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 to haunt its house.

After watching on as the Payne family turns against one another, the Presence that drifts around their newly purchased, bougie abode makes a grand gesture to save its tattered residents. Looming above as the drugged Chloe (Callina Liang) is about to be murdered by her new boyfriend Ryan (West Mulholland), the ghost swoops downstairs to awaken her brother Tyler (Eddy Maday) from his own roofie-induced slumber. In a possessed rush, Tyler storms up the stairwell, down the corridor and enters the bedroom to tackle Ryan, who has already killed one of Chloe’s friends and staged it as an overdose. In the scuffle, the two boys abruptly fly out of the second-floor window. The Presence then looks below to see their motionless bodies splayed in the driveway.

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

After an abrupt cut to black, “Presence” begins its final shot. The Payne family is seen again sometime later, presumably after burying their son. The house is now emptied out, but the mother Rebecca (Lucy Liu) still senses one last thing inside. Following the Presence to 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 is occupying the past to prevent a terrible event. With the Presence revealed to be Tyler, the film’s events are reframed through the view of a recently departed soul, looking back on the callousness he showed towards his sister and saving her and, in a potential act of repentance, sending himself to his own death.

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

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

Koepp has proven himself to be one of Hollywood’s preeminent screenwriters since Steven Spielberg recruited him to pen “Jurassic Park” in his twenties. But between spectacle features, he has often returned to more contained settings, 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 shares that, after beginning work on the screenplay, he began to dream from the perspective of a ghost. He moved to write immediately after waking up from these, putting most of his work in before 6:00 a.m.

“When I first saw a cut of the film, I was struck by the voyeuristic concept and how it makes it feel more real,” Koepp says. “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 no business with. It gave it a much higher level of reality than I expected.”

How do you write a screenplay accounting for this formal premise? Are you blocking the Presence or scripting its psychological state?

I just used “we” in the screenplay all the time. “People start shouting at each other. We get anxious. We back away from them.” Or, “We’ve seen enough and get bored and move out.” You’re definitely writing it as a character. It’s funny how that comes across. The character of the ghost in this film is played by Steven Soderbergh: his camera. He had to creep around in a way that seemed appropriate. The ghost is skittish, so you’ll often see it back away from a situation or hide in the closet. The camera behaves like that character would.

Many viewers won’t know that this film is shot from a ghost’s perspective before seeing it. Did you feel that 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 he wants to say, “Look, this is all somebody’s point of view.” Audiences are pretty savvy. And horror audiences see a lot of formal invention, because filmmakers have to try to vary the genre. But it’s once you get five or six minutes in the movie, you realize, “Oh, this whole thing is going to be like this.”

I hadn’t even thought about a person expecting it to stop being from the ghost’s perspective.

Steven felt early on this should not be a long film — because of budget, but also because the aesthetic concept is a strong one. Eighty-five minutes is plenty. After that, we’re going to start to really feel the conceit of it and not like it. I’d scripted a sort of shuttering effect. But Steven wanted to use fades, because then he could vary the length of it depending on how long of a time jump it was or how long he felt we needed to digest a scene. Those were because every scene had to be a oner. 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 got an eye out for films with half-Asian families. They are rare enough that each feels notable. Were the ethnicities of the characters written into the script?

Steven asked, “Can 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 maybe sensed what you do, which is we don’t see this very often. That was 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 single 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’ve mentioned in previous interviews that Soderbergh had been pushing you to follow through on an idea you had for a movie. Was this that idea?

This one was his. I’d had an idea that became “Kimi”; he kept saying, “You really got to do that.” There is a new idea we have that he has reminded me many times I’m late with; it’s just been a busy year. We were having dinner one night, and he said, “I want to do something all from the point of view of a ghost. I want to do it all in a house and it’s one family.” All of that just rang my bells. I love a confined story. I love the restriction of the aesthetic idea. I feel like those kinds of restrictions actually spur creativity; they force you into thinking of new ways to do things.

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

His only things were, there’s 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 went from there. We did it fairly quickly. The other thing was, there was a strike coming. I gave it to him a week before the writers’ strike started; he got a waiver and shot it. It was a bummer, because I couldn’t go to set. I didn’t get to see him doing it, which is too bad. I was curious. But a lot of times good things happen quickly; it’s the ones that take forever that somehow never find their way.

These movies don’t unfold in confined settings, but do you find a similar thrill in restrictions when you’re writing for an established property, like “Jurassic” or “Indiana Jones”?

Those are harder because of the lack of restrictions. The first “Jurassic” was at the dawn of CG. I asked Steven [Spielberg], “Well, what are my limitations here?” And he said, “Only your imagination.” I was like, “Okay, well, that’s a little hostile.” But we were making up whatever we felt like, then he was seeing if we could figure it out. Those are giant movies, so there’s a lot of expectations and there’s a lot of money. The level of tension and anxiety surrounding it is a lot higher. On this one, by virtue of the fact that its budget was a lot smaller and Steven was paying for it himself, there were whole levels of approval that just weren’t present.

You’ve returned to the “Jurassic” franchise to write “Jurassic World Rebirth,” which releases this summer. What was the impetus behind that homecoming?

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

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

No. I reread the two novels to get myself back in that mode though. We did take some things from them. There was a sequence from the first novel that we’d always wanted in the original movie, but didn’t have room for. We were like, “Hey, we get to use that now.” But just to get back in that head space 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.