
Steven Soderbergh’s camera, representing the presence, captures a shot of the teenage daughter (Callina Liang) from a bedroom closet. Peter Andrews/Neon/The Spectral Spirit Company
LONDON – Steven Soderbergh has been thinking about ghosts. Whether they exist, sure, but more so: Why? He wonders what would compel a spirit to remain on this earthly plane rather than advance to whatever lies in the great beyond – and whether they’re given a choice.
The Oscar-winning director grapples with these questions in his latest film, “Presence,” in theaters Friday. The supernatural drama follows a family (Lucy Liu and Chris Sullivan as the parents, their teenage children played by Callina Liang and Eddy Maday) that moves into a suburban home they come to believe is haunted. Working off a screenplay by David Koepp, with whom he collaborated on 2022’s “Kimi,” Soderbergh shot the film himself, from the perspective of the ghostly presence. His handheld camera operates as its own character, peeking out of closets, peering around corners, closing in on members of the family as they sleep at night.
“Presence,” the first of two films Soderbergh is releasing this year – the other being the British spy thriller “Black Bag,” also written by Koepp, expected in March – has been well received by critics. When it debuted at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, New York magazine deemed it “the best thing Steven Soderbergh’s done in ages,” and more recently the New Yorker referred to its framing as “a simple but ingenious device.” Indeed, the filmmaker famous for movies such as “Traffic,” “Erin Brockovich” and the “Ocean’s” trilogy, who has increasingly been known to experiment with visual storytelling, found a way to reinvigorate the haunted-house story.

Julia Fox, far right, plays the realtor in “Presence” who sells a haunted house to the family played by, from left, Callina Liang, Chris Sullivan, Eddy Maday and Lucy Liu. Peter Andrews/Neon/The Spectral Spirit Company
In early January, The Washington Post sat down with Soderbergh at a London co-working space to discuss the making of his new film. (The prolific artist had completed postproduction on “Black Bag” but remained in the city to work out his next project set there.) “It reminds you of how young our country is,” he said to a fellow American of his centuries-old surroundings. Surely, the ghosts haunting the Georgian-style rowhouses nearby in the East End had some wild tales to share.
But for now, we focus on the presence he played himself, as cinematographer. Here, step by step, is how he did it.
Step 1: Encounter a ghost
It began with the housesitter. When Soderbergh and his wife were out of town some years ago, the friend watching their Los Feliz home told them she saw a presence walking from the bathroom to their bedroom. They wondered whether it was the ghost of a woman who died in the house in the 1980s. Authorities had officially ruled her death a suicide, but neighbors raised suspicions to Soderbergh. They said she had been heard fighting with her daughter the night before she died, and that blood stains on the floor suggested her body had been dragged to the bedroom.
Soderbergh and his wife, the writer and former television personality Jules Asner, clung to the eerie notion. They called the woman Mimi.
“It got me on this track of thinking about how Mimi felt about us being in her house,” he said.
While Mimi served as the inspiration for the family being haunted in “Presence,” Soderbergh said the incident also led him to discover his own “unconscious repository” of spooky stories dating back to his childhood. His mother worked for years as a parapsychologist, talking to people about their paranormal experiences. She was “very matter-of-fact” about it, he said.
“Anybody who reads this who has not watched (A&E’s) ‘Celebrity Ghost Stories’ needs to finish this piece and go watch,” he added. “These people are obviously shook. They’re not making this up.”
Step 2: Hire a screenwriter
With Mimi in mind, Soderbergh wrote up six pages about a family moving into a haunted house and sent them over to Koepp, asking, “Does this spark anything for you?” Koepp told The Post he was intrigued by the challenge of writing a screenplay shot exclusively from one point of view. The presence is trapped in the house, which means the camera never leaves the property.
“I love a premise that confines you in some way,” Koepp said. “I’d written this movie ‘Panic Room’ some years ago, the idea being that it’s all in this house and, even smaller, in this one room. I like a time constraint, too. I feel like those limits force you to come up with creative solutions.”

As the presence became more comfortable sharing its space with the family, Soderbergh brought his camera closer to the actors’ faces. Peter Andrews/Neon/The Spectral Spirit Company
In “Presence,” the daughter (Liang) is recovering from the death of her close friend, who overdosed. Her immense grief bothers her mother (Liu), who struggles to understand why her daughter doesn’t seem as well-adjusted as her popular son (Maday). This then drives a wedge between Liu’s character and her husband (Sullivan), who is far more sympathetic toward his daughter’s situation. The presence is clearly protective of the girl, too, often remaining by her side — especially when her shady boyfriend (West Mulholland) comes over while her parents are out.
Though they didn’t work together until this decade, Koepp and Soderbergh have known each other for far longer. The screenwriter had a film at Sundance in 1989, the same year the director showed his feature-length film debut, “Sex, Lies, and Videotape.” Soderbergh trusted Koepp to help him work through his hesitations toward “POV films,” which he said mainly amount to “never being able to get past the primal desire to see a reverse angle of the character who’s experiencing the story.”
“In theory, we wouldn’t have that problem here because you would know once you twigged (realized) what the conceit was that there’s nothing to cut to,” he said. “So you would drop that expectation.”
To hedge against a visually fatigued audience, Soderbergh also advised Koepp that the running time “max out at 90 minutes.” The final cut of the film clocks in at a tight 85.
Step 3: Prepare to haunt
Koepp wrote specific camera movement into the script, which he said is “normally a no-no. That’s the director’s business, not yours.” But if he were to truly treat the camera as a character, as Soderbergh pitched, he would need to identify its triggers and describe its reactions.
Soderbergh still determined how to execute the vision. He decided to shoot almost entirely in sequence to allow him to naturally develop the presence’s point of view. He would be acting himself, with his Sony A7 camera in hand, and didn’t want to overthink any movements ahead of time.
“I want you to watch anything I’ve done and feel like the filmmaking is precise, but not pre-chewed – that it feels like it was built right then,” he said. “Sometimes for the crew and the production, that means I can’t answer everybody’s questions about everything. I’m like, ‘I don’t know yet.’ ”
Production took place over 11 days in September 2023, thanks to a waiver from the Screen Actors Guild (which was on strike at the time). At the film’s Sundance premiere last January, Liu recalled Soderbergh showing up to the set each day in Cranford, New Jersey, wearing these weird grippy socks, not unlike what she imagined a martial artist might wear. Soderbergh didn’t know what they were called. All he knew is they weren’t his lucky brown boots, which would have been too loud.
“To not have my boots on, I was worried – like, this was going to be bad luck,” he said. “I put them over by the sound card so I could see them. They looked a little sad. Like, shoe FOMO.”
Step 4: Chase the actors
Soderbergh is accustomed to working in close proximity with actors. But this project took that intimacy to another level. “I was at times, like, inches from them,” he said, describing how he held the camera right up in the actors’ faces as the presence grew more and more comfortable sharing the characters’ personal space. “They could smell me,” Soderbergh added.
The presence follows the family around the house, trailing the morose daughter as she lumbers up the stairs, running over to the mother when she exclaims in shock. This meant the nimble filmmaker, always at the ready in his grippy socks, executed all those movements as well.
The Sony A7 is a small camera, and the rig weighed maybe 12 pounds, Soderbergh said, but holding anything upright for several minutes straight becomes a chore. He couldn’t work with a load-lightening stabilization rig because it would limit his mobility. He needed to be able to back into a closet at a moment’s notice. “Your arms start to shake, like they’re filled with concrete,” he said.
More than once, he apologized to the cast and crew for “messing up” a take. There were a couple of times where they would be eight minutes into a 10-minute take, and then – oops, his arms got tired, and he ruined the shot, time to start over. Anything that required the stairs was a challenge.
“I have to look at my feet when I’m going up and down the stairs, which means … I’m just kind of aiming the camera where I think it should be compositionally,” he said. “Then I would watch the playback and go, ‘I was too high,’ ‘I was too low.’ I’m just trying to use my sense memory.”
Step 5: Cut the footage
Soderbergh said the shoot was so short “because it was so simple. I think we reshot one scene.”
There is only one invisible cut in the film – a subtle edit creating the illusion of a single, uninterrupted take – because the rest of the scenes were actually captured that way. “I was a bit of a purist about it,” Soderbergh said. “I didn’t want to cheat.” He worked swiftly, cutting footage every night, which he said “took two minutes.” They locked picture “half an hour after we wrapped,” marking the end of the visuals process.
Step 6: Cross your fingers
There are numerous scenes throughout “Presence” where only a single actor is seen on-screen, but there are actually two characters present because the ghost is there, too, watching. It recalls the visual storytelling of the recent release “Nickel Boys,” RaMell Ross’s POV film depicting abuse at a racist reform school through the eyes of two Black teenagers. Asked if he had seen the film, Soderbergh praised Ross’s decision to toggle between the perspectives of the two boys, saying Ross seemed to be “aware … he needed to keep the (visual) language moving so people don’t go, ‘Okay, I get it.’”

Sullivan and Liu appear as a married couple in “Presence.” Peter Andrews/Neon/The Spectral Spirit Company
“I don’t think this is going to spark a wave of POV movies, because it’s usually the wrong approach,” Soderbergh continued. “But when you have something it can work with, it really works.”
The carefully constructed POV of “Presence” has still proved a challenge for some viewers. “It was interesting to watch at Sundance,” Soderbergh said. “We had a couple of walkouts.”
The film can get quite claustrophobic when the presence hides in confined spaces. But the more intriguing element, mentioned by both Koepp and Soderbergh, might be its sense of voyeurism.
“The directorial conceit at the center of the film accesses and activates something in the viewer that is very primal, which is our interest in eavesdropping,” Soderbergh said. “How we get pulled so quickly into this idea of seeing something we’re not supposed to see. Watching people when they’re alone … there’s something very compelling about it. You question your interest in it.”
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