More news on Gina Carano’s spy thriller

I don’t believe that fighters should act – I don’t really believe that fighters can act – but I’ll make an exception for Gina Carano, especially since she’s starring in a movie to be directed by Steven Soderbergh (Traffic, Ocean’s Eleven). As I reported here, Carano will star in a spy-action-thriller called, appropriately, Knockout. Now Empire Magazine has an interview with Soderbergh, who gives a few details on the film:

“My feeling was, If I don’t do this, somebody else will,” says the Oscar-winning director. “I felt, somebody is going to look at her and go, ‘She should be in a movie!’ And I felt like, Why shouldn’t I be the person saying that?

“If you start following the female MMA fighters, Gina pops out pretty noticeably,” says Soderbergh. “I thought it was a fascinating combination of appearance and activity… I’d been wanting to make a spy action film for a while, but hadn’t really determined what I was going to bring to it that would distinguish it from the traditional approach. Then I thought, ‘Why don’t I just build it around her? She can actually break people in half.’ I was interested in doing something ultra-realistic.”

Carano – who appeared as Crush in TV’s American Gladiators and has a role in the Michael Jai White actioner Blood And Bone – will play someone who is ‘outsourced’ by the government to perform tasks the state can’t be seen to undertake. “My desire is for it to be a very realistic portrayal of somebody who gets hired, as these people do, by the government, to go and perform certain duties that it would be inappropriate to give to the military,” says Soderbergh. “That could be anything from a hostage-grab to surveillance to an actual killing…”

Plot details are light, because the script is currently being written, but Soderbergh describes Knockout as “a combination of a Bond movie and Point Blank,”though, “more on the scale of From Russian With Love than, you know, Quantum Of Solace… Something where the characters and the story are as prominent as the action stuff.”

Lem Dobbs, whose scripts for Kafka and The Limey were previously directed by Soderbergh, is writing the screenplay, with cameras expected to roll in February.