Steven Soderbergh talks about his new film ‘Presence’

NEW YORK (AP) — Steven Soderbergh is not only the director and cinematographer of his latest film. He is also, in a way, its central character.

“Presence” is filmed entirely from the POV of a ghost in a home a family has just moved into. Soderbergh, acting as his own cinematographer under the pseudonym Peter Andrews (his father’s name), essentially appears as the presence, a hovering point of view that looks at how the violence that killed the mysterious ghost threatens to be repeated.

For even the prolific Soderbergh, the film, which opens in theaters Friday, 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 met with a reporter at a midtown Manhattan hotel, between wrapping up post-production on his second upcoming film (“Black Bag,” a Focus Features thriller out March 14) and beginning production in a few weeks d. 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” films, “Magic Mike” and “Erin Brockovich,” tends to do a lot in small windows. “Presence” took 11 days to film.

The dexterous skill has done the ever-experimental Soderbergh one of Hollywood’s most respected evaluators of the film business. In a wide-ranging conversation, he discussed why he believes streaming is the most destructive force the movies have ever faced and why he is “the 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 “Presence”?

SODERBERGH: No, but what I did is subtle. For the first and only time, Peter Andrews has a camera operator credit. It’s not a credit that I typically take because I don’t need it and I typically have another operator working with me. But I felt like this was a workout. It was hard, but really fun. It was another level of performance anxiety because I ruined more shots than anyone else in the film by a bigger factor. I was the one who went, “Cut. I got it up. We’re off again.”

AP: You made this quickly and cheaply and then sold it to a distributor. Was it appealing to work outside the system?

SODERBERGH: The beauty of projects of this scale is that I can just do them without having to talk to anyone. It’s not because I don’t want notes. That’s because it’s just brain trust, and none of that mental real estate is occupied by things that have nothing to do with what you want to shoot. I went from that to a more traditional project where a lot of mental real estate is taken up by the process of getting a studio to finance your film. I like these people, it’s just a lot of lawyers. Like a lot of lawyers.

AP: You have called streaming the most destructive force in film history. What annoys you most about it?

SODERBERGH: It removes a central point of reference for an artist. It is useful to know how something does or how it did. You need to know that to calibrate whether you have achieved what you wanted to achieve, whether you can work at a certain level. That’s one of the most confusing things about it, the black box. Aside from the financial invisibility of what’s going on there — the fact that we can’t really see under the hood of how these streaming companies work financially — there’s another kind of handrail that’s missing that I find really useful. At the end of the day, at least I want to know. The market will tell you how to do. I want to know so I can adjust or go in a different direction. Being irrelevant is not very appealing. What is the overlap between what people seem to respond to and what I like? Because I don’t want to do these things and no one has to see them. I’ve had enough people say, “Oh, did that come out?” It is a public art form.

AP: How do you suspect audiences are changing?

SODERBERGH: The good news is that if you talk to Focus Features and Neon and A24, young people are going to the movies. This is the Letterboxd generation. It’s fantastic. I hope that ripples outside the US. They are film savvy and they expect something exceptional. They want the signature, they want the stamp of a filmmaker. And it is 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 of what success is. It’s not a template you should apply to everything.

AP: Do you ever regret that the movies that made you want to be a filmmaker like “All the President’s Men” and “Chinatown” occupied a different place in culture than today’s movies?

SODERBERGH: There was a period of about 10 to 14 years where the best movie of the year was also the most popular movie of the year. That’s not necessarily true anymore. You can choose one of the movies that are on the hunt this year and go: It’s a 70s movie. It is as good and interesting as any of them. But it’s not going to do the business that either of them would have done. It is the artist’s job to adapt. When it comes to trying to control what people want to see, you’re now in a place like, “If I really want it, it won’t rain.” The weather is the weather. To some extent, the audience is a weather system. Fortunately, because of the way I started, I am the cockroach of this industry. I can survive any version of it.

AP: You’ve described feeling the need to immediately “destroy” what you’ve just done by starting on something completely different.

SODERBERGH: Yeah, when you see “Black Bag,” you go, “Oh, that’s different.” There are more shots in the first four minutes of “Black Bag” than all of “Presence.” It is something else and it has different requirements.

AP: Isn’t it exhausting to reinvent yourself every film?

SODERBERGH: No, it feels more like a natural evolution and a natural reaction in the sense: I want to be a different filmmaker for this. I don’t want to know the result. If you have a conversation with a filmmaker who says they’ve “figured things out,” you should run the other way. It’s like: You’re delusional and you have a very shallow understanding of what this art form requires if you’re not humble about what it asks you to be distinctive about.

AP: Do you feel like you’ve gotten closer? There may not be a filmmaker alive who has tried more ways to make a movie than you have.

SODERBERGH: No, I still feel like I’m reaching for something I may never grasp and maybe shouldn’t. As frustrating as it can be to feel like I’ve never done anything on par with one of my heroes, I don’t know what I’d do if I felt that way. Do you stop then? The movie “Come and See” that guy basically had to say, “That’s my microphone.” I’ve never done anything close to that.

AP: It wouldn’t be the only movie I’d suggest, but I think “Out of Sight” is pretty perfect.

SODERBERGH: Oh, I’m very happy with that movie. I am very proud of that film. I can’t say there is much in it that I would go back and change. That said, it’s not “Apocalypse Now.” Or “The Third Man”. By my standards, I don’t look at it and say, “It’s as good as ‘The Third Man’.” I’m good at pushing myself into areas that are a little outside of my comfort zone, but I also understand what my limitations are. is. I am not naturally a grand thinker about myself or my work. It’s a critical component to some of the movies I’m talking about that I think are great. I could never do “Apocalypse Now.” I don’t think of myself as a filmmaker the way Francis (Ford Coppola) thinks of himself. It is not: He should be like me, or I should be like him. It’s just how we’re built. I’m more grounded, I think is the word. And that’s what I like and what I’m good at.

AP: Do you have any idea why?

SODERBERGH: I think it’s the way I was born and the way I was raised. And the people who were around me when I was younger, who guided me. I just don’t think I was born with the grandiosity gene and there was no one around me who would have cultivated it even if I had shown signs. Going to Sundance last year with “Presence” was really gratifying. If you had told me 35 years later that you would come back here (where “Sex, Lies and Videotape” premiered in 1989) with a movie that people are interested in seeing, I would have cried.