Director Steven Soderbergh on Presence, movies for adults and the power of karaoke | News
Ocean's 11, Erin Brockovich, Magic Mike: Steven Soderbergh is a tough director to pin down. Now, the Oscar winner is taking on a ghost story called Presence. Soderbergh spoke with CBC's Eli Glasner about the precarious state of the industry and why he won't make another Ocean's film.
From Magic Mike to Ocean's 11, Steven Soderbergh is a cinematic journeyman who with Presence is making a ghost story with a twist. Above, he speaks at a press conference in Berlin where he said Behind the Candelabra would be his last film. It was not. (Michael Sohn/The Associated Press)
You might not know the name Steven Soderbergh, but you likely know his movies.Â
He's the director behind Erin Brockovich, Traffic, the Ocean's 11 trilogy and Behind the Candelabra. After winning the Palme D'Or at the age of 26 for Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Soderbergh reinvented himself as genre connoisseur, serving up crowd-pleasing heists and neo-noir meditations — not to mention Magic Mike, his wildly successful film about the eponymous gyrating male stripper.Â
Now, with Presence, Soderbergh is pivoting to horror. The film, starring Lucy Liu, is a ghost story with a twist, where the audience only sees the family that's being haunted, but never who — or what — is haunting them. Â
A passionate champion of independent cinema, Soderbergh sat down to chat with CBC's Eli Glasner about the real-life circumstances that inspired Presence, what drew him to horror and the connective power of karaoke.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Presence feels like a collision between Rear Window and The Blair Witch Project. What came first: the story or the idea of how to tell it?
The directorial premise was the first thing because we'd had some incidents in this house that we have in Los Angeles. My wife had some moments like "Oh, did I leave that light on? I don't think so." Then we had a house sitter who saw someone in the house. There was a whole backstory to somebody who had lived in this house regarding a daughter who had killed her mother. So I began to wonder, what is it like to have somebody come and move into her house? So that's how it started.
I gave the basic idea to [screenwriter] David Koepp. He came back with the script, which — the ghost genre thing is sort of the Trojan horse to present a family that is going through a troubled period.Â
The cast of Presence, from left, West Mulholland, Callina Liang, Chris Sullivan, Lucy Liu and director Steven Soderbergh. (Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press)I love the way you were allowing us to eavesdrop on this family, almost encouraging us to jump to conclusions.
Well, you're only able to put things together by the choices that the Presence makes about what it's listening to and what it's looking at. The question from the jump is "Who is it?" That was a fun way to construct a story because it seems to be leaning in a certain direction.
What I find really interesting for you: It's very difficult to say what a Soderbergh film is. The only thing I can say is that you have this toolbox and for every project you're looking for new ways to challenge yourself.
There's gotta be something that scares me about the thing — and it could be anything, but there has to be a pocket of fear because it keeps you alert. I love the job so much and respect the job so much that if it's not keeping me up, then I should do something else and let somebody who's passionate about it do the job.
So when people lately ask, "Another Ocean's movie?" I say, "The person who makes the next Ocean's movie should be somebody who's as excited about that opportunity as I was." Like, it's just too far in the past for me. I'm done. So they should get somebody who is going to roll up with the kind of energy and enthusiasm that I had.
After the success of Sex Lies and Videotape, Soderbergh embraced genre films and found success with the Ocean's 11 all-star heist films. Soderbergh is seen with the cast of Ocean's Thirteen in 2007 with Scott Caan and George Clooney. (Jeff Christensen/The Associated Press)I don't want to make stuff that's like single-use plastic.- Steven SoderberghA big part of that challenge and enthusiasm for you seems to come from genre.Â
I came to that realization that I should work almost exclusively in genre after we did Che because it's such an efficient delivery system for really any idea you wanna get at and everybody wins.Â
I don't want to make stuff that's like single-use plastic. You look at Presence, it's a ghost movie. But what happened to that family is hard to shake, and makes you think, "It's a story of a family with a blind spot."Â
Callina Liang plays Chloe, a teenage who has an unexpected visitor in Presence. (Elevation Pictures )This is closer to a kind of horror thriller than we've seen from you. I know you've had a lot to say about the state of independent cinema, and it feels like thrillers and horror are one of the last refuges of independent filmmaking.
Well, it's certainly resulted in some really interesting movies and it makes sense. Independent filmmakers are just trying to get movies made; they don't necessarily have to cost a lot of money and they have commercial potential.
I was talking last night about In a Violent Nature, which is nutty, nutty, nutty, nutty fantastic. The filmmaking's great. It's so weird. Super simple idea, beautifully executed. If you want to make a name for yourself, that was a good way to do it. Â
In 2013, you gave a talk at the San Francisco International Film Festival about the state of the industry. You spoke about the importance of protecting the vision of cinema and battling with blockbusters. Over a decade later, there's much industry contraction. How much cinema, as you define it, do you see out there?
There's still cinema out there. I feel, and last summer was an example of that, Greta [Gerwig]Â and Chris [Nolan]Â came up through the independent world and then they made these gigantic hits [Barbie and Oppenheimer].Â
One of the reasons I've been working in genre is I want to keep bringing back this idea that you can make singular commercial movies that have an absolute precision of vision, but are designed to reach a large audience.Â
We have plenty of art house movies. What we're lacking is as many commercial movies that are as artful.
Could you get an Erin Brockovich made today?
Well, the movie I'm finishing now, Black Bag, it's a spy drama. This is in theory the kind of movie that people say, "Why don't they make movies like this anymore?" It's an intelligent David Koepp script for grown-ups. So I hope they come, because if they don't, it's going to be harder for the person behind me to get something like this made.Â
I guess I'm trying to measure whether things have changed, because I talked to Joss Whedon in 2012 when he was at TIFF to promote Much Ado About Nothing and even then he was telling me the middle movie is dying.
Oh, no question. No question, and our challenge with Black Bag will be cultivating that audience and convincing them that it's worth coming to the theatre.Â
Do you still believe in terms of cinema as an empathy engine?Â
We're wired for stories and we always have been. We have always convinced ourselves that our problems can be addressed by some new piece of technology. It's demonstrably true that that is a fallacy and that the problems that we're experiencing, our human problems, that technology only accelerates.
Steven Soderbergh holds up his Oscar for best director for the film Traffic at the 73rd annual Academy Awards in 2001. (Kevork Djansezian/The Associated Press)I feel like technology is amplifying our demons. Â
It's amplifying our irrational side faster than it's supporting our rational side. How do you convince people to not believe things that aren't true? There's a difference between illusion and delusion. One of those is necessary to get through the day. We all indulge in writing a story for ourselves in which we're slightly better than we are. Delusion is stuff that is just provably untrue and yet there are people that believe things that are provably untrue. How do you talk to these people?
But if I can't combat the disinformation, if I can't change my uncle's mind, maybe I could get them in front of Behind the Candelabra to hang with Liberace for two hours.Â
Well, that's an interesting point because there was this project I was working on about cognition and how we make decisions. I would ask everybody, "In what state of being is somebody most likely to let go of a deeply held belief?"
They all said when they're laughing, and in a close second, music as a connective thing. Which leads me to my own pet theory of karaoke as a hack, because [from] my experience of karaoke, I've never seen anything connect people faster.Â
This was borne out to me when we were in Hong Kong shooting Contagion and we had a wrap party. It happened at one of these, like, really tricked-out karaoke bars. So half of the people in this room can't speak with the other half of the people in this room. In four minutes, this room was completely unified and stayed that way for the rest of the evening and I'm watching this going, "There's something here. This is not a joke."
I wanted to write a polemic about cinema and now you're talking about karaoke.Â
The empathy hack of karaoke. Well, movies are a slower, less intense version of that because they're not really interactive in that way. But again it's this human question of, do stories really change people's minds?Â
Lucy Liu plays the mother Rebekah in Presence. (Elevation Pictures)
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