‘Presence’s Steven Soderbergh and David Koepp on ghosts, horror, and hating winks

Centering on a ghost as it haunts a family in a cozy suburban home, Presence might seem like a horror movie in the vein of Poltergeist, The Amityville Horror, or The Conjuring. But in their follow-up to the tech thriller Kimi, longtime friends director Steven Soderbergh and screenwriter David Koepp say that Presence was never conceived of as or intended to be a horror movie. 

“It’s a ghost story,” Koepp told Mashable in a joint in-person interview with Soderbergh, who concurred, adding that the film is not horror by his definition. For Soderbergh, whose mother was a parapsychologist, the idea of a ghost in the house isn’t inherently scary. Or more specifically, it’s not scary in the way modern audiences think about horror. He thinks of Presence as “more The Shining than Longlegs.“

Koepp expanded on this: “In the last 10 to 15 years, horror has really been prominent and changed. Gore and jump scares are huge. When people hear horror, they think of that. When I think of horror, I think of Linda Blair in the MRI tube [in The Exorcist].”

It’s in such moments of grounded, everyday, human anxiety that Presence thrives. Using first-person perspective — shot by Soderbergh, who served as helmer and cinematographer — Presence follows an enigmatic spirit as it eavesdrops unseen on a family of four (Lucy Liu, Chris Sullivan, Callina Liang, and Eddy Maday), who are going through an array of personal and professional tensions. Rather than this presence being a menace in their household, it is a captive audience who seems desperate to be a part of the family’s lives and help however it can. But without a voice and little ability to be acknowledged by anyone but a grieving teen girl, its struggle is fraught with anxiety and heartache. And this was inspired by Soderbergh’s own brushes with ghosts. 

Presence is loosely based on Soderbergh’s own haunted house. 

Callina Liang, Chris Sullivan, Eddy Maday, Lucy Lui, and Julia Fox seek a forever home in “Presence.”
Credit: NEON

For the director behind Ocean’s Eleven and Logan Lucky, Presence began when “our house sitter saw a ghost” in his Los Angeles home. While Soderbergh hasn’t experienced a paranormal encounter with a spirit in his home or elsewhere, he believes those who say they have — citing Jeff Ross, who shared his scary story on Celebrity Ghost Stories — because of his trust in them and their genuine alarm. And this got him pondering, as he told Mashable, “I just got to thinking how I would feel — if I’d been killed in my own house — about other people coming into my house. And that’s where it started.” 

From there, he’d sent Koepp a few pages of a draft, imagining the spirit wandering the space and seeing a realtor arrive with prospective buyers. “Steven had this idea: first-person point of view of the ghost, should all be in one house, and it feels like it wants to be a family drama. And I was like, well, okay, those are my three favorite things. I know how to write a family. I love a contained space, and your aesthetic idea is really cool.” 

“The ghost is the Trojan horse for a portrait of a family struggling,” Soderbergh explained, “And that has an incredible blind spot in the center of it.” 

The first-person perspective meant that all scenes would be shot as oners — a long take with no cuts. This was a “box movie” challenge (as Soderbergh put it) that Koepp, the screenwriter behind similarly constrained films like The Paper and Panic Room, relished. Yet there’s one scene in Presence that, for a few moments, seems to break this POV framework to a surprising and clever effect. Just don’t call it a “wink.” 

Steven Soderbergh hates winking, both literal and metaphorical. 

Producer Ken Myers, screenwriter David Koepp, producer Julie M. Anderson, and director Steven Soderbergh pose at the “Presence” premiere.
Credit: NEON

Presence — which I championed as an excellent example of horror in my review — turns the expectations of a ghost story on its head by putting audiences in the shoes of the gentle spirit at its center. Rather than this first-person perspective being used as spooky voyeurism, as the shot is often employed in slasher movies, it carries a sense of vulnerability that excited both Koepp as a writer and Soderbergh as the performer of this ghost through his camera’s lens.

“Vulnerability was [crucial], because in the pages he sent me,” Koepp said, “The thing’s looking around the empty house, people come in, and it retreats to the closet. And I thought, ‘Oh, it’s scared, it’s vulnerable.’ That changed everything, because it’s not the presence that wants to scare you and has some kind of power and authority. It’s not at all. It’s exactly the opposite. It’s that vulnerability that was key to writing that.” 

Yet there’s a moment where Soderbergh’s camera switches from its fluid wandering motion, instead perching high in the daughter’s bedroom, overlooking her at her desk. Then, in the edge of the top right of frame, a very familiar sight in a horror movie about ghosts occurs. The bedroom door opens slowly, as if on its own. But just as the audience might think Soderbergh has unceremoniously ditched his first-person POV, the father of the family enters, slyly subverting the expectation of a scare for something comforting and common. 

“That was in the script,” Soderbergh says, crediting Koepp. “And it came at the right time to kind of — I don’t want to say wink. I don’t want to say it was a wink. My wife made the mistake early in our dating, and I don’t know what motivated this, but she winked at me. And I lost my mind, and was like, ‘Do not ever.’ So just the word and the whole notion of ‘wink’ [repulses me] — I don’t think we were winking. But I liked the idea that for a second, you know, ‘Oh, they’re gonna do that thing.’ And then his head comes out, and she jumps [in surprise]. Okay, so you do need to find those moments of release, absolutely. You know, Jaws is one of the funniest movies out there — the audience wants that release [amid the tension].” 

Credit: NEON

Pressed on why winks bother him so, Soderbergh mused, “I’ve really got to do a deep dive on why, in real life, I find that so disturbing. Maybe it’s because I can’t understand. It’s unthinkable that I would do it to someone, so it’s a lack of imagination on my part, to enter a headspace in which I would think that was a good thing to do, you know? And made me feel like, who are you? She just laughed about it when she saw my reaction, like it wasn’t that big an ask.” He continued, “And then as far as films go, I think that’s very, very dangerous territory, because the default mode is that it’s somewhat self-referential. I was comfortable with it here because it was referential to a genre as a whole, right? And not like another movie that I had made…I’m just unnerved by [winks].” 

From there, the pair discussed how there are names and numbers that recur in their respective projects. But Soderbergh insists this isn’t self-referential winking. “There’s a company name that always clears that I use a lot, called Perennial,” he explained, “So if you were to go through my filmography, there are probably eight or nine Perennials in there. It works for anything: dry cleaner, armored cars. So that, to me, is not winking, I’m trying to solve a problem.” 

The pair have known each other since 1989, when their respective first films — Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies and Videotape and Koepp’s Apartment Zero — played at the Sundance Film Festival. Though Koepp once pitched his follow-up Death Becomes Her to Soderbergh, the two didn’t collaborate until 2022’s Kimi. But since then, they’ve reunited for Presence and the upcoming spy drama Black Bag. So, after all these decades together, how do they know when a project is best suited to their collaboration?

Koepp said it’s when a casual conversation about an idea comes up repeatedly, and the concept grows from there. Soderbergh concurred, then quipped, “I’ll wink!”

Presence is now playing in theaters.