Ever since seeing his 1989 directorial debut, Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Lucy Liu and Chris Sullivan have been big fans of Steven Soderbergh’s film work.
“He wanted to have a meeting with me and I said, ‘Whatever you’re doing, I’m in,’” Liu recalled with a laugh in an interview at the Toronto International Film Festival last fall. “I have been such a huge fan of his and I love the way he works. He takes a lot of risks and chances and that’s what art is.”
“I want to do whatever Steven Soderbergh is doing,” added Sullivan, who first worked with the filmmaker on the small screen medical drama The Knick. “I’m also a big fan of the genre. So when you tell me Steven Soderbergh is making a ghost story, I could not be more thrilled.”
In Presence, Liu and Sullivan play a husband and wife who move with their two teenage children into a suburban home that’s haunted by a supernatural spirit.
As the Payne family goes about life in their haunted home they face cracks in their personal lives. The couple’s daughter Chloe (Callina Liang) is grieving the death of her best friend, while their son Ty (Eddy Maday) is being a bully at school.
“This is a family that has a gigantic blind spot that they are not addressing. What allows (the story) to stay with you is the question that you immediately ask yourself, which is, ‘Do I do that? Is there something going on with my close relationships that I’m completely blind to?’ We do do that. We often don’t see what’s right in front of us,” he says.
Filmed entirely from the POV of a ghost who wanders from room to room as the family slowly comes undone, Soderbergh — whose film work includes Out of Sight, the Ocean’s 11 trilogy, the Magic Mike movies, Erin Brockovich, Traffic and the pandemic horror Contagion — based the movie on an incident from his own life after a woman house-sitting for him and his wife saw an apparition in their home.
“There was a woman that was living there that had been murdered by her daughter. Someone was staying there and saw that woman. I get chills thinking about it,” Liu said. “He wrote three pages and then sent it to (screenwriter) David Koepp who came up with this incredible story.”
Soderbergh said he never encountered the ghost in his home, but Liu admitted she could easily buy into the supernatural element of Presence. “I believe there are other energies in the world,” she said. “I don’t think we just exist. I think we’re very corporeal, but when it ends there has to be something more (after life). Everyone’s looking for life on different planets, but there’s also life outside of ourselves.”
Asked how he would react to a haunting in real life, Sullivan said he would have a more light-hearted approach.
“Am I renting the place? Do I own? When is the lease up? Can I ride this out? Is this a violent situation or just someone moving my dishes?” he quipped.
The fact that Presence marks Soderbergh’s horror debut excited his two leads.
“There’s been a lot of innovation in the genre in the last 10, 15 years. Whether it’s something like Parasite or Heredity or Longlegs or Get Out … the genre has been constantly shifting,” said Sullivan, who nabbed two Emmy nominations for his role as Toby Damon on the NBC drama This Is Us.
“There’s a simplicity to horror now and it’s not just about the stabbing and gore,” Liu added. “It’s different. It’s more inside out.”
The shocking ending that Koepp (who also penned Mission: Impossible, Jurassic Park and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull) came up with surprised both the director and the film’s stars.
“His ending surprised me, because the presence wasn’t who I thought it might be,” Soderbergh remembered.
“It wasn’t what I was expecting,” Sullivan added.
Soderbergh works fast. The shoot for Presence was completed in just 11 days and his next movie, the upcoming spy thriller Black Bag (which Koepp also wrote), will be in theatres in March.
Liu said that despite the steady output there’s a timelessness to the Oscar winner’s work. “He creates this look and feel so that (his films) become a classic,” she said.
Sullivan said that Soderbergh’s films are like “signposts” marking his evolution as a moviemaker.
Glancing at a movie poster that listed off some of Soderbergh’s most well-known titles, he praised the director for constantly tackling films that are “all so different.”
Asked to pick a favourite, Liu paused. “That’s hard,” she said.
For Sullivan, the answer came instantly. “There was something about Ocean’s 11 where they took an independent filmmaking God and put him in the studio system and he made a movie with like the New York Yankees of casts. Then he brought his own oddities and sense of humour and combined everything into this movie that everyone loves,” he said, smiling. “There’s not a person who does not like Ocean’s 11 and it is unlimitedly watchable.”
Presence is now playing in theatres.