‘It’s not Apocalypse Now. Or The Third Man.’ Why Steven Soderbergh keeps pushing himself
From Presence to Ocean’s 11, Soderbergh has directed every kind of movie but none ‘as good as The Third Man’, he says. So he keeps trying
Steven Soderbergh isn’t just the director and cinematographer of his latest film. He’s also, in a way, its central character.
Presence is filmed entirely from the point of view 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.
Even for the prolific Soderbergh, the film, which opened in cinemas on January 24, was a unique challenge. He shot Presence with a small digital camera while wearing slippers to soften his steps.
The 62-year-old filmmaker recently talked about Presence and a wide range of other topics at a midtown Manhattan hotel in between finishing post-production on his other upcoming movie, Black Bag, a thriller Focus Features will release on March 14, and beginning production in a few weeks on 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 movies, Magic Mike and Erin Brockovich, tends to do a lot in small windows of time. Presence took 11 days to film.
That has made the ever-experimenting Soderbergh one of Hollywood’s most widely respected evaluators of the movie business.
