January 19, 2024 @ 11:41 PM
Steven Soderbergh debuted his new superordinary thriller “Presence” Friday evening at the Sundance Movie Event, and throughout the post-screening Q&A he opened regarding exactly how the movie’s vibrant aesthetic pomposity negated his long-held idea regarding virtual reality in narrative narration.
“Presence,” composed by Soderbergh’s “Kimi” partner David Koepp and starring Lucy Liu and Chris Sullivan (that starred on Soderbergh’s collection “The Knick”), is distinguished the point-of-view of a ghost– the movie never ever damages from that viewpoint and each scene is played out in one long, unbroken take.
The target market at the offered out best testing at the Collection movie theater reacted with distinct gasps as the tale unravelled. Not just is the pomposity spooky and disquieting, yet it likewise attracts the customer right into the secret (That is this presence? What do they desire?) in such a way that would not have actually been feasible if it had actually been fired any type of in different ways.
“I had real questions about the choice that was at the center of this, because I’ve been very vocal about the fact that VR, [first] person POV VR doesn’t work, is never going to work as a narrative,” Soderbergh claimed throughout the Q&A after the testing. “Nobody wants this thing on their head. They want to see a reverse angle of the protagonist with an emotion on their face experiencing the thing. I’ve been beating this drum for a long time – it’s never going to work.”
Obviously, that all altered.
“The only way to do it was you never turn around,” Soderbergh proceeded. “It was really fun because there was no other plan. That’s it. You live or die by that.” While it looks like that was the only method the movie can be informed, Soderbergh claimed, “I was thinking about my reaction as a viewer to a choice like that. Would I want that? How would I feel about that? But I felt there wasn’t another way to do it. There just wasn’t.”
Koepp was likewise present at the Q&A and claimed Soderbergh entrusted him with the standard configuration of the tale: it would certainly be distinguished the viewpoint of the ghost, and would certainly concentrate on “a really f–ked up family.”
The actors, that had actually simply seen the movie for the extremely very first time, were virtually amazed. “I don’t have words,” Liu claimed. “My body is having reactions as if I wasn’t in the movie.”
Sullivan defined the experience of production of “Presence”– which was fired in key over 11 days in New Jacket– as something of a dancing as Soderbergh ran the video camera himself, as he does on every one of his movies. “The learning curve is very steep when we got to set to figure out how we were supposed to interact as actors with with the presence, played by Steven Soderbergh,” the “This Is Us” star claimed.
The Oscar-winning “Ocean’s 11” and “Traffic” filmmaker is vulnerable to testing, like capturing functions on apples iphone or self-releasing whole programs with his internet site, and “Presence” is an additional huge stylistic swing that links. Paradoxically, it’s not tough to think of the movie ending up being an appealed virtual reality headsets.
“Presence” is presently up for circulation, yet if the best target market’s response was any type of sign this can be the following you-have-to-see-it-in-a-theater scary movie.
For every one of TheWrap’s Sundance 2024 protection, click on this link.