Presence: Soderbergh & Koepp Deliver Family Drama Via Ghostly Perspective

Indie film director Steven Soderbergh made a huge cinema splash at Sundance with the voyeuristic Sex, Lies and Videotape in 1989. Similarly, screenwriter David Koepp made waves a year earlier with his cool, controlled thriller Apartment Zero.

Over the years, the pair have crossed professional paths in the film circuit, brainstorming potential collaborations. That effort has born fruit. “Presence came about while we were talking about doing a remake of the 1944 ghost movie The Uninvited,” recalls Soderbergh. The wheels were put in motion.

Presence is ostensibly a haunted house movie about a family moving into their dream home.

The mother, Rebecca (Lucy Liu) is an alpha executive barking orders in the most inelegant manner. Her teenage son Tyler (Eddy Madday) is on track to follow in her aggressive footsteps. This contrasts with her gentle giant husband Chris (Chris Sullivan) and teen daughter Chloe (Callina Liang) who is grieving over her best friend’s recent death. So, presence or not, the family dynamics are always sombre and tense.

The concept for Presence was galvanized much closer to home – in Steven and his wife Jules’ Los Angeles home. “There’s a rumor that the person that died in this house was a mother killed by her daughter. We were aware of this when we bought the house,” continues Soderbergh.

For a long time, their house’s alleged dark past didn’t affect their lives. Until one fateful night when a house sitter felt a “presence” while watching television. She felt she was not alone.

Steven’s mother was notably a parapsychologist and his father an academic; a potential recipe for an intellectual punch up. This difference informed Steven’s worldview of the possibility of the existence of entities that couldn’t be easily defined or explained.

David Koepp once lived in a big, creaky old building in Langham New York City. One night while he was watching television, he saw a figure moving down the hall. His son also witnessed similar sightings so it wasn’t his imagination. It was time to move.

Subsequent to their similar supernatural experiences decades earlier, Sobderbergh reached out to Koepp to discuss his haunted house idea. “It all takes place in one location. Weird stuff happens. A family starts to fall apart. I think you’ve hit all my personal obsessions,” explains Koepp.

Presence relies heavily on loose structure not strictly tethered to the traditional three act paradigm. Much of the story embraces mood and tone underpinned by a subtle lingering dread.

The screenwriter proceeded to write a twenty page treatment for the contained, time-constricted thriller. “It’s 24 hours. It’s all in the same house. It restricts your thinking and therefore opens up your thinking,” notes Koepp.

Steven inserted the Presence into his camera and told the story from its point of view. First as an observer, then as a perpetrator of harm – all without it ever being seen or heard. That’s the elusive nature of the spirit world. We’re unsure what it wants. It moves from room to room monitoring the distressed family.

In spite of the intrinsic challenges involved in making the main character a ghost, David found the challenge liberating. “Steven had intimated that the character for the POV could be skittish. It’s a little fearful — hides in the closet a lot,” continues David.

“Using those cues, I viewed the ghost as a child. I tried to write it the way a small child is; a little fearful and also curious. You are writing a character, but don’t see them,” he continues.