A few years ago, there was a ghost in Steven Soderbergh’s Los Angeles home. One evening, while a friend was cat-sitting for the filmmaker and his wife Jules Asner, she saw someone — or something — walk from the bathroom into the bedroom, even though no one else was home. Soderbergh and Jules later discovered that a woman died in the house in the late 1980s, apparently from suicide. It was this experience that led Soderbergh to make “Presence,” an evocative, melancholy film that is unexpectedly one of his most personal efforts to date.
“We called our ghost Mimi,” Soderbergh, 62, recalls, sitting in the London production office where he is currently putting the final touches on “Black Bag,” his other upcoming film. It’s the Sunday before Christmas, although nothing in the sparse, modern loft space suggests the holiday season. The director of revered films like “Traffic,” “Erin Brockovich” and “Magic Mike” slouches as he speaks, but is alert and engaged throughout our 90-minute conversation. He continues, “It got me thinking about how Mimi would feel about us being in her house. Is Mimi pissed at us living here?”
Although Soderbergh himself never encountered Mimi, she became an inspiration for “Presence” (in theaters Jan. 24), which centers on a family that moves into a house inhabited by an unknown spirit. It marks the filmmaker’s second collaboration with screenwriter David Koepp, who also wrote 2022’s “Kimi,” as well as March’s “Black Bag.” The story, influenced loosely by the 1944 classic “The Uninvited,” draws on the grand tradition of haunted-house movies. Strikingly, though, the camera, operated by Soderbergh himself (as he almost always does, under the alias Peter Andrews), takes on the perspective of the spirit throughout the movie. The viewer sees what the ghost sees, an unusual approach to the genre 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, but the supernatural element is not meant to frighten. Instead, it’s a way to understand a disconnected couple, Rebekah (Lucy Liu) and Chris (Chris Sullivan), and their teenage children Chloe (Callina Liang) and Tyler (Eddy Maday). Something is amiss between the parents, although it’s never fully clear what, and Tyler, desperate to be accepted at school, bullies his sister Chloe, who is grieving the death of her best friend. Soderbergh describes his choice of the horror genre as a Trojan horse, in which the ghostly element acts to reveal “a family under duress and in danger of coming apart.”
“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 film himself before selling it to Neon after its world premiere at last year’s Sundance Film Festival. It was a similar process to his 2020 movie “Let Them All Talk,” which was acquired by HBO Max after it was completed rather than produced within 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 movies like “Presence” and bigger-budget fare like “Black Bag,” which is being distributed by Focus Features.
“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 complete artistic freedom. In addition to serving as its director of photography and editor, this particular conceit required an unexpected intimacy between himself and the cast. “I’m usually right there because I’m operating the camera, but this was different,” he recalls. “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 film was shot in Los Angeles in a tight 11 days, as chronologically as possible, during September 2023. There was a small crew inside the house along with Soderbergh, all of whom had to stay hidden since he was constantly moving through the rooms. He used a Sony A7 camera supported by a Ronin stabilizer, which he estimates weighs about 12 pounds.
“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 on this task, adding, almost 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.”
Each scene was blocked and rehearsed in advance to map out where and how the camera should move. Soderbergh watched playback of each rehearsal to ensure the movements felt authentic to the scene and to his character of the ghost, who reacts to the events in specific ways, like hiding behind clothing in Chloe’s closet and floating up and down the stairs in search of the family members. The scenes play out like vignettes, with cuts to black in between each one — “like mini plays,” Soderbergh says, each revealing more about the family’s emotional turmoil and the ghost itself. The process required few actual 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.”
Operating the camera as a character required both careful choreography and absolute silence. To ensure his footsteps didn’t interrupt the scenes, Soderbergh donned a pair of black nylon slippers with rubber grips on the soles. He tiptoed around the house, the camera held out in front of him, sometimes for up to 10 minutes for a continuous shot. Wearing the slippers was a functional choice, but it also meant temporarily discarding his beloved lucky shooting shoes: a pair of worn-out brown Red Wing boots he’s donned every production since 2011’s “Haywire.” (He’s wearing them during 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.”
Soderbergh doesn’t believe in ghosts, an unlikely perspective from the son of a parapsychologist, his mother Mary Ann. Growing up in the South, the filmmaker witnessed “a revolving door of people who were very into paranormal experiences and ideas of visitation.” These days, his barometer for belief correlates to A&E series “Celebrity Ghost Stories,” on which famous people recount their encounters with the realm beyond.
“These stories are pretty wild,” he says in complete seriousness. “The Jeff Ross story is really disturbing.” The director says he once met the comedian and asked 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.”
Still, as a kid, Soderbergh didn’t buy into his mom’s chosen career. It felt like she was on the fringe and he related more to his dad, an academic who gave him more attention. For a long time, the director was unwilling to consider the ways he is like both of his parents.
“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 career has veered in numerous directions, from capers like “Ocean’s Eleven” and its sequels to sports dramas (“High Flying Bird”), thrillers (“Contagion”) and somber sci-fi (a remake of “Solaris” starring George Clooney). He won the directing Oscar for “Traffic.” But despite its small scale and short production window, “Presence” feels more significant for Soderbergh than some 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, considering, “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 less personal for him, but just as compelling, he says. It had specific challenges Soderbergh wanted to see if he could pull off, notably a pair of dinner parties pivotal to the plot. The lengthy scenes gave him a problem to solve, which he did with clever tactics like a custom-made table with a hole in the middle for himself and the camera.
“That was the thing that scared me: Can we pull off these two dinner-table scenes?” he says. He adds, 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” last year and has already started work on his next feature, “The Christophers,” which starts shooting in London next month. Billed as a dark comedy about an art forger, the film was written by Ed Solomon and stars Ian McKellen, James Corden and Michaela Coel. He and Koepp are also collaborating on a fourth movie, although Soderbergh won’t say what it’s about. It’s possible that the filmmaker is one of the busiest people in Hollywood, but he claims to “feel kind of lazy” because 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 home. “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.”
