By MICHAEL GINGOLD
Leave it to Steven Soderbergh, who’s been experimenting with cinema his entire career, to come up with a different approach to the haunted-house genre. The entirety of his new movie PRESENCE is presented from the point of view of a spirit dwelling in the new suburban home of a conflicted family of four. Through the ghost’s “eyes,” we slowly learn the nature of their troubles, while teenaged daughter Chloe (Callina Liang) begins to sense that they’re not alone. Soderbergh sat down for a lengthy interview with RUE MORGUE about the movie and its unique creation.
Scripted by David Koepp and opening in theaters this Friday, January 24 from Neon, PRESENCE also stars Lucy Liu as mother Rebekah, Chris Sullivan as father Chris and Eddy Maday as teen son Tyler. Through the phantom’s eyes, we eavesdrop on them as they reveal hidden sides of themselves, and the ghost attempts to physically intrude on their world. Serving, as usual, as his own cameraman under the pseudonym “Peter Andrews,” Soderbergh uses the POV gambit to both reveal things about the characters and build considerable tension. (You can see more of this interview in RM #222, now on sale.)
How did the idea of making a movie from the point of view of a ghost first occur to you?
We have a small house on the east side of Los Angeles, in Los Feliz. We had a house sitter there for a while, and she described seeing a female figure in the house while she was watching TV one night. Her instinct upon seeing this figure down the hall, toward where the master bedroom was, was to yell out my wife’s name–and then she realized, as soon as she did that, that neither my wife nor myself were in the house, and that what she had seen had to be something else.
She recounted this story to us, and we decided that was probably a good time to tell her what we had been told by our neighbors about what happened in our house some years before, which is that a woman had died there in the master bedroom. The police report said suicide; our neighbor was absolutely convinced it was not, and that this woman was killed by her daughter. That person said she wished she’d known that story before she agreed to house-sit for us!
That got me thinking about this woman who died, whether under suspicious circumstances or not, and how she might feel about having people in her house. So I worked up a few pages of script that described what seemed to be a point-of-view shot, that seemed to be from eye height as it moved through the house. Initially, the house is empty, and then there are time shifts, and a realtor comes, and a family comes, and that was sort of all I had. David took that basic idea of something in the house and a family moving in, and ran with it.
How many of the details of the characters and their backgrounds, etc., did you come up with, and how much was Koepp’s invention?
I came up with the family of four, and what I sent to him implied that there’s some sort of issue within the family that we will discover through these glimpses the presence has. I didn’t say what that problem was, or how it would be resolved, I just said, “It gets excavated through the presence watching them over this period of time.” It was very, very basic; it didn’t really have a plot, so David came up with all of that.
How did you find actors who were not only right for the individual parts, but would make for a convincing family?
Chris Sullivan I’d worked with on THE KNICK, and had in mind from the beginning as the dad. Chris radiates a kind of integrity that I felt was very important for that part. And Lucy Liu is somebody who had been on a list in the back of my mind for a while. I’ve always liked her, and she’s friendly with Carmen Cuba, our casting director. So as soon as the script came in and I said, “What do you think about Chris Sullivan for the dad?” Carmen said, “I think that’s great, and would this be a good place to slot Lucy in, because we’ve talked about her before?” And I said, “Yes, this would be a good place.”
For the kids, I asked Carmen to find me people who hadn’t had a lot of exposure. I wanted new faces, and she went out and canvassed quite a bit. I chose these two based on how they fit with Chris and Lucy, and did that look like a plausible family? That all came together pretty quickly.
Can you talk a little more about working with Liang, who’s terrific and really carries the movie?
I think she was based in London when Carmen interviewed her and auditioned her. I hadn’t seen her in anything before, and she was a real thoroughbred. She was extraordinary; she’s so expressive. You would have thought she’d been doing this since she was 4 years old; she took to it like a seasoned professional. We were shooting in New Jersey, and the cast were all staying in a hotel very close to the house where we were living, so they were getting together every night and running scenes. I think that made them very comfortable when we were shooting. I felt very lucky, and that the cast was so prepared, and understood their characters so well, that all I had to worry about, really, was where the camera should be. They took a lot of that burden off of me.
One piece of “casting” that was actually trickier than the actors was finding the house. The script had some very specific demands, and we were having a lot of trouble finding one house that had everything we needed. Very late in our prep schedule, I got a call from the location manager saying, “I think I found something.” We jumped in a van and went out to New Jersey to look, and I said, “That’s it.” I was worried, because we never leave the house, so not only did it have to work for the script, it had to be visually interesting enough to keep you from getting bored. And that beautiful signature staircase was really what sold me on this place. Turned out, it was not the easiest staircase to run up and down with the camera, but it worked for the movie.
Can you talk about serving as your own cameraman representing the presence, and working with the actors in that sense?
We’d spend time just blocking the scenes; forget about the camera, what is organic movement for you in this scene? They were kind of like mini-plays, in a way. And I asked that we shoot basically in chronological order, so that the presence could kind of learn as it was going about how it would look at things, and what it would choose to look at. I felt it would be very hard for me to show that learning curve if we were shooting out of sequence. It was unlike anything I’d ever attempted before, and the restrictions were kind of liberating, in a way, because they eliminated so many other possibilities. Often on set, you’re watching a scene, and you’re thinking, “Wow, there are a couple of ways I can shoot this.” And here, there was only the one way.
How did you deal with timing the scares when you were working in these very long takes?
Rehearsing. We just had to rehearse as much as we could. I didn’t want to cheat, you know? Everything that happens in the film occurs in these long takes, and except for one specific instance, they’re not stitched together. We were doing everything in camera as much as possible. So it just became about the choreography–and me trying not to trip on the stairs. Because when I was on the stairwell, obviously, I had to be looking at my feet, aiming the camera where I thought it should be based on the rehearsals. And there would be times when we’d do a take, and I would come down and play it back, and see that I’d screwed up the composition while I was going up or down those stairs, because I had to look at my feet. That was the only time I felt stressed, getting well into a take and having to navigate those stairs, and blowing a shot because I cut somebody’s head off.
What kind of camera did you shoot on?
We used a Sony A7, which is very small; it looks like a still camera, but shoots movies. And then we had a small Ronin stabilizer, which is kind of a U-shaped device that we’d put the Sony in the center of. The whole thing weighed 10 or 12 pounds, which is pretty light–until you have to hold it out from your body for seven minutes. Then it starts to get a little strange [laughs], but we made our way through it.
Having shot UNSANE and HIGH FLYING BIRD on the iPhone, did you consider using one on PRESENCE?
For about five minutes. I really wanted a larger sensor, so that I could have more depth to the image when people got close. So the question was, do I go from the iPhone all the way up to the RED camera–which I use on most of my normal productions–or do I go somewhere in between? And that’s when I decided, after testing the Sony, that that was the right choice. It has a sizable sensor, but it’s also small, so I couldn’t have been happier with the image.
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