Who is the ghost haunting the family?

SPOILER ALERT: This article discusses the plot and ending of “Presence”, now playing in theaters.

As with many ghost stories, the presence in “Presence” has a good reason for haunting its house.

After watching as the Payne family turns on each other, the presence drifting around their newly purchased bougie abode makes a grand gesture to save its tattered residents. The ghost looms above as the drugged Chloe (Callina Liang) is about to be murdered by her new boyfriend Ryan (West Mulholland), and the ghost flies below to wake her brother Tyler (Eddy Maday) from his own roofie-induced slumber. In a frantic rush, Tyler storms up the stairwell, down the corridor and into the bedroom to tackle Ryan, who has already killed one of Chloe’s friends and staged it as an overdose. In the fight, the two boys fly out of the window on the second floor. The Presence then looks below to see their motionless bodies scattered in the driveway.

“I don’t know where that guy came from or why. I know it’s really sick,” says screenwriter David Koepp, discussing the ending in an interview over Zoom. “I’ve raised four kids — two of them are still teenagers. Shepherding your children over those years I have found to be a harrowing experience. I have a lot of fear, and maybe it came out a little in the writing.”

After an abrupt cut to black, “Presence” begins its final shot. The Paynes are seen again sometime later, presumably after burying their son. The house is now empty, but the mother Rebecca (Lucy Liu) still senses one last thing inside. After attending what was once the living room, she sees her son’s reflection in a mirror and collapses in tears.

As a medium indicated in an earlier scene, the Presence is confused by linear, earthbound time and records the past to prevent a terrible event. With the presence revealed to be Tyler, the events of the film are reframed through the vision of a recently departed soul who looks back on the weakness of mind he showed towards his sister and saved her, and in a potential act of repentance sent himself to his death.

“The presence is there to help them, not hurt them. It’s there to save his sister,” Koepp says of the ending. “I have this theory that every time you do a new ghost story, you have to come up with a reason why people can see ghosts.One of those ways is through trauma.The times in my life when I’ve experienced something traumatic, I’m more open to the world and people around me than I am suffering, you feel the suffering of others more acute.”

For director Steven Soderbergh, “Presence” represents an efficiently produced, fresh formal dare of its kind: shooting a horror film entirely from the perspective of an unidentified ghost. But the premise marks something of a homecoming for Koepp; his second film as a director, the Kevin Bacon supernatural thriller “Stir of Echoes,” opens with a shot of a child turning to stare down the camera barrel, which turns out to be a phantom.

Koepp has proven himself as one of Hollywood’s preeminent screenwriters since Steven Spielberg recruited him to write “Jurassic Park” in his twenties. But between spectacles, he has often returned to more contained environments, as with David Fincher’s home invasion thriller “Panic Room” or Soderbergh’s own tech skeptic “Kimi”, released three years ago. But “Presence” put Koepp in a darker place than usual. He says that after starting work on the script, he began to dream from the perspective of a ghost. He moved to writing immediately after awaking from these, putting most of his work before 5 p.m. 06.00

“When I first saw a cut of the film, I was struck by the voyeuristic concept and how it makes it feel more real,” says Koepp. “You’re really a fly on the wall. You’re eavesdropping. You’re looking at things you shouldn’t be, and you’re listening to things you have nothing to do with. It gave it a much higher level of reality than I expected.”

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How do you write a script that takes this formal premise into account? Do you block the presence or write its psychological state?

I just used “we” in the script the whole time. “People start shouting at each other. We become anxious. We’re backing away from them.” Or, “We’ve seen enough and are bored and moving out.” You definitely write that as a character. It’s funny how that comes across. The ghost character in this movie is played by Steven Soderbergh: his camera. He had to creep around in a way that seemed appropriate. The ghost is often seen to back away from a situation. The camera acts like that character would.

Many viewers do not know that this film is shot from the perspective of a ghost until they see it. Did you feel like this premise had to announce itself to the audience at some point in the film?

One of the reasons Steven explores the house the way he does in the opening shot is because he wants to say, “Look, it’s all somebody’s point of view.” The audience is quite knowledgeable. And horror audiences see a lot of formal invention because filmmakers have to try to vary the genre. But it’s only when you get five or six minutes into the movie that you realize, “Oh, it’s all going to be like this.”

I didn’t even think that a person expected that stop be from the ghost’s perspective.

Steven felt early on that this film should not be a long film – because of the budget, but also because the aesthetic concept is strong. Eighty-five minutes is plenty. Then we will start to really feel the conceit of it and dislike it. I had written a kind of shutter effect. But Steven wanted to use fades because then he could vary the length of it depending on how long the time jump was or how long he felt we needed to digest a scene. It was because each scene had to be a one-liner. So a cut to black always signals a passage of time. It would have been too jarring otherwise.

I’m half-Asian, so I’ve always had an eye for movies with half-Asian families. They are rare enough that they each feel remarkable. Was the ethnicity of the characters written into the script?

Steven asked, “Could she be Asian?” Maybe he had Lucy in mind and that’s why. And I thought, “I don’t see any reason why not.” He may have sensed what you do, which is that we don’t see it very often. That’s how I was on “Stir of Echoes”. I didn’t want to see an upper middle class family in a beautiful house, because you see that in every ghost story. Can’t this be working class Chicago? You get to see some different kinds of people in movies. It makes things feel more real and freshens things up.

You have mentioned in previous interviews that Soderbergh had pressured you to follow through on an idea you had for a film. Was that the idea?

This one was his. I had an idea that became “Kimi”; he kept saying, “You really should.” There’s a new idea we have that he’s reminded me of many times I’m late on; it’s just been a busy year. We were having dinner one night and he said, “I want to do something entirely from a ghost’s point of view. I want to do it all in one house, and it’s one family.” All of that just rang my bells. I love the limitation of the aesthetic idea. I feel like those kinds of limitations actually spur you to think of new ways of doing things.

Did he give you much direction for the overall story or the identity of the presence?

His only thing was that there is a house with a presence in it. It starts with a family being shown it by a real estate agent. And this family should be really messed up. I left from there. We did it pretty quickly. The other thing was that there was a strike. I gave it to him a week before the writers’ strike started; he got a waiver and shot it. It was a skirt because I couldn’t go to sets. I didn’t get to see him do it, which is a shame. I was curious. But many times good things happen quickly; they are the ones that take forever, that somehow never find their way.

These films don’t take place in confined settings, but do you find a similar thrill in constraints when writing for an established property, like “Jurassic” or “Indiana Jones”?

They are more difficult because of the lack of restrictions. The first “Jurassic” was at the beginning of CG. I asked Steven (Spielberg), “Well, what are my limitations here?” And he said, “Only your imagination.” I thought, “Okay, well, that’s a little hostile.” But we came up with what we wanted, so he saw if we could figure it out. These are gigantic films, so there are a lot of expectations and there is a lot of money. The level of excitement and anxiety around it is much higher. On this one, by virtue of the fact that its budget was much smaller and Steven himself paid for it, there were whole levels of approval that just weren’t there.

You’ve returned to the “Jurassic” franchise to write “Jurassic World Rebirth,” which comes out this summer. What was the driving force behind this homecoming?

The first two movies were two of my favorite experiences ever. And Steven said, “How about starting over? Let’s try something completely new.” I said, “Oh, that’s a cool idea. What if blah, blah, blah,” and then I threw back an idea. That’s it. It caught on. You do that all the time with your friends and associates: throw ideas around back and forth. And sometimes they don’t. There’s pressure because it’s going to cost a lot of money and there’s going to be big, blah, blah. But there was no pressure at first – only the pursuit of our ideas.

There isn’t even a source novel you’re pulling from for this one, is there?

No. I re-read the two novels to get myself back into that state. We took some things from them. There was a sequence from the first novel that we had always wanted in the original film but didn’t have room for. We thought, “Hey, we need that now.” But just to get back into the main room 30 years later – is it still fun? And the answer is yes, it still really is. Dinosaurs are still fun.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.