By MICHAEL GINGOLD
Continuing the interview that began here, we present more of our in-depth discussion with director Steven Soderbergh about his unique haunted-house movie PRESENCE, which opens this Friday, January 24 from Neon.
David Koepp’s script focuses on a family–mom Rebekah (Lucy Liu), dad Chris (Chris Sullivan) and teen children Chloe (Callina Liang) and Tyler (Eddy Maday), who have just moved into a new suburban home. From the beginning, there are clear tensions between them, and beyond that, Chloe begins to feel the presence of something else. There is indeed a ghost in their dwelling, and the entire movie (shot handheld by Soderbergh, under his pseudonym “Peter Andrews”) is presented from its point of view in lengthy, real-time takes. (You can see more of this interview in RM #222, now on sale.)
Aside from KAFKA, which dabbled in genre a little bit, and UNSANE, this is your first true horror film, I would say.
Yeah, I would say UNSANE even more than this. It’s a knee-jerk reaction, I guess, but when I hear the word “horror,” I see blood. That’s what comes to mind, and the fact that there’s no blood in PRESENCE, and no real jump-scares–it’s not designed that way–makes me wonder if that’s the right term. I don’t know what other term to use. We call it a ghost movie; I guess that’s accurate. I saw IN A VIOLENT NATURE recently–that’s a horror movie!
PRESENCE definitely has a creepy feeling throughout, and people have come out of advance screenings talking about being chilled by it, so I’d say it definitely qualifies.
Look, if you’re the parent of a teenager, it’s a horror film for sure!
On that note, are you a parent yourself?
Yeah.
How did that feed into developing the storyline?
David’s a father too, so I think a lot more of his experience went into that than mine. What I thought David did wonderfully well, and you don’t realize how rare it is until you see it, is he wrote a really good dad. I feel like it’s not often, especially in this space, that you see that portrayed on screen. I thought he did a great job of writing a good dad, who’s also still interesting and has his own flaws. That was affecting, the way he wrote that character specifically.
It’s kind of a tragedy, in a way, because the mother feels so close to her son that she’s really not paying attention to what’s happening with her daughter. And it’s clear, early on in the film, that the presence is very focused on Chloe, and is very protective of her, and part of the dread that starts to build as the movie goes on is your understanding that something bad is going to happen, and it’s probably going to happen to her. And with the exception of the dad, who’s trying to engage with her, none of them see it coming.
We talked about shooting the scary moments in the long-take style, but was there also a challenge doing the more intimate scenes between the characters that way?
I guess so. I was constantly checking with them to make sure they were comfortable with all that, and they seemed OK, and didn’t seem to be bothered by the fact that at times, I was inches from their faces. They seemed to be able to put me in some sort of cloaking device where I just wasn’t there. They seemed very un-self-conscious about it–even though occasionally, I would literally bump into them, because I was so close to them. It all seemed to work. Like I said, I think I was more stressed than they were.
How about the visual effects, and deciding how many of those to use?
I wanted to be very careful there. There’s really only one, to my mind, full-blown VFX shot, where the daughter’s taking a shower in the bathroom, and the presence decides to move all her study materials around the room. I felt, “Look, we have to do it once, to show that it is capable of doing this,” but I didn’t want to turn this into a Harry Potter film [laughs]. We had to be very careful about that.
And also, when the psychic comes over to visit, I wanted to avoid the cliché of that kind of scene as well. David and I talked about this woman being just a regular working-class person who’s left her job at Home Depot for lunch to come and do this. She’s not a professional, this isn’t how she makes a living, so it’s not like in POLTERGEIST, with the Beatrice Straight character. I wanted it to be really grounded; I wanted the whole movie to be very grounded.
This is the trick in trying to sell the movie, both in terms of marketing and talking about it. To me, it’s a drama that happens to use a ghost as the Trojan horse to show you a portrait of this family in distress. I didn’t go into it thinking I wanted to make a movie in that genre; to me, this seemed to be an interesting way to show a family coming apart.
Was there anyone living in the house you filmed in who had to clear out for the shoot?
Yeah, they moved out. I would never let anybody make a movie in my house; having shot in a lot of houses, there’s just no way. But we tried to be as careful as we could, and we paid them a nice location fee and put them up in a nice place for a few weeks. For some people, I think the novelty is worth it, and a little bit of pocket money, but it would have been impossible for them to stay there. The other thing is, obviously, when we were done, we had to restore it to its original state, so they got a free paint job out of it.
How long did it take to shoot PRESENCE?
Three weeks, and it could have been less. It’s just that there were multiple scenes I wanted to shoot right at a certain moment at dusk. If you’re gonna do that, you only have time to do one of those scenes, so there were a couple of times where if I hadn’t been so specific about time of day, I probably could have shot more material on a given day. But when one of our lengthy scenes was playing out right at twilight, the whole day was engineered toward that. It wasn’t a tough shoot in that regard, it was pretty calm, and since I was paying for it, I felt like I had the luxury of not trying to jam a lot of work into one day. They were normal days; they were not long days.
Shooting in that long-take style obviously doesn’t give you a lot of choices in postproduction, so was editing a challenge in terms of getting the pacing right?
No, it was really about the shots. Once we had those… There was literally only one thing that changed after I watched the whole movie put together the night we wrapped, and that was, I moved the scene where the mom is talking to the son about, “Anything that happens, I did for you. I just wanted you to know that.” That used to be later in the film, and I thought, let’s move it up earlier, so that you take on this sense of her having done something at work that might be kind of sketchy earlier.
Getting back to the question of genre, how do you see PRESENCE in terms of its place among other ghost/haunting films?
I don’t know that I’m well-versed enough to place it within the genre correctly. Often when you make something, the process you start with is eliminating things you don’t like. In this instance, the conceit, the visual gimmick, enabled me to avoid some of the tropes that have been in ghost films before, that I always bump on. The key one being the appearance of an apparition, some sort of glowing or half-transparent figure. I really wanted to avoid all of that, and this gimmick allowed me to do that. And I don’t want to spoil things, but the way in which you finally see what it is–that’s held until the very last shot of the movie, which was David’s idea. We talked about how that reveal might work, and if there would have to be some sort of reveal, but I didn’t know how exactly it was going to be done until I read David’s first draft, and I felt that was smart.
How has your experience been watching PRESENCE with audiences so far?
Very interesting. At Sundance, we had some walkouts in the last 10 minutes, and they were, you know, you can tell when someone has to go to the bathroom or whether they’re trying to just flee the theater. You can feel the intensity ratcheting up as you get closer and closer to the penultimate scene. I think part of that intensity is that the form, the directorial conceit, doesn’t allow for any escape from what you’re watching. You’re never cutting away to something else, or somebody else–you are stuck in this point of view, and when things start to get weird, there’s just nowhere to go. This movie is kind of in your face. The cumulative effect of that seems to work on people.
There’s a reason it’s not a long film; David and I both discussed the fact that at a certain point, you run out of ways to explore this specific gimmick. And so the movie’s about 86 minutes, and that was very much by design, because I felt, at a certain point, I didn’t know what else to do with this idea. Everything that was written, we shot; there were no scenes that were cut.
