Just look at Gina Carano, the mixed martial artist who graces ESPN The Magazine’s new
Body Issue. What do you see? A category-defying athlete, a woman who maybe perfectly embodies the term scary-attractive? If you’re Steven Soderbergh, you see the star of your upcoming spy thriller, ‘Knockout,’ who you want to turn into a version of one of the iconic heroes of recent cinema.
“Why can’t I make her Jason Bourne?” Soderbergh asked during a recent interview with MTV News.
“I’d been contemplating an action/spy thing that was ultra-realistic for a while, something on a human scale, not an extravaganza,” the Oscar-winning director explained. “I’ve been watching [Gina] for a while and thought she was interesting. So recently I was thinking, ‘She’s interesting, someone should build a movie around her, why don’t I blend these two elements? Why does he have to be a guy?’ “
And why does it have to be a trained actress? Soderbergh made a splash earlier this year when he brought Sasha Grey from the world of porn to the land on Hollywood in “The Girlfriend Experience.” For that matter, who needs a “Bourne”-esque big budget to capture the same sense of in-the-middle-of-the-chaos action that Paul Greengrass did in his two “Bourne” pictures?
“I have to go in another direction,” Soderbergh said. “I have to think laterally instead of vertically because I don’t have the budget. I’m not going to have scenes with so much mayhem taking place that in reality the cops would shut it down…. So stylistically I don’t want to duplicate what Paul’s been doing. The camera won’t be on the shoulder. It’ll be my take.”
Carano will star as a woman with a mistake-strewn past hired by the government to put her badass skills to unsavory use in a globe-trotting caper. While this stuff has more than a whiff of Bond and Bourne, Soderbergh plans to remedy what he sees as one of the most frustrating aspects of contemporary action flicks: the logic-defying high-speed car chase.
“Very, very few people escape high-speed pursuit,” the director said. “It happens, but it’s very rare. So I’ve already researched the six times in history it’s happened, so if we do that and she gets out of it, she’s going to get out of it one of the ways they did. It’s that kind of thing. It drives me nuts when I see a movie and I think the police presence would be so immediate. That sequence would be over in three minutes!”
In September, Variety reported that “Knockout” would shoot in Ireland and Turkey, as well as the U.S., but Soderbergh told us he still hasn’t settled on overseas shooting locations. He has decided that the storyline will begin abroad and then work its way back stateside to a location where Carano’s character grew up.
In terms of casting, Soderbergh has decided to surround his largely unfamiliar star with actors who are more recognizable. “I want to cast people around her that make the audience comfortable,” he said. “She’s an unknown quantity to the audience as a movie actor, so I need a couple people around her so when people see the poster they go, ‘Oh it’s a real movie.’ “
It came as no surprise that 
Potentially his generation’s Ben Kingsley, “
