Steven Soderbergh looooves John Boorman’s “Point Blank,” the 1967 existential thriller that’s a bit like if Alain Resnais made an action movie and stars Lee Marvin. It’s not like he hides its grand influence over him either, and he’s admitted several times that the temporal shifting in “The Limey,” is greatly indebted to the picture. He’s referenced it endlessly and went so far as to do the commentary track on the DVD with Boorman (it’s really essential listening).
So maybe it’s no surprise for his upcoming foray into the action genre — a picture called “Knockout” starring American mixed martial arts champion Gina Carano (yes, another non-actor much like porn actress Sasha Grey in “The Girlfriend Experience”) — he’s referencing the film once again.
Speaking to Empire he called the film, “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.”
This is essentially in keeping with what we were told when the film was described as “The Bourne” films meets “La Femme Nikita,” though maybe now it has a slightly more arty bent. Or maybe that’s just our wishful thinking, but we do think it’s amusing that he’s managed to mention this film in a project that was seemingly a mainstream one from the outset. Perhaps he can’t resist throwing some of his idiosyncratic ideas into an action movie? Either way, we’re all for it, the proclivity to bend this way always makes for interesting takes on genres that have become fairly predictable. It’s great he’s referencing something so oblique that might balance out the action tendencies in the film that he described to the U.K. movie outlet as “ultra-realistic.”
And the Bond thing makes even more sense, as when we were told about this project from a source inside his camp, the confidante said Soderbergh had once been offered a Bond movie (and $15 million in fact) early on in his career and he was game, but backed out once he realized he wouldn’t be able to inject his creative style into the formulaic template (though, seemingly it’s since been broken somewhat by “Casino Royale,” and then reverted back again with ‘Quantum’).
The script is currently being written by Lem Dobbs (so there’s no plot per se because they’re figuring it out as they go with obvious directions in mind), the screenwriter behind Soderbergh’s “The Limey,” Kafka” and the hilariously fractious commentary tracks on the ‘Limey’ DVD, more pure gold that’s essential listening; Dobbs and Soderbergh basically going at it —and the director suggests the contentiousness will flare up again. But their argumentative relationship makes for good art.
“Oh, you can fuckin’ bet the farm on that!” Soderbergh laughed about battling it out with Dobbs. “He’s absolutely gonna give me a hard time. I’ve already thought about that, like, Oh boy, you know, this is going to be round two. There’s no question. This is absolutely the rematch that people have been waiting for.”
As for casting an unknown and non-actor, the Oscar-winning director doesn’t seem worried in the least. “My feeling was, If I don’t do this, somebody else will…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?”
The picture is aiming to start production January 2010.