Award-winning director Steven Soderbergh on his new film Presence, starring Lucy Liu

Steven Soderbergh has directed 33 feature films and eight TV programs. (Supplied)

By Stephen A Russell

While he wouldn't describe himself as a believer in the supernatural, per se, director Steven Soderbergh is less spooked than most by the idea of what might be there in the shadows.

Chatting in London, where he has just shot spy thriller Black Bag with Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender, Soderbergh tells me his mum, Mary Ann, was a parapsychologist. Growing up in Charlottesville, Virginia, he was used to a steady stream of strangers discussing paranormal scenarios.

"When you're young and one of your parents is up to something kind of fringy, you know, I wasn't bragging about that to people at school," chuckles the director of Ocean's 11, Magic Mike and Behind the Candelabra. "I was kind of neutral about it. I didn't think it was ridiculous, but it didn't attract me at all."

(L-R) Chris Sullivan, Julia Fox, Lucy Liu, Steven Soderbergh, Callina Liang, Eddy Maday, West Mulholland at the Presence New York premiere. (Photo by John Nacion/Variety via Getty Images)

That said, he could feel how viscerally the visitors felt their encounters. "You can tell by their physicality, as they describe these things, that they're still affected."

Penned by Jurassic Park screenwriter David Koepp, Presence, the latest film from the Oscar-winning director draws on his mum's uncanny milieu, pulling back the veil between worlds to create an intriguing take on the haunted-house genre that up-ends expectations.

Charlie's Angels lead Lucy Liu plays Rebekah, a no-nonsense businesswoman who snaps up the sprawling suburban house — within which the entire film plays out — for a bargain price.

The new home seems ideal when Rebekah moves in with her husband, Chris (Chris Sullivan), adored teenage son Tyler (Eddy Maday) and more distant daughter Chloe (Callina Liang). But even before we meet the clan, we're privy to an unusual phenomenon, perceiving the house's darkened nooks and crannies from the sweeping camera's point of view, as if we are the unseen presence lurking here. Is it well-meaning or malignant?

Soderbergh had hoped to work with Liu for ages. When he handed the screenplay for Presence to casting director Carmen Cuba, she knew it was time.

"She goes, 'Oh, is this the one for Lucy?' And I go, 'Yeah, I think it is'."

What's in a name?

Soderbergh's teenage bedroom was "a total boy cave of cinema", inspired by his movie-buff dad, Peter, an academic.

"That was moving along the surface of my life until the summer of 1975 when I was 12, and I saw Jaws. I wanted to know what 'directed by' meant and who Steven Spielberg was."

His previous obsession for baseball went out the window and a life focused on making movies began, with Soderbergh's first feature — the provocatively named Sex, Lies and Videotape, starring Andie MacDowell and James Spader — debuting at the Sundance Film Festival in 1989.

"I think about titles a lot because they make the difference between sparking somebody's interest and creating a completely neutral or, in some cases, negative reaction," Soderbergh says.

"My first film went through a real title debate, and I ended up calling it that as a last-ditch effort to describe the film in stark, almost glib terms."

Sex, Lies and Videotape won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and Soderbergh was nominated for a Best Original Screenplay Oscar. Naming was a big deal for Presence, too.

Famous Soderbergh Films

Soderbergh has directed more than 30 feature films. Here are some of his most well-known: 

• Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989)
• King of the Hill (1993)
• Out of Sight (1998)
• Erin Brockovich (2000)
• Ocean's 11 (2001) and all the other Ocean's films
• The Informant! (2009)
• Contagion (2011)
• Magic Mike (2012) 
• Behind the Candelabra (2013)
• Logan Lucky (2017)

"It seemed, again, to be the simplest way to describe it without giving anything away, which is critical in a situation like this."

Chloe's bedroom, in Presence, is adorned with teenage passions, just as Soderbergh's once was.

"April Lasky, the production designer, and I talked a lot about the room," Soderbergh says.

"A teenaged bedroom's aesthetics evolve organically, but sometimes not completely linear. Kids go through phases of being obsessed with things, and then they tear those down. Your loyalties are shifting all the time."

And sometimes those posters — or a wardrobe shelf — come down unexpectedly, sending a shiver up your spine.

"It happened here the other night, in the middle of the night," Soderbergh says. "There was a noise that woke up me and my wife and you go right back to that primitive state trying to figure it out as your amygdala is blinking."

Something strange

Soderbergh says the concept behind Presence is "probably the simplest idea" he's had.

"But simple ideas can have real power. They're primal."

Zack Ryan's score helps set the scene.

"Very quickly, you pick up on two things: That this whatever-it-is was a person, and that there's something sad about it," Soderbergh says. "It's searching the house, trying to find somebody or something. Because obviously, the big question on the table that isn't answered until the last shot is, 'Who is this?'"

A reluctant woman with second sight is brought in by Chris to hopefully answer the question, much to Rebekah's annoyance.

"That was the only scene I asked David to go back and adjust," Soderbergh reveals.

"In the first draft, she felt much more like [Beatrice Straight as parapsychologist Martha Lesh] from Poltergeist, but I wanted to make her more ground-level because of my upbringing with my mother. There was nothing freaky about it. It was shockingly banal."

The film is captured by a fleet-footed Soderbergh himself, armed with a small handheld camera.

"I'm really in the scene with the cast," Soderbergh says. "If a take was ruined on this movie, it was because I made a mistake, so there was an extra level of performance anxiety. And the fear of falling on the stairs."

This was a very real risk.

"I was wearing these little slippers that had rubber grips on them, and I had to look at my feet, so I'm aiming based on rehearsals and muscle memory where I think the camera is, but sometimes I would cut somebody's head off."

It's a turn of phrase that immediately reminds me of that shocking scene near the start of Soderbergh's film, Contagion, where Gwyneth Paltrow's skull is cut wide open. It was a scene audiences recently got reacquainted with, after the film's uncomfortable renaissance during lockdowns.

"It's nice when people are watching the work," Soderbergh admits, "but that's not optimal, in the sense that the only scenario in which Contagion becomes a number one movie again is because an actual pandemic is happening."

Presence is in cinemas February 6.

First published at ABC News February 5, 2025