NEW YORK — Steven Soderbergh is not only the director and cinematographer of his latest film. In some ways, he is also its central character. “Presence” is filmed entirely from the point of view of a ghost inside a house that a family has just moved into. Soderbergh, who acts as his own cinematographer under the pseudonym Peter Andrews (his father’s name), essentially plays the presence, a floating point of view that watches as the violence that killed the mysterious ghost threatens to repeat itself. For the prolific Soderbergh, the film, which opens in theaters Friday, was a unique challenge. She shot “Presence” with a small digital camera while wearing slippers to soften her steps. The 62-year-old filmmaker chatted in a recent interview in Manhattan, in the midst of post-production on his next film (“Black Bag,” a thriller that Focus Features will release on March 14), and the start of production in a few weeks his next project, a romantic comedy that he says “feels like a George Cukor movie.” Soderbergh, whose films include “Out of Sight,” the “Ocean’s 11” films, “Magic Mike” and “Erin Brockovich,” tends to do a lot in small windows. of time. “Presence” took 11 days to film. That skill has made Soderbergh one of the most respected Hollywood evaluators in the film business. In a wide-ranging conversation, he discussed why he thinks streaming is the most destructive force cinema has ever faced and why he is “the cockroach of this industry.” Steven Soderbergh attends the premiere of “Presence” at AMC Lincoln Square on Thursday, January 16, 2025 in New York. (Evan Agostini/Invision/AP) You use pseudonyms for yourself as director of photography and editor. Were you tempted to credit yourself as an actor for “Presence”?SODERBERGH: No, but what I did is subtle. For the first and only time Peter Andrews has a camera operator credit. That’s not a credit I usually take because I don’t need it and I typically have another operator working with me. But I felt like this was training. It was complicated, but really fun. It was another level of performance anxiety because I ruined more takes than anyone else in the movie by a major factor. I was the one saying, “Cut. I ruined it. “We have to start over.” You made this quickly and cheaply, and then sold it to a distributor. Was working outside the system attractive to you?The beauty of projects on this scale is that I can do them without having to talk to anyone. It’s not because I don’t want comments. It’s because it’s just the trusted group and none of the psychic space is occupied by things that have nothing to do with what you’re going to film. I went from that to a more traditional project where a lot of psychic space is consumed in the process of having a studio finance your film. I like these people, it’s just that there are a lot of lawyers. Many lawyers. You’ve called streaming the most destructive force in the history of cinema. What irritates you the most about it?It removes a key reference point for an artist. It’s useful to know how something is working, or how it worked. You need to know that to gauge whether you achieved what you wanted to achieve, whether you can work at a certain level. That’s one of the most confusing things about it, the black box of it. Aside from the economic invisibility of what’s going on there — the fact that we can’t really look under the hood of how these streaming companies operate economically — there’s another kind of guardrail that’s missing that I find really useful. At the end of the day, at least, I want to know. The market will tell you how you are doing. I want to know that so I can adjust or go in another direction. Being irrelevant is not very attractive. What’s the overlap between what people seem to be responding to and what I like? Because I don’t want to do these things and have no one see them. I’ve had enough people say, “Oh, that came out?” It is a public art form. West Mulholland, from left, Callina Liang, Steven Soderbergh and Eddy Maday attend the premiere of “Presence” at AMC Lincoln Square on Thursday, January 16, 2025 in New York. (Evan Agostini/Invision/AP) How do you suspect the audience is changing?The good news is, if you talk to Focus Features and Neon and A24, young people are going to the movies. This is the generation of (the social network of movie buffs) Letterboxd. That’s fantastic. I hope that spreads outside of the United States. They are movie buffs and expect something unique. They want the signature, they want the seal of a filmmaker. And that is becoming a real business. One of the things, I think, that we all need to do, but especially people who cover the industry, is to stop using the studio metric for what is a success. That is not a template that you should apply to everything. Do you ever regret that the movies that made you want to be a filmmaker like “All the President’s Men” and “Chinatown” occupied a different place in the culture than movies today?There was a period of about 10 to 14 years where the best movies of the year were also the most popular movies of the year. That’s not necessarily true today. You can pick one of the movies that’s in the competition this year and say: That’s a movie from the ’70s. It’s just as good and interesting as one of those. But it’s not going to do the business that one of those would have done. It is the artist’s job to adapt. When you’re trying to control what people want to see, you’re in a place like, “If I really wish hard, it won’t rain.” The weather is the weather. To some degree, the audience is a weather system. Fortunately, … Read more
