Steven Soderbergh’s “Presence” is a different kind of ghost story

“This is for my mental health,” Soderbergh, 62, explained a few weeks later. “I realized very early on that an interview where you only have enough time to ask about the three things you know about yourself have asking was not very satisfying for me.

“My favorite interview I ever gave was four hours with a German newspaper when ‘Sex, lies and video tapes‘ was released,” he said.

The Globe didn’t get four hours of the filmmaker’s time—the publicist politely stopped after about an hour. But Soderbergh, who has directed an average of one film a year for more than three decades, revels in what he does. “It’s the best job in the world,” he says. “I think I could prove it in a court of law.” That’s why he was eager to talk, not just about his latest film, “Presence,” but whatever a reporter without the watch might ask.

In style and substance”Presencewhich opens in theaters Friday, is a departure for Soderbergh. It’s not a heist movie (“Logan Lucky”); crime (“Traffic”); sci-fi movie (“Solaris”); disaster movie (“Contagion”); unconventional biopic (“Hey,” “Behind the Candelabra”); or shameless crowd-pleaser (“Magic Mike.”) It’s a ghost story.

The supernatural tale starring Lucy Liu, Chris Sullivan, Callina Liang, Eddy Maday and Julia Fox is about a suburban family that moves into a new house and soon discovers that something else lives there too. But what makes “Presence” so unnerving isn’t the story, it’s the way Soderbergh has chosen to tell it.

The film, set in a single location, is shot entirely from the phantom’s point of view; the audience sees and experiences everything that happens from the ghost’s perspective. Soderbergh himself filmed POV, effectively putting him in every scene. (To avoid making a sound, the director wore slippers as he moved through the house with the camera.)

“I was excited about the all-or-nothing aspect of the gimmick,” he said. “I always operate the camera, but this was next level. I’m really into the actors.”

A POV approach is not uncommon in horror. (Examples include “The Blair Witch Project,” “Cloverfield,” and “Paranormal Activity.”) But the perspective here is stable; Soderbergh’s ghost does not have the same nervous field of vision as many other cinema specters.

“When you walk down the street, your point of view doesn’t shake,” he said. “It would have been sickening to have your eyes dancing like that for 85 minutes.”

Liang, who plays Chloe, the teenage daughter who first senses something is not quite normal about the family’s new home, didn’t know what to expect when she showed up on set. “If Steven is going to make a horror movie, he’s going to do it his way,” Liang said.

She quickly realized that the director would be her primary scene partner for the 11-day shoot. “A lot of my scenes were obviously with Steven because a lot of my scenes were with the ghost,” the actress said. “It was fun. We were able to choreograph it, almost like a dance, stepping around each other and making sure our movements are in sync.”

A willingness to experiment has been a hallmark of Soderbergh’s career. There was the time when he himself tried to distribute and market his films. (It didn’t work.) And his decision to use an iPhone to make the 2018 psychological thriller “Unhealthy” and 2019 sports drama “High-flying bird.” (Soderbergh said he was inspired by the aesthetic of Sean Baker’s 2015 film, “Mandarin“, which was recorded on an iPhone.)

“There are infinite possibilities of how to do something, and your job as a director is to arrive at the optimal version of what this thing will be,” he said.

While many of his films have enjoyed huge commercial success — the “Ocean’s” franchise has grossed over $1 billion worldwide and “Erin Brockovich” earned $250 million and five Academy Award nominations — Soderbergh, who won an Oscar for best director for “Traffic” in 2000, said that he does not offer a ticket triumph every time.

“It’s like a diet,” he said. “I don’t just want to make films that are going to travel the arthouse circuit, and I don’t just want to make things that I think are largely commercial. I want to do both.”

It looked for a while that he might not get the chance. After his first film, 1989’s “Sex, Lies and Videotape,” won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, as well as the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival and an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay, Soderbergh made several films — “Kafka,” “King of the Hill”, “The Underneath” and “Schizopolis” – that confused more than overwhelmed the audience. But the 1998s”Out of sight” flipped the script. Nominated for two Academy Awards (Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Film Editing), the action-comedy, starring George Clooney as a slick criminal and Jennifer Lopez as the federal agent on his tail, has established Soderbergh as a director capable of to make a Hollywood hit.

He’s certainly a known quantity now, but Soderbergh doesn’t believe he has the cache of some filmmakers — and that’s fine with him.

“Nobody walks into a meeting and pitches a project and says, ‘I want it to be like a movie directed by (Soderbergh).’ They might say, ‘I want it to be a movie like ‘Out of Sight,”’ he said. “But my name alone is not enough to make a movie a hit. There are only a few people who meet this metric.

“I’m very happy to exist in a space that gives me access to restaurants, but no one ever stops me on the street,” he said.

Barely an hour before the Globe interview died David Lynch was announced. Asked about the director of “Eraserhead,” “Elephant Man,” “Blue Velvet” and “Mulholland Drive,” Soderbergh praised him as an exceptional artist.

“You are either an original or you are a synthesist. I’m a synthesist, and David Lynch was an original,” said Soderbergh. “Part of the way to measure the value of someone like David Lynch is to imagine if none of his work existed and what a hole there would be in American cinema.

“It’s inconceivable that David Lynch never was,” he said.

What’s left for Soderbergh? A lot, it seems. The director who once famous retired Because he was frustrated with the business of making movies, he said he continues to think of new stories and creative ways to tell them on screen. (His retirement in 2013 lasted only a few months.)

“I feel like I’ll never get to the end,” Soderbergh said of the direction. “For me, it’s impossible to figure out a formula that solves all the problems in every film, and that’s humbling in a way that keeps me hungry to learn more.”

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Mark Shanahan can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him @MarkAShanahan.