiere ultimately 12 months’s Sundance Movie Pageant. It was the same course of to his 2020 film “Let Them All Talk,” which was acquired by HBO Max after it was accomplished quite than produced inside a studio. The director acknowledges that there’s a “ceiling to what you can take on by yourself, but it’s a good business if you’re willing to do it.” He likes to alternate between small motion pictures like “Presence” and bigger-budget fare like “Black Bag,” which is being distributed by Focus Options.
“I wouldn’t want to do either all the time,” he says. “They inform each other in ways that can be surprising. More than anything I’m just trying to find an experience, and the next experience I have I want to be in opposition to the experience that I just had — where the thing you’re making annihilates the thing you just made.”
Funding “Presence” himself gave Soderbergh full creative freedom. Along with serving as its director of images and editor, this explicit conceit required an surprising intimacy between himself and the solid. “I’m usually right there because I’m operating the camera, but this was different,” he remembers. “I was really in the scenes with them, so if I made a mistake I’d ruin the take. There was another level of performance anxiety for me.”
The movie was shot in Los Angeles in a good 11 days, as chronologically as attainable, throughout September 2023. There was a small crew inside the home together with Soderbergh, all of whom needed to keep hidden since he was continually transferring by the rooms. He used a Sony A7 digital camera supported by a Ronin stabilizer, which he estimates weighs about 12 kilos.
“It’s not very heavy,” he says. “But after eight minutes of holding it out from your body, your arms start to turn into cement and you start to shake. I had to come up with strategies to keep myself moving a little bit so that my arms wouldn’t lock up. That was trying to find these subtle movements in some of the longer scenes, like the presence trying to be closer to the family, because I couldn’t stand still without creating a problem.”
The filmmaker acknowledges the lunacy of taking over this activity, including, virtually sheepishly, “At first it didn’t feel heavy. It wasn’t until we got into these longer takes that I realized maybe, yeah, I should have worked out.”
Every scene was blocked and rehearsed prematurely to map out the place and the way the digital camera ought to transfer. Soderbergh watched playback of every rehearsal to make sure the actions felt genuine to the scene and to his character of the ghost, who reacts to the occasions in particular methods, like hiding behind clothes in Chloe’s closet and floating up and down the steps looking for the relations. The scenes play out like vignettes, with cuts to black in between every one — “like mini plays,” Soderbergh says, every revealing extra concerning the household’s emotional turmoil and the ghost itself. The method required few precise takes since “once you had it, you had it.”
“The only concern as a director was: If this doesn’t work, there’s no plan B,” Soderbergh admits. “I can’t fix it later. The conceit either needs to work or the movie doesn’t work. But I felt pretty confident that it would work. We talked about [how] the idea of this gimmick is only sustainable for a certain amount of time before it’s got to resolve itself and we felt 90 minutes was a good target. And part of the fun of it was the audience really has to pay attention. You’ve got to create the context based on the clues we’re dropping.”
Working the digital camera as a personality required each cautious choreography and absolute silence. To make sure his footsteps didn’t interrupt the scenes, Soderbergh donned a pair of black nylon slippers with rubber grips on the soles. He tiptoed round the home, the digital camera held out in entrance of him, typically for as much as 10 minutes for a steady shot. Carrying the slippers was a purposeful selection, nevertheless it additionally meant quickly discarding his beloved fortunate capturing footwear: a pair of worn-out brown Crimson Wing boots he’s donned each manufacturing since 2011’s “Haywire.” (He’s sporting them throughout this interview.)
“I’m not a superstitious person, but I had this moment of ‘These are my lucky boots and now I’m not going to have my lucky boots,’” he says. “Every morning on set I had to put them in a corner before I put the slippers on.”
Lucy Liu within the film “Presence.”
(Peter Andrews / Neon)
Soderbergh doesn’t imagine in ghosts, an unlikely perspective from the son of a parapsychologist, his mom Mary Ann. Rising up within the South, the filmmaker witnessed “a revolving door of people who were very into paranormal experiences and ideas of visitation.” Today, his barometer for perception correlates to A&E collection “Celebrity Ghost Stories,” on which well-known individuals recount their encounters with the realm past.
“These stories are pretty wild,” he says in full seriousness. “The Jeff Ross story is really disturbing.” The director says he as soon as met the comic and requested him about it.
“You could tell he was still carrying it around,” he says. “So if you ask me ‘Well, do you believe in ghosts?’ I can only say I believe Jeff Ross was telling the truth. Given what has been my life experience, that’s as far as I can go. I believe the people on that show are not lying.”
Nonetheless, as a child, Soderbergh didn’t purchase into his mother’s chosen profession. It felt like she was on the perimeter and he associated extra to his dad, a tutorial who gave him extra consideration. For a very long time, the director was unwilling to think about the methods he’s like each of his mother and father.
“I was very invested in the narrative that I’m like my dad,” he says. “It was only when I became older and became a parent — someone with responsibilities while working in a creative field as a way of supporting myself — that I understood there were aspects of my mother’s personality that were crucial to my creative life and my personality. Part of what was fun about working on this project was really living in her personality for the length of a movie. It felt very much like a movie my mom would make and I’m sorry she isn’t here to see it.”
Since his Cannes-winning 1989 breakthrough “Sex, Lies, and Videotape,” Soderbergh’s profession has veered in quite a few instructions, from capers like “Ocean’s Eleven” and its sequels to sports activities dramas (“High Flying Bird”), thrillers (“Contagion”) and somber sci-fi (a remake of “Solaris” starring George Clooney). He gained the directing Oscar for “Traffic.” However regardless of its small scale and brief manufacturing window, “Presence” feels extra vital for Soderbergh than a few of his blockbusters.
“If each of these projects are like a dot on a timeline, this seems like a bigger dot,” he says. “It turned out to be a repository for a lot of things that I hadn’t gotten to express before. In my experience, that usually happens instinctually. It was only afterwards, when I had to start talking about it and I started to interrogate why and where this came from, that I understood. When you’re making it, you’re trying to make it better. You’re not worried about whether it’s expressing your feelings for your mom.”
He pauses, contemplating, “I think it was Orson Welles who said, ‘I’m the bird. You’re the ornithologist.’ I’m trying to be the bird.”
“Black Bag,” which stars Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender, was much less private for him, however simply as compelling, he says. It had particular challenges Soderbergh wished to see if he might pull off, notably a pair of dinner events pivotal to the plot. The prolonged scenes gave him an issue to resolve, which he did with intelligent ways like a custom-made desk with a gap within the center for himself and the digital camera.
“That was the thing that scared me: Can we pull off these two dinner-table scenes?” he says. He provides, jokingly, “I’m sure this excites everyone to hear that and they can’t wait to see these two dinner-table scenes. But, really, that was a secondary issue. The primary thing was a great script and it’s a commercial Hollywood movie with movie stars in it.”
Soderbergh shot and edited “Black Bag” final 12 months and has already began work on his subsequent characteristic, “The Christophers,” which begins capturing in London subsequent month. Billed as a darkish comedy about an artwork forger, the movie was written by Ed Solomon and stars Ian McKellen, James Corden and Michaela Coel. He and Koepp are additionally collaborating on a fourth film, though Soderbergh gained’t say what it’s about. It’s attainable that the filmmaker is without doubt one of the busiest individuals in Hollywood, however he claims to “feel kind of lazy” as a result of he’s so skillful at delegating.
“I don’t need to micromanage the art department — they’re obsessive already,” he says. “I need to be obsessive about my job, which is figuring out how to direct that scene when we are on the floor. If you cast your crew as well as your cast, you can do a lot of things.”
As for Mimi the ghost, Soderbergh believes she has now moved on from his house. “If she was there, I think she left,” he says, shrugging. “And if she sues me for this movie, then I’ll know she’s still here.”