Centering on a ghost because it haunts a household in a comfortable suburban residence, Presence may appear to be a horror film within the vein of Poltergeist, The Amityville Horror, or The Conjuring. However of their follow-up to the tech thriller Kimi, longtime buddies director Steven Soderbergh and screenwriter David Koepp say that Presence was by no means conceived of as or meant to be a horror film.
“It’s a ghost story,” Koepp advised Mashable in a joint in-person interview with Soderbergh, who concurred, including that the movie just isn’t horror by his definition. For Soderbergh, whose mom was a parapsychologist, the concept of a ghost in the home is not inherently scary. Or extra particularly, it is not scary in the way in which trendy audiences take into consideration horror. He thinks of Presence as “extra The Shining than Longlegs.“
Koepp expanded on this: “In the last 10 to 15 years, horror has really been prominent and changed. Gore and jump scares are huge. When people hear horror, they think of that. When I think of horror, I think of Linda Blair in the MRI tube [in The Exorcist].”
It is in such moments of grounded, on a regular basis, human nervousness that Presence thrives. Utilizing first-person perspective — shot by Soderbergh, who served as helmer and cinematographer — Presence follows an enigmatic spirit because it eavesdrops unseen on a household of 4 (Lucy Liu, Chris Sullivan, Callina Liang, and Eddy Maday), who’re going via an array of non-public {and professional} tensions. Slightly than this presence being a menace of their family, it’s a captive viewers who appears determined to be part of the household’s lives and assist nonetheless it may. However with no voice and little capability to be acknowledged by anybody however a grieving teen lady, its wrestle is fraught with nervousness and heartache. And this was impressed by Soderbergh’s personal brushes with ghosts.
Presence is loosely primarily based on Soderbergh’s personal haunted home.
Callina Liang, Chris Sullivan, Eddy Maday, Lucy Lui, and Julia Fox search a endlessly residence in “Presence.”
Credit score: NEON
For the director behind Ocean’s Eleven and Logan Fortunate, Presence started when “our house sitter saw a ghost” in his Los Angeles residence. Whereas Soderbergh hasn’t skilled a magical encounter with a spirit in his residence or elsewhere, he believes those that say they’ve — citing Jeff Ross, who shared his scary story on Celeb Ghost Tales — due to his belief in them and their real alarm. And this obtained him pondering, as he advised Mashable, “I just got to thinking how I would feel — if I’d been killed in my own house — about other people coming into my house. And that’s where it started.”
From there, he’d despatched Koepp just a few pages of a draft, imagining the spirit wandering the house and seeing a realtor arrive with potential patrons. “Steven had this idea: first-person point of view of the ghost, should all be in one house, and it feels like it wants to be a family drama. And I was like, well, okay, those are my three favorite things. I know how to write a family. I love a contained space, and your aesthetic idea is really cool.”
“The ghost is the Trojan horse for a portrait of a family struggling,” Soderbergh defined, “And that has an incredible blind spot in the center of it.”
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The primary-person perspective meant that every one scenes can be shot as oners — a protracted take with no cuts. This was a “box movie” problem (as Soderbergh put it) that Koepp, the screenwriter behind equally constrained movies like The Paper and Panic Room, relished. But there’s one scene in Presence that, for just a few moments, appears to interrupt this POV framework to a shocking and intelligent impact. Simply do not name it a “wink.”
Steven Soderbergh hates winking, each literal and metaphorical.
Producer Ken Myers, screenwriter David Koepp, producer Julie M. Anderson, and director Steven Soderbergh pose on the “Presence” premiere.
Credit score: NEON
Presence — which I championed as a wonderful instance of horror in my assessment — turns the expectations of a ghost story on its head by placing audiences within the footwear of the mild spirit at its middle. Slightly than this first-person perspective getting used as spooky voyeurism, because the shot is commonly employed in slasher films, it carries a way of vulnerability that excited each Koepp as a author and Soderbergh because the performer of this ghost via his digital camera’s lens.
“Vulnerability was [crucial], because in the pages he sent me,” Koepp stated, “The thing’s looking around the empty house, people come in, and it retreats to the closet. And I thought, ‘Oh, it’s scared, it’s vulnerable.’ That changed everything, because it’s not the presence that wants to scare you and has some kind of power and authority. It’s not at all. It’s exactly the opposite. It’s that vulnerability that was key to writing that.”
But there is a second the place Soderbergh’s digital camera switches from its fluid wandering movement, as a substitute perching excessive within the daughter’s bed room, overlooking her at her desk. Then, within the fringe of the highest proper of body, a really acquainted sight in a horror film about ghosts happens. The bed room door opens slowly, as if by itself. However simply because the viewers may assume Soderbergh has unceremoniously ditched his first-person POV, the daddy of the household enters, slyly subverting the expectation of a scare for one thing comforting and customary.
“That was in the script,” Soderbergh says, crediting Koepp. “And it came at the right time to kind of — I don’t want to say wink. I don’t want to say it was a wink. My wife made the mistake early in our dating, and I don’t know what motivated this, but she winked at me. And I lost my mind, and was like, ‘Do not ever.’ So just the word and the whole notion of ‘wink’ [repulses me] — I don’t think we were winking. But I liked the idea that for a second, you know, ‘Oh, they’re gonna do that thing.’ And then his head comes out, and she jumps [in surprise]. Okay, so you do need to find those moments of release, absolutely. You know, Jaws is one of the funniest movies out there — the audience wants that release [amid the tension].”
Credit score: NEON
Pressed on why winks hassle him so, Soderbergh mused, “I’ve really got to do a deep dive on why, in real life, I find that so disturbing. Maybe it’s because I can’t understand. It’s unthinkable that I would do it to someone, so it’s a lack of imagination on my part, to enter a headspace in which I would think that was a good thing to do, you know? And made me feel like, who are you? She just laughed about it when she saw my reaction, like it wasn’t that big an ask.” He continued, “And then as far as films go, I think that’s very, very dangerous territory, because the default mode is that it’s somewhat self-referential. I was comfortable with it here because it was referential to a genre as a whole, right? And not like another movie that I had made…I’m just unnerved by [winks].”
From there, the pair mentioned how there are names and numbers that recur of their respective initiatives. However Soderbergh insists this is not self-referential winking. “There’s a company name that always clears that I use a lot, called Perennial,” he defined, “So if you were to go through my filmography, there are probably eight or nine Perennials in there. It works for anything: dry cleaner, armored cars. So that, to me, is not winking, I’m trying to solve a problem.”
The pair have identified one another since 1989, when their respective first movies — Soderbergh’s Intercourse, Lies and Videotape and Koepp’s Condominium Zero — performed on the Sundance Movie Competition. Although Koepp as soon as pitched his follow-up Dying Turns into Her to Soderbergh, the 2 did not collaborate till 2022’s Kimi. However since then, they’ve reunited for Presence and the upcoming spy drama Black Bag. So, in any case these many years collectively, how do they know when a challenge is finest suited to their collaboration?
Koepp stated it is when an off-the-cuff dialog about an concept comes up repeatedly, and the idea grows from there. Soderbergh concurred, then quipped, “I’ll wink!”
Presence is now enjoying in theaters.
