My feeling was, If I don’t do this, somebody else will.

I think director Steven Soderbergh has come up with something that is going to be an big hit. He is currently developing a new spy thriller called Knockout, and he has cast mixed martial arts fighter Gine Carano in the lead role. Hell! They are building the whole movie around her!

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?

So he said it, and then he did it. Carano is an experienced fighter that is trained in the art of Muay Thai, which is the same style of fighting that you have seen Tony Jaa perform in Ong Bak.  She doesn’t have much acting experience, but since they are building the movie around her, they can make whatever they want to do work for the big screen.

If you start following the female mma fighters, Gina pops out pretty noticeably. 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.

Ultra realistic usually means ultra awesome.

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. That could be anything from a hostage-grab to surveillance to an actual killing…

The more Soderbergh talks about it, the more awesome this movie sounds. Lem Dobbs is currently writing the script, and they hope to start shooting in February of next year. There are no solid plot details revealed yet, but Knockout is described as,

A combination of a Bond movie and Point Blank, 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.

Sounds good to me! Soderbergh is a solid director and I trust that he is going to bring us something different and special with this new movie. What are your thoughts?

So ya wanna see Gina Carano kick some ass? Sure ya do!

Source: Empire