NEW YORK (AP) â isnât just the director and cinematographer of his latest film. Heâs also, in a way, its central character.
âPresenceâ is filmed entirely from the POV of a ghost inside a home a family has just moved into. Soderbergh, who serves as his own cinematographer under the pseudonym Peter Andrews (his father's name), essentially performs as the presence, a floating point-of-view that watches as the violence that killed the mysterious ghost threatens to be repeated.
For even the prolific Soderbergh, the film, which opens Friday in theaters, was a unique challenge. He shot âPresenceâ with a small digital camera while wearing slippers to soften his steps.
The 62-year-old filmmaker recently met a reporter in a midtown Manhattan hotel in between finishing post-production on his other upcoming movie ("Black Bag," a thriller Focus Features will release March 14) and beginning production in a few weeks on his next project, a romantic comedy that he says âfeels like a George Cukor movie.â
Soderbergh, whose films include âOut of Sight,â the âOcean's 11â movies, âMagic Mikeâ and âErin Brockovich,â tends to do a lot in small windows of time. âPresenceâ took 11 days to film.
That dexterous proficiency has made the one of Hollywood's most widely respected evaluators of the movie business. In a wide-ranging conversation, he discussed why he thinks streaming is the most destructive force the movies have ever faced and why he's âthe cockroach of this industry."
AP: You use pseudonyms for yourself as a cinematographer and editor. Were you tempted to credit yourself as an actor for âPresenceâ?
SODERBERGH: No, but what I did is subtle. For the first and only time Peter Andrews has a camera operator credit. Thatâs not a credit that I typically take because I donât need it and I typically have another operator working with me. But I felt like this was a workout. It was tricky, but really fun. It was another level of performance anxiety because I ruined more takes than anyone else in the film by a larger factor. I was the one going: âCut. I fâed that up. We got to go again.â
AP: You made this quickly and inexpensively, and then sold it to a distributor. Was it appealing to work outside the system?
SODERBERGH: The beauty of projects at this scale is I can just do them without having to talk to anybody. Itâs not because I donât want notes. Itâs because itâs just the brain trust and none of the psychic real estate is taken up by things that have nothing to do with what youâre going to shoot. I went from that into a more traditional project in which a lot of psychic real estate gets taken up by the process of having a studio finance your movie. I like these people, itâs just a lot of lawyers. Like, a lot of lawyers.
AP: You've called streaming the most destructive force in movie history. What most irks you about it?
SODERBERGH: It removes a key reference point for an artist. Itâs helpful to know how something is doing, or how it did. You need to know that to calibrate whether you accomplished what you wanted to accomplish, whether you can work at a certain level. Thatâs one of the most confusing things about it, the black box of it. Apart from the economic invisibility of whatâs going on there â the fact that we canât really look under the hood of how these streaming companies work economically â thereâs another kind of handrail thatâs missing that I find really helpful. At the end of the day, I, at least, want to know. The market will tell you how youâre doing. I want to know that so I can adjust or go in another direction. Being irrelevant isnât very appealing. What is the overlap between what people seem to be responding to and what I like? Because I donât want to make these things and have nobody see them. Iâve had enough people say, âOh, did that come out?â Itâs a public art form.
AP: How do you suspect the audience is changing?
SODERBERGH: The good news is, if you talk to Focus Features and Neon and A24, young people are going to the movies. This is the Letterboxd generation. Thatâs fantastic. I hope that ripples outside the U.S. They are cine-literate and they expect something singular. They want the signature, they want the stamp of a filmmaker. And thatâs turning into a real business. One of the things, I think, we all need to do, but especially the people who cover the industry, is to stop using the studio metric for what a success is. Thatâs not a template you should be applying to everything.
AP: Do you ever lament that the movies that made you want to be a filmmaker like âAll the President's Menâ and âChinatownâ occupied a different place in the culture than today's films?
SODERBERGH: There was a period of about 10 to 14 year where the best movies of the year were also the most popular movies of the year. Thatâs not necessarily true anymore. You can pick one of the movies thatâs in the hunt this year and go: Thatâs a â70s movie. Thatâs as good and interesting as one of those. But itâs not going to do the business that one of those would have done. Itâs the artistâs job to adapt. When it comes to trying to control what people want to go see, youâre now in a place like: âIf I really wish hard, it wonât rain.â The weather is the weather. To a certain degree, the audience is a weather system. Luckily because of the way I began, Iâm the cockroach of this industry. I can survive any version of it.
AP: You've described feeling a need to immediately âannihilateâ whatever you just made by starting on something vastly different.
SODERBERGH: Yeah, when you see âBlack Bag,â youâre like, âOh, thatâs different.â There are more shots in the first four minutes of âBlack Bagâ than the entirety of âPresence.â Itâs a different thing and it has different demands.
AP: Itâs not exhausting to reinvent yourself every movie?
SODERBERGH: No, it feels more like a natural evolution and a natural response in the sense of: I want to be a different filmmaker for this. I donât want to know the outcome. If you have a conversation with a filmmaker who says they have âfigured things out,â you should run in the other direction. It's like: Youâre deluded and you have a very superficial understanding of what this art form demands if youâre not humbled by what it asks of you to be distinctive.
AP: Do you feel you've gotten closer? There might not be a filmmaker alive who's tried more ways to make a movie than you have.
SODERBERGH: No, I still feel like Iâm reaching for something I quite possibly wonât ever grasp and maybe shouldnât. As frustrating as it may be to feel like I've never made a thing that is at the level of one of my heroes made, I donât know what Iâd do if I did feel that. Do you stop, then? The movie that guy got to basically go: âThatâs my mic drop.â Iâve never made anything approaching that.
AP: It wouldnât be the only film Iâd suggest, but I think âOut of Sightâ is pretty darn perfect.
SODERBERGH: Oh, Iâm very happy with that film. Iâm very proud of that film. I canât say thereâs much in it that Iâd go back and change. That said, itâs not âApocalypse Now.â Or âThe Third Man.â By my standards, I donât look at it and go, âThatâs as good as âThe Third Man.ââ Iâm good at pushing myself into areas that are slightly beyond my comfort zone, but I also understand what my limitations are. Iâm inherently not a grandiose thinker about myself or my work. Thatâs a critical component to some of the films Iâm talking about that I think are amazing. I could never make âApocalypse Now.â I donât think of myself as a filmmaker the way Francis (Ford Coppola) thinks of himself. Thatâs not: He should be like me or I should be like him. Itâs just how weâre built. Iâm more earthbound, I guess is the word. And thatâs what I like and what Iâm good at.
AP: Do you have any idea why?
SODERBERGH: I think itâs the way I was born and the way I was raised. And the people who were around me when I was younger who mentored me. I just donât think I was born with the grandiosity gene and there was nobody around me who would have cultivated that even if I had shown signs. Going to Sundance last year with âPresenceâ was really gratifying. If youâd told me 35 years later youâre going to come back here (where âSex, Lies and Videotapeâ premiered in 1989) with a movie that people are interested in seeing, I would have wept.
Jake Coyle, The Associated Press
