“We’re here because I love this place,” says Steven Soderbergh, pulling up a stool at a snug whiskey bar among the guitar shops off London’s Charing Cross Road. “But we’re also here because I need a drink.”
It is 11 a.m. on November 7 2024: Donald Trump has just been re-elected president of the United States of America. And Soderbergh – tenacious, shapeshifting director of the Ocean’s trilogy, Erin Brockovich, Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Magic Mike, and a further 27 features and eight television series besides – is taking a consolatory nip while we talk about his latest film, one that finds the director communing with spirits of a very different sort.
Presence has the sort of irresistible premise only Soderbergh, 62, could come up with: a ghost story shot from the point of view of the ghost. Like Polanski via Peep Show, it centers on an invisible ethereal something-or-other whose handsome old suburban house has just been bought by a troubled middle-class family, led by Lucy Liu’s overbearing matriarch. An increasingly sinister drama unfolds, which the audience watches from the specter’s perspective.
Soderbergh claims the plot was inspired by a haunting at his own home: a friend who was house-sitting glimpsed the shape of a woman drifting between rooms, and assumed the director and his wife had returned early. (They had not.) A previous owner of the property had died there, “and a neighbor later told us that she’d always believed she had been killed, rather than [dying by] suicide as the police believed. And as soon as I heard that story I wondered: if she is here, what would it be like for her to have other people living in her house?”
The intensity and creepiness of Presence’s drifting first-person viewpoint is Soderbergh’s own handiwork. He shot the film in three weeks, under his usual cinematographer pseudonym Peter Andrews, while wearing the quietest pair of slippers he could find. The biggest technical challenge, he explains, “was moving between floors while shooting without falling up or down the stairs”. The second biggest was handled by his screenwriter, David Koepp, the brains behind such classic 1990s studio pictures as Jurassic Park, the first Mission: Impossible and Carlito’s Way.
“I knew that at the end of the film we were going to have to come correct and reveal who the presence is,” Soderbergh says. “But David surprised me. He did not pick who I thought he was going to pick.”
Soderbergh shot the film in three weeks, under his usual cinematographer pseudonym Peter Andrews, while wearing the quietest pair of slippers he could find.
He concedes that his ghost’s-eye-view ploy is “a very significant gimmick – and I say that as someone who has embraced the gimmicky before”. (Two recent films, Unsane and High Flying Bird, were shot on an iPhone.) “So the question has to be: why is it better to do it this way? And the bottom line is that here, to get the effect I wanted – to play with the audience’s primal desire to look into the eyes of the protagonist, and give them that sense that if they turned around, there would be nothing there – there was no alternative.”
That very question is why he has little desire to experiment with virtual reality: a medium that – at least superficially – shares something with Presence’s first-person look. “Nobody wants to wear that thing on their head for two hours,” he says, referring to the ungainly headset VR requires. Such technology cuts us off from our fellow viewers, preventing “those moments where something big happens and I turn to my wife and we give each other that ‘holy s—’ look,” which, he says, can play a significant part in our enjoyment of a film.
He has even less time for A.I., which has been identified by many in the creative industries as an existential threat. “I wish everybody that is so freaked out about it would actually spend some time with it; if they did, I think they would quickly calm down,” he says. “It’s interesting as a tool, but its limitations are so obvious and insurmountable.”
He can see a potential role for it “in carrying out grunt work. If you wanted to make CSI: Barcelona, you could feed it a guide to the city and every CSI script ever written and ask it to spit out a template for the first 10 episodes to see if the idea had mileage. But, come on! A human would have to make the call, then turn it into something watchable.”
In place of A.I., Soderbergh currently has Koepp, whose imagination he fired up with an eight-page description of Presence’s opening scenes. (“David said, ‘I know exactly what to do with this,’ he remembers.) The two met in 1989 at the Sundance Film Festival, which had programmed both of their debuts: Soderbergh’s was Sex, Lies, and Videotape, which went on to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes; Koepp’s, the psychological thriller Apartment Zero, starring Colin Firth.
In the 1990s, they tried to draft a remake of a 1944 horror called The Uninvited: a tale of two London siblings who experience creepy goings-on at their Cornish seaside retreat. The duo came up with “some really fun stuff”, Soderbergh recalls, before falling out over what he describes as a “Harold the Explainer scene”: an exposition dump Koepp felt was necessary but which Soderbergh loathed. They let the project go – “so that our friendship would survive”, he says. “And now we’ve been making up for lost time.”
Presence is the second part of a three-film collaboration, following 2022’s Kimi, a Rear Window remix for the snooping techno-conglomerate age. The third, due in March, is the London-set spy thriller Black Bag, in which Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett star as married secret agents, the latter of whom becomes suspected of treason, stretching the former’s loyalties to snapping point.
Soderbergh describes it as “less Fleming than Le Carré – no chases, no fights, just one gunshot. Bond is not my skill set. My core skill set is people in rooms, talking. The trick is making them interesting people and interesting rooms.” One suspects he may be slightly underplaying his hand here: the Black Bag trailer does contain an exploding car, as well as slinky hints of bedroom scenes.
“It’s the kind of movie they supposedly don’t make any more,” he says. “A mid-budget movie for grown-ups. It’s the kind of movie I earned my stripes on – like Erin Brockovich, Traffic and Out of Sight. Can we convince the audience to leave the house and come and see what I think is a pretty fun and satisfying movie? I know they’re still out there. We just have to find out where they’re lurking, and go and hit them with our stuff.”
Back in the Brockovich days, Soderbergh was a studio filmmaker. But he largely went indie in the Noughties after the industry rebuilt itself around franchises. Hollywood today, he believes, often struggles to connect with a broad audience by aiming too young and hiring too old. “Studio heads used to be close in age to the people they made films for, but in the current business model there’s an entire generation gap.”
He also laments the business’s inability to mint new movie stars. “It’s a forgotten art. These days, you don’t get to make a Risky Business, and do the equivalent of what that film did for Tom Cruise,” he says, referring to the 1983 film in which Cruise made his breakthrough. “There’s a lot of fear out there. The cost of capturing eyeballs and creating awareness just keeps going up, and that creates a desire to make everything feel like a sure bet.”
One upshot of this: “The conversation with studios is always: ‘We need to have established names in every single part.’ They just won’t let you take a chance on anyone who isn’t huge yet, but you think could be. Because that way, if the film doesn’t work, no one can turn around afterwards and yell: ‘Why did you think that nobody could be a movie star?’”
He knows what he’s talking about. In the 1990s, a TV heartthrob called George Clooney tried to break into film, but none of his early lead roles – in From Dusk Till Dawn, One Fine Day, Batman & Robin – got his Clooniness quite right. Soderbergh remembers watching Clooney in ER and thinking all it would take to make him a star was the right part.
“Studio heads used to be close in age to the people they made films for, but in the current business model there’s an entire generation gap.”
“And that was Out of Sight,” he grins. Soderbergh, having dashed off five commercial flops on the trot, was only allowed by Universal near the steamy Elmore Leonard adaptation “after everyone else in town passed. Sydney Pollack said George simply wasn’t a movie star. Barry Sonnenfeld said he didn’t understand the tone. I had to wait for everyone else to disperse, then I went in and made my pitch, because I knew it could be the perfect role for him. And he played it perfectly. It’s the first film he made that when you watch it now you think, ‘Ah, there’s George Clooney, the movie star.’”
By today’s standards, Clooney’s romance with Jennifer Lopez is steamy for a studio film. But at a time when Hollywood is shrinking away from sex, Soderbergh notes, “it’s important to distinguish between actual sex, and eroticism and desire.
“Everything leading up to the act is interesting, and definitely everything that happens immediately after the act is interesting. But I just don’t have a lot of interest in the act itself.” He takes a brief comic pause. “On screen.”
What’s sexy to him, he continues, “is emotional intimacy. And the physical expression of that can also be compelling. But you’ve got to be careful, because once it’s visualized, the viewer very quickly crosses over into the realm of, ‘Oh, wow, that’s Clooney’s ass.’”
I’m intrigued to know what he made of Megalopolis, the self-funded passion project of Francis Ford Coppola – another former studio darling now working on his own terms.
“You’ve got to respect somebody who’s just sailing away from the shore on a boat of his own design,” Soderbergh enthuses. “It’s movies like that which always go through reappraisals later: the bugs of today are the features of the future.”
One reason he was keen to see the film, he says, was in case there was anything in it worth stealing. “That’s another thing that’s interesting to me about the AI conversation, where artists want to sue the companies for using their work as data input. I’m sitting at home thinking, well, that’s what I do. Sex, Lies, and Videotape was just my version of Carnal Knowledge. I was ripping off Jules Feiffer and Mike Nichols.”
Does he think it matters who gets there first? His brow creases. “In art, none of us gets there first,” he says.
Presence is in theaters now
Robbie Collin is the U.K.-based chief film critic at The Telegraph
