Steven Soderbergh talks new ghost story 'Presence' and mastering the art of failure

Steven Soderbergh is famously one of Hollywood’s most earthbound filmmakers.

He has avoided directing superhero epics largely because there’s no sex. He famously told The Daily Beast back in 2022, “Nobody’s f—ing! Like, I don’t know how to tell people how to behave in a world in which that is not a thing.”

His lone foray into anything otherworldly (in the 2002 sci-fi thriller Solaris), was essentially a character drama about loss that he set on a spaceship.

So it was somewhat surprising last year when the director unveiled Presence, a ghostly mystery starring Lucy Liu, Chris Sullivan, Callina Liang, Eddy Maday and Julia Fox.

Opening Friday, the film centres on a family that moves into a suburban house where they become convinced they’re not alone.

In an interview with Postmedia the morning after the film’s premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival last September, Soderbergh, 62, said the idea was born out of a real-life experience he had at his Los Angeles home.

“It grew out of an odd experience with a house we had in Los Angeles. The house-sitter had claimed to have seen a woman in the hallway, crossing from the bathroom to the bedroom,” Soderbergh recalled.

Soderbergh and his wife Jules Asner knew that a woman had died in the house before buying it. But what they didn’t know was that there were whispers she had been murdered.

“What we didn’t know — the neighbours told us this after we moved in — is that the death was very suspicious. The police said it was suicide, our neighbour thought that a daughter had killed her mother in our house,” he explained.

The unsettling experience got him wondering about how the spirit might feel about them being in her onetime home.

Although Soderbergh never had any encounters with the phantom, he told Jurassic Park screenwriter David Koepp — who also wrote 2022’s Kimi for the director, as well as his upcoming spy thriller Black Bag?— about the encounter.

“I made a choice; instead of being afraid, I thought, ‘What if there’s a story here?'” he remembers. “What if you were this woman and it’s your house and people move in? How do you feel about that?”

Koepp turned in a first draft almost right away. There were very few changes, Soderbergh recalled, but he wanted the audience to see the movie through the eyes of the spectre.

“His ending surprised me, because the presence wasn’t who I thought it might be,” Soderbergh remembers.

Presence is Soderbergh’s first horror, but he said the supernatural element of his story isn’t supposed to scare viewers. Instead, it’s meant to show that the family is “in real trouble.” Soderbergh calls the ghostly aspect simply a “Trojan horse” that acts to reveal that the family being haunted has a “gigantic blind spot that they’re not addressing” in their relationship with one another.

The camera acts as his ghost to show how the parents and their children don’t know even the slightest details about what is going on in their interior lives.

Since breaking through in 1989 with his Palme d’Or-winning debut Sex, Lies and Videotape, Soderbergh’s career has been nothing short of a rollercoaster. After a string of indie misfires in the early 1990s, Soderbergh found his footing with 1998’s Out of Sight, a caper that turned George Clooney from a heartthrob known for starring on TV’s ER into a bona fide movie star.

He’s gone on to direct Traffic and Erin Brockovich in 2000 (winning a best director Oscar for the former), the Ocean’s Eleven trilogy, an eerie pandemic thriller (Contagion), Channing Tatum’s Magic Mike movies and the small-screen medical period drama The Knick, which ran for two seasons on Cinemax.

Over the course of an hour on a Saturday morning, Soderbergh spoke more about his push into the horror genre, his unlikely path as a director and shared his thoughts about the future of filmmaking.

Presence offers a unique spin on scary thrillers. Did you have any rules in setting up the movie?

In early drafts, the presence could move through walls or go upstairs just by levitating through the floor. I didn’t want to do that. In order to orient people to the idea of this being a person, it needed to adhere to the rules that we have to. You’re picking up the clues that it can’t leave the house. You get the sense pretty quickly that there’s something preventing “it” from leaving the threshold of the house. You don’t know why, but you know it can’t leave … it can’t penetrate that perimeter. David Koepp calls them box movies. He’ll say, ‘I like a movie that I have to work within a box. Could be 24 hours and that’s the box.’ … He loves limitations. Give me as many limitations as you can find and I will figure out how to exploit every possible solution.?

So you act as the eyes of the ghost. Some of these takes are intricate and long. Was that a hard task for you?

I was sweating … my arms were like cement … There are a lot of things that have to do right filming a movie this way. Chief among them was me. There were a lot of long takes where we were well into it and in the course of it I would make a mistake and I would have to do it again.

Over the past 20 years, the horror genre has been super cool to watch unfold. Did you see what’s going on there and thought it was a sandbox you’d want to play in?

I’ve paid attention to it just because there’s a lot of interest from filmmakers in that genre lately. Filmmakers are directorially trying things that are interesting in that genre … It feels like we’re in a wave of just interesting explorations in horror.

Can filmmakers take bigger swings in that space?

Yeah. As long as you satisfy some basic demands of the genre, you’ve got a lot of room to play with. I just feel I see a wider range of interests and styles in a horror movie than I see in the fantasy spectacle movies. I think it’s a really exciting period for that kind of film right now. Longlegs did really well because it’s interesting. The point of view in that is very specific and detailed and it’s rigorous in the rules it sets up for itself.?

In your career as a filmmaker, you’ve jumped between smaller-budget movies and big Hollywood-type fare. How do you determine what comes next?

How the sequence plays out in what I get to make is only partially in my control. I always have a few things ready or very nearly ready to take out and try and get made. But in the case of things like Presence, I just pay for it myself and then sell it. That’s the best version of anything. But that’s not always the way I want to work. I want to work on large canvases. As much fun as Presence was, Black Bag, which comes out in March, is a bigger canvas. It’s a Hollywood movie with movie stars. I can’t pay for that.

You became an overnight sensation 35 years ago with Sex, Lies and Videotape. How did that film come about?

It was kind of the result of a feeling to really make a push at getting a movie made. I graduated high school in 1980, I was 17, and I spent the years afterwards making short films and writing scripts in an attempt to break through in the film business. Gradually, I was able to get representation. I got jobs writing, I did a lot of freelance editing. I was back in Louisiana. I had spent a year-and-a-half in California. I called my friend Larry in L.A., this was late 1987, and I said, ‘I got to make one more serious run at this. Can I come sleep on your couch?’ I sold everything I had and got in my car and started writing an idea I had been making notes on for about a year. In the week that it took me to drive from Louisiana to California, and I was not in a hurry, I wrote the first draft of Sex, Lies. At the time, I was supposed to be writing a spy movie for (film producer) Bobby Newmyer, and I was 35 pages in on that. When I got to Los Angeles, I said, ‘Hey, I stopped writing the spy movie to write this other thing, do you want to see it?’ I gave it to him and he said he knew what to do with it. He was an executive with Columbia. Columbia has a home video department making films for $2 million and under. We took it over there and they said yes. So it was an eight-year overnight thing. Suddenly, it just happened … The story itself grew out of (a relationship) in which I was very deceptive for reasons I couldn’t figure out. But I knew that my best shot at getting something made was to do something low budget where I could cast four attractive young people. I was aware of that and I was a diehard fan of (the 1971 drama) Carnal Knowledge and I just said, ‘I’m going to blend these two things.’?

What was it like being at the forefront of that new wave of independent filmmaking?

I think it was an inevitable evolution for movies. What happened in 1989 was driven by a couple of things. Mainstream audiences were really, I think, eager to see something that felt handmade. They wanted a movie that felt like a person made it, not a corporation. Sex, Lies and (Spike Lee’s) Do the Right Thing came out and made money. Suddenly, the studios had to pay attention. They couldn’t pretend like they didn’t see that going on.

You had five movies come out after Sex, Lies and before Out of Sight. None of them really made an impact with moviegoers. So how did you get the Out of Sight gig?

I was as cold as cold can get … The mainstream movie business had serious doubts in my ability to get my s— together. As a result, I had to wait for a lot of people to pass on Out of Sight before I was able to go in and pitch for the job. The head of Universal, Casey Silver, who made King of the Hill and The Underneath with me, called me out of the blue and told me I should read it … They offered it to Cameron Crowe, but he was coming off Jerry Maguire. He was on his own trajectory. They were going to all the people who seemed to be having moments. I was not having a moment. But I believed George was going to be a movie star. Some people didn’t. He was getting the same knock I was. We were both in that box, and we needed each other. We bonded very quickly because we liked a lot of the same movies. But I was hyper aware that if I blew that movie I would be in movie jail. People forgave those five movies because they were indie movies. This was different. I was able to trick myself on set and make myself think I was just making another Schizopolis, but there was pressure to deliver something.?

So without those five failed movies, do we get this Steven Soderbergh?

No. Filmmakers, artists in general, need to fail. You need to make mistakes and you need to learn from them and evolve out of those mistakes. There’s no way Out of Sight looks and feels like that if I don’t make all those other films that came before it. I feel for young filmmakers coming up and not having the luxury of making so many movies that nobody sees. A lot of young filmmakers have to give the impression that they’re fully formed right out of the gate. But if something doesn’t work commercially they’re in trouble. That’s hard. When I see a young filmmaker make a first film that is good, I always hope they don’t get frozen in that moment at that first success and stop evolving. There’s so much pressure, where people will say to you, ‘Keep doing movies like that.’ You’ve really got to have a dispassionate view. When everyone is telling you to go one way, you have to say, ‘No, I’m going to go over here and try something over here.’

After releasing Traffic and Erin Brockovich back in 2000, your career just went to a whole other level with the Ocean’s movies, The Informant, Contagion, Magic Mike and others. How did you view the career going forward?

That run — Out of Sight to Ocean’s Eleven in 2001 — was a sort of nonstop sprint. It was an exciting time. I felt pent up because I had been in the wilderness for a while. I had a lot of stuff I wanted to get out and I felt excited about making movies again. So that was a real peak. But you go through these waves … I did stuff afterwards, like Solaris and K Street that made people scratch their heads. The key is to just be adaptable and fluid in your thinking in order to surf the waves of the business, which keeps changing, and not box yourself in. Since I came up in the independent film world, working with nothing, I can always do that. I can always just go back and find an idea that benefits and isn’t compromised by being made cheaply. Presence is the perfect example. I didn’t need one more dollar to make that any better. But it’s hard to teach yourself how to make something for nothing. Going backwards is tricky.

You’ve directed features for streaming and theatrical. What’s the future for filmmakers then?

I don’t think anyone feels comfortable prognosticating because we are talking about a business that’s also an art form and people have very personal responses to art. Whenever it seems bad, I always think there’s a filmmaker somewhere working on something that we don’t know about that’s going to arrive in six months or come to a film festival and completely change things and take the business in a completely new direction. I just put my faith in creative people. What solves the problem for the movie business is making really good movies.

The last question was one my wife was curious about. After sitting out on Magic Mike 2 in 2015. You came back to direct Magic Mike 3 last year. What prompted you to return?

I saw the live show that they do in Vegas … I wanted to make a movie about how you did that. I wanted to do (a version of) All That Jazz, but it’s Mike creating that show. I pitched everybody that idea. I really enjoyed making it because it’s a process film. It’s a movie about problem solving and creativity and he’s got this nutty relationship with Salma (Hayek), who is a force. I loved the chemistry between the two of them. And I had never made a musical. It’s not a full-blown musical, but it was bumping up against almost being a musical and that excited me. I had been thinking about that for a long time. Fifteen years ago I almost did a musical version of Cleopatra. It was going to be like Tommy. I got really close to doing it but we couldn’t get it off.

Presence is now playing in theatres.

mdaniell@postmedia.com