‘Sex, Lies, and Videotape’ at 35: Steven Soderbergh Remembers Helping Put Sundance on the Map Ahead of His New Horror Film ‘Presence’

Now that Steven Soderbergh’s three-year overall deal with HBO is over, he’s free to work with any studio he chooses. And the filmmaker is doing just that, in his usual workaholic way, as Deadline reports that Focus Features outbid everyone for “Black Dog,” Soderbergh’s upcoming spy thriller with Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender.

EXCLUSIVE: Focus Features has won a bidding battle for Black Bag, a package for a spy thriller film that Steven Soderbergh will direct this summer in Europe from a David Koepp script, with Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender attached to star. Casey Silver and Greg Jacobs are producing.

Everyone loves a what if, us especially. We all like to dream about the greatest projects never made, right? Well, here’s one more to add to that pile.

The “Erin Brockovich” director moves his camera around so much, you want to yell at the screen, “Settle down, please! I have a headache!” There is a rationale for his nearly-nonstop motion shtick: the audience is experiencing the haunted house from the perspective of a ghost. And this particular ghost apparently needs to get its steps in.However, aside from a couple creepy voyeuristic scenes that the technique complements, its more obvious purpose is for Soderbergh to show off elaborate tracking shots.

Brent Lang Executive Editor “Presence,” a twisty new thriller that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, has sold to Neon. The movie, which is directed by Oscar winner Steven Soderbergh, puts an inventive spin on the haunted house genre. It unfolds from the perspective of the spectral entity and is primarily interested in dramatizing the issues of the people living in the home, who seem to be grappling with a lot of interpersonal problems.

You’ll remember during the pandemic, Steven Soderbergh revealed he wrote three scripts in a three-month blaze at the beginning of lockdown. One of them was a sequel to “Sex, Lies, and Videotape.” READ MORE: Steven Soderbergh Has Written A ‘Sex, Lies & Videotape’ Sequel; Says George Clooney & More Set For ‘Kill Switch’ Well, it’s not happening, and in a recent Variety article, Soderbergh said while he got actors like Andie MacDowell and Laura San Giacomo to agree to return, he feels like the idea has missed its moment and he’ll likely turn it into a novel instead (which would be his first).

Jaden Thompson DJ Drama, the Grammy-winning “King of the Mixtape,” is known for his “Gangsta Grillz” series, which has featured a myriad of prominent hip-hop artists over the years from Lil Wayne to Tyler the Creator. On the new Audible original “DJ Drama’s Gangsta Grillz Podcast,” presented by Kenya Barris‘ Khalabo Ink Society, Drama sits down with some of the notable musicians he’s worked with to unpack his iconic mixtape series. “He was arrested in a sting for mixtapes.

We’ve confirmed that a new Jurassic World movie, a complete reboot, is being fast-tracked at Universal with the franchise’s original Jurassic Park screenwriter David Koepp. He adapted the first two movies from 1993 and 1997’s The Lost World from Michael Crichton’s novels.

Brent Lang Executive Editor Mavis Beacon taught the world to type. Starting in the late 1980s, a software program featuring the eponymous instructor drilled computer users on their keyboard skills, selling more than 10 million copies worldwide. But it often comes as a shock to find out that Beacon never really existed.

Since returning from his announced retirement from feature filmmaking, Steven Soderbergh has been on a tear of productivity unmatched since the heyday of Hollywood’s studio system. His quickie projects might feel like slight exercises in style or storytelling, but they have never felt disposable.

Brent Lang Executive Editor The title alone was enough to convince Aubrey Plaza to appear in “My Old Ass,” an offbeat coming-of-age story that was warmly received during its premiere Saturday night at the Sundance Film Festival. “It all just made sense to me,” Plaza told the sold-out crowd at the Eccles Theater in Park City, Utah. “‘My Old Ass,’ I was like, ‘Oh man.'” And when Plaza spent time with Megan Park, the film’s writer and director, and discovered her affinity for unusual means of transportation, Aubrey knew she had signed on to the perfect project.

Stephen Rodrick The not-so-secret fact about premieres is that the actors rarely watch, usually ducking out when the lights go down. They spend the film’s duration smoking cigarettes and reciting the cinema’s version of the serenity prayer: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, i.e. the director’s predilection to use my worst take.” That was not the case at Sundance’s world premiere of Steven Soderbergh’s “Presence,” a ghostly thriller about the Payne family, a bougie clan with a significant number of problems including a spectral, uh, presence that could be friend or foe.

Directed by Steven Soderbergh and penned by David Koepp, the haunting psychological thriller Presence follows a fractured family as a mysterious supernatural force infiltrates their new home that has taken interest in their daughter Chloe. The film is written by David Koepp and stars Lucy Liu, Chris Sullivan, Callina Liang, Eddy Maday, West Mulholland, and Julia Fox.An unsettling presence permeates the home of Chris (Sullivan) and Ruth (Liu)  before they even move in. This supernatural entity is a witness to the family’s most vulnerable moments. It has a particular focus on the couple’s young daughter Chloe (Liang), who is always at odds with her mother and Brother Tyler (Maday). However, the young girl is in mourning because of her two girls, one of them her best friend Nadia, died recently.  

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “Presence,” a ghost story directed by Steven Soderbergh, is set entirely inside a lovely, renovated, 100-year-old suburban home, and before the characters even have a chance to move in, the place is already occupied. The camera literally seems to be peering at things, staring out the second-floor windows, then coming down the stairs to witness the arrival of a harried real-estate agent, then the family of four she’s about to sell the house to. Darting from room to room in an unbroken wide-angle-lens shot, the camera gives us an impromptu tour of the house, letting us drink in the crisp mint-green walls, the vintage wood that lines everything (windows, doors, stairway, fireplace), the ancient smoke-glass mirror and polished oak-board floors and elegant sprawling kitchen.

Well, the Steven Soderbergh/David Koepp relationship continues. After writing the surveillance thriller, “Kimi” and the upcoming ghost movie “Presence” which will premiere at Sundance soon, screenwriter David Koepp (“Jurassic Park,” “Carlito’s Way”) has penned yet another film for director Steven Soderbergh.

Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender are set to co-star in a spy thriller!

EXCLUSIVE: Julia Fox‘s shocking New York Times bestselling tell-all, Down the Drain, about her rise from tumultuous youth to dominatrix to multi-hyphenate fashionista-actress and social media influencer, is being developed into a series with Joey Soloway behind it; the actress told Deadline on Friday at our Sundance Film Festival studio.

Rebecca Rubin Film and Media Reporter Netflix has acquired “Ibelin,” a documentary that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Benjamin Ree (“The Painter and the Thief”) directed the film, which centers on a Norwegian gamer named Mats Steen, who died of a degenerative muscle disease at the age of 25. According to the official logline, “his parents mourned what they thought had been a lonely and isolated life, when they started receiving messages from online friends around the world.” “Many of my favorite documentary films and series of all time have been distributed by Netflix,” Ree said in a statement.

One of Hollywood’s best known boutique law firms is undergoing a touch up, in more ways than one.

Brent Lang Executive Editor Not much is funny about those terrifying early days of COVID, when the world was cloaked in an apocalyptic doom and the president was telling us to drink bleach. But in “Stress Positions,” Theda Hammel miraculously finds the funny side of lockdown, mining the masks, Purell and social distancing that defined that unhappy era for physical comedy. “Those gestures are like balloons, and they’re filled with the sense of danger and a sense of peril,” Hammel says of the Sundance-bound film that she directed and co-wrote.