By Brian Davids. With Soderbergh operating the camera in continuous takes to create the perspective of the spirit, Sullivan admits that the unconventional camera setup put him through his paces at first. But David [Koepp] took a really delicate approach to this, and he left enough vagueness to allow the audience to choose their own adventure.
Firstly, is everything alright with you and yours amid the wildfires? Yeah, the air quality is giving our toddlers some breathing issues, but we are in a safe area. Coming out of a six-year commitment to This Is Us , did you purposefully avoid another potential long-term role so you could be available to do a number of different things?
Or was it not that calculated? So the way these things line up is sometimes intentional, but this time I was doing a Broadway play [ The Thanksgiving Play ] towards the end of the strike when Steven Soderbergh called me up. I then went and had a meeting with him at his office, and that was it. I hit the ground running. So you had history with him already, but were you still a bit surprised when he called about Presence?
So it was strange. What did you make of those dynamics? Well, for one, I thought it was an interesting role reversal. Generally, the father figure is not the more emotionally available of the partners, and there were interesting conversations between Lucy and I about those stereotypes, the way we wanted to play it, the way she wanted to approach her character and what that meant for how I would play mine and vice versa.
So it felt new to me, at least as far as a father being there emotionally for his daughter, while emotionally challenging his son to be a better person. It was a slightly different kind of character. Or did you and Lucy come up with your own explanation? And I imagine that it happens by looking at too many opinion cards at the end of test audience viewings. That angle belongs to this ghostly presence that observes, and even sometimes interacts, on our behalf.
