Steven Soderbergh Defends AI in Film: ‘I’m Not Threatened'

Over the course of his nearly four-decade career, Steven Soderbergh has just about done it all—including, now, made a horror film.

Presence is a ghost story like no other, assuming the first-person perspective of a specter that haunts a suburban clan that’s moved into its residence. With gliding, searching, inquisitive camerawork, it’s a disquieting and poignant spin on a familiar formula, and one that the Oscar-nominated director (working from David Koepp’s compact, revealing script) transforms into a meditation on family strife, the seen and the unseen, and the role of the filmmaker and audience in the stories they tell and watch.

Having premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, Presence, which hits theaters Jan. 24) is a reserved and unsettling supernatural mystery, and it reconfirms that the 61-year-old director has lost none of his adventurous spirit. A genre affair whose central formal device begets uncharacteristic suspense while allowing it to double as an intriguing commentary on the way movies operate, Soderbergh’s latest pushes buttons and boundaries with equal aplomb. It’s a spookshow of depth and resonance, led by fine performances from Lucy Liu and Chris Sullivan, and culminating with an act of violence that’s not easily forgotten, or shaken.

With another feature already on the horizon—Black Bag, a spy film starring Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender, arrives on Mar. 14—Soderbergh isn’t slowing down any time soon. Whether working in an independent or studio mode, he’s one of American cinema’s most audacious auteurs. No surprise, then, that we were thrilled to once again sit down with him for a wide-ranging chat about the challenges posed by Presence’s distinctive POV, his feelings about AI, and whether there’s still an audience for adult-oriented theatrical fare.

As you said, David Lynch was the definition of inimitable. But where is the line between inspiration and imitation?

The issue of influence, for young filmmakers especially, is a really interesting one. All this stuff that’s going on about people suing AI companies for using their work—I’m just here to admit that what that thing is doing to generate a version of something is what I do.

You don’t see AI as a form of plagiarism?

I am the process of synthesizing everything I’ve ever witnessed or experienced or watched or made in order to decide how I want to do a specific thing at a specific moment on a specific day on set. If Carnal Knowledge doesn’t exist, Sex, Lies, and Videotape doesn’t exist. What do I owe Jules Feiffer and Mike Nichols? They would tell you I don’t owe them anything—that they’re standing on somebody else’s shoulders. David Lynch would go, well, if I’d never seen a Buñuel film, I probably wouldn’t be exactly the filmmaker I am.

I know the differences in theory: These are for-profit companies. I’m like, well, I’m a for-profit company. It’s called Populist Pictures, Inc., and I’m the principal.

I don’t know what the solution is here. I’m just saying that the idea of somebody creating an AI that a young filmmaker uses to give ideas that’s been fed in the style of Steven Soderbergh? I don’t care.

Does AI have potential for you?

Absolutely. It’s a tool. Its limitations are obvious and insurmountable. But as it continues to develop, its use in getting to iterations of things faster is absolutely valuable to me. But it can’t finish anything. So I’m not threatened by it.

Writers should be threatened by it. Actors, I understand their concerns, and these are very solvable problems, in terms of language and usage. There’s a lot of language that was already in SAG contracts about image and likeness. That language is getting tighter and tighter, which is good. But at a certain point, I’m going on the fact that audiences ultimately will always want to see something that at least feels like a person made it.

Hopefully.

I think so. You have to remember, this doesn’t exist in a vacuum. If you go off and make a movie or TV show that is “all AI,” the audience knows that. That’s framing the whole experience for them, and I think that puts them in a space of disinclination. It does for me.

I’m talking about something that’s trying to convince me that it’s real, not something that’s designed to never be that. I’m talking about, you’re trying to convince me that this family drama you’ve done entirely in AI is “real.” I’m here to tell you, if you were able to do it, given the amount of effort involved, I think I would look at it and go, why don’t you just go shoot? Like, in a day? Why is this better?

That’s the question you need to ultimately ask about all these things. And it includes a director making a very bold decision in terms of an approach with a movie. If I’m looking at it, I’m like, okay, you’re going this way, but I’m thinking, why is it better? Is it better? Presence is an interesting example of that, in the sense that every other way to do this is worse.

Speaking of influences, Presence is a ghost story, and there are a million ghost stories…

There are a million ghost stories and lots of movies made either entirely or with passages employing POV.

So where does this film fit into that conversation, and what was its initial inspiration?

It started because our housesitter in Los Feliz saw a ghost in our house, and I started wondering about that. Not whether I believed her; she was a friend of my wife, and I knew her, and I know she didn’t make this up. Then we found out somebody had died in our master bedroom. Our neighbor thought this daughter had killed her mother, but the police said it was a suicide. This got me on a loop of, if someone was taken before their time in this house, and they considered it their house, how would they feel when we moved in? How would Mimi—my wife gave her a name—feel about us living in her house?

I love that she has a name.

That’s where the idea started. I’m imagining Mimi coming into being in this state, in a room, and not knowing how to orient. I wrote a couple of pages that I gave to David Koepp. Cut to black. New shot, same room. It’s in this room, and now it’s starting to look around a little bit—searching. Cut, black. Different day. Woman shows up, enters the house, starts moving around. It turns out, it’s a realtor, and she’s showing it.

That’s all I had. I gave that to David and said, “And?” He goes, I know what to do with this.

It’s a unique approach to both a ghost story and a family drama.

It’s a very, very, very simple idea. The restriction of it was challenging and exciting at the same time. Part of the problem can be, when you’re directing, that the possibilities are always so numerous that filtering out what you shouldn’t do can sometimes be trickier and time-consuming. This filtered out so many options. The camera has to be this high and it has to be this lens and it has to move like a person. You’ve eliminated almost everything except those three things. So my job becomes one purely of choreography at this point. Blocking. And it’s a little more intense than usual because I’m in there with them.

I ruined more takes than all of the cast combined. More often than not, if there was a take that went off, [it was me] almost all the time! Because they were all ready to go. If a take didn’t work or got cut, it’s because I did it wrong and we had to go again. And a couple of these [takes] go on for a bit.

You’ve shot a lot of your prior movies, but Presence does put you more squarely in the middle of the action.

Yeah, it was a little more intrusive for the cast [laughs].

Do you think audiences are going to be surprised by the film’s unconventionality?

Yes, I’m curious about, when it’s released, what the response is. I don’t know how you really clock it. I mean, you clock it partially by the box office. And I do not like CinemaScore. I really don’t. I find this really frustrating. I know people use them as an indicator of what the multiple will be—oh, it got a B so that means its multiple is going to be 2.5 instead of 3.5 or whatever. But I find this really annoying.

I’m just curious to see, because it’s not typical. I never viewed it as a horror film by my definition. And it’s not a typical ghost thing either. It’s actually a drama about a family and the ghost thing is kind of a Trojan horse to pull you in. So I’m just curious to see what the response is, apart from the economics.

The film’s POV conceit raises issues about the director’s and audience’s relationship to the action. How much did you actively think about those things while making the film, and how much did you just let them work themselves out?

It was an interesting case of intellectually understanding that this raises certain questions regarding the gaze—anybody’s gaze—and voyeurism, and eavesdropping, and privacy. Then discovering, once you actually started looking at it, that it was a much more visceral debate that you had with yourself,

It went from me going, oh, I bet this is going to be something that people will go, hey, what does it mean? But when you see it, and you’re in it, and you can’t escape it…because there’s no cutting away. You’re just in it and you are watching things that you know you are not supposed to be watching. The issue of complicity is right in your face, and I wasn’t prepared for that. I thought it would always exist on a purely intellectual level. But I found when I was looking at it and other people were looking at it, those questions and issues really rose up, and it was impossible to not think about.

Presence is coming out now, and your next film, Black Bag, is debuting in two months. Is that an unpleasant situation?

The long answer is yes [laughs]. And they’re by the same writer!

Look, this is going to be an interesting little parlor game, as to whether I can have two people go see movies that I’ve made six weeks apart in numbers. Like, I was used to one a year—this guy’s really pushing it! I am prepared for that.

They’re so different. I’m hoping people want to see the second one because it seems like a complete annihilation of the first one. Also, because of what it is, how it was done, how it was made, and its history at the festival and all of that, Presence is much more dependent upon me as a sales element than Black Bag. Black Bag is a Hollywood spy movie, commercial film, with movie stars in it. Really doesn’t matter if people know who I am or care. You can sell that movie without me. You can’t sell Presence without me.

Did your experience on Presence inform your work on Black Bag?

I’m going to interpret that question as, did I learn anything that I can bring forward to another movie? That’s what I’m hoping when I make anything—that I got some new knowledge here that I can now put in the tool kit. As I sit here, Presence feels like an anomaly and a one off, because I don’t know what I would take. It’s so specifically what it is. I don’t know what I would take and apply somewhere else.

Maybe I’ll let you know if I’m on set one day and I go, if I hadn’t made Presence, I wouldn’t know how to solve that.Didn’t happen on Black Bag, I can tell you that. Because it’s 180 degrees different in terms of its film grammar.

Was that on purpose?

Yeah. That’s what I was looking for.

We’ve discussed this in the past, but it’s relevant when it comes to both Presence and Black Bag: How do you feel about the health of the mid-tier adult theatrical space which is where your films generally operate?

Presence is in a space that’s experiencing growth. Black Bag isn’t. But I’m convinced, and certainly Universal and Focus are convinced and hopeful, that this audience can be recultivated and convinced to leave the house. Because we really feel it’s the best version of the business if you can make mid-range budgeted movies for grown-ups and have them work. We feel like it’s just more fun if you have that kind of variety in theaters. My concern is less personal—will it succeed?—then that, if it doesn’t, the person behind me who wants to make one of these is going to have a hard time. That bugs me.

With Black Bag, to their credit, they read the script, they loved the script, they said yes immediately, and I’ve got nobody to blame. We made the movie we wanted to make, and I think it’s really fun. But can we convince people over the age of 25 to come see it? Because part of the problem is not that young people can’t like the movie. It’s the fact that one of the core elements of the film is a long-term marriage under attack. 25-year-olds don’t know what those stakes are. 40-year-olds know. That’s the issue. We know this from test screenings. Young people like it, but it’s clear they don’t have the emotional investment because they haven’t been married for fifteen years…hopefully.

It does feel like that mid-range space is coming back a bit, at least in my (unscientific) estimation.

I’ll say it out loud: If people who write about movies want to see more movies in that range, they need to be supportive. I’m not saying you need to like the movie. But you need to support the idea of this movie. You can say you don’t like it, but for me as the filmmaker, there’s a line when you say, “don’t bother.” If you’re saying don’t bother about something I’ve made, please, at your earliest convenience, go f--- yourself.