Soderbergh is a man of many talents, but one of his distinct abilities is how he transitions from project to project, often exploring wildly different genres in between. While doing press rounds for his new movie No Sudden Move (Which is on HBO Max starting today), he already confirmed his next movie while being interviewed on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, a tech thriller titled KIMI which already began production back in April and is the idea of screenwriter David Koepp (Jurassic Park) who conceived the idea a couple years ago before finishing the script recently. Discussing it today, Soderbergh describes it essentially as present-day riff on Francis Ford Coppola’s iconic 1974 feature The Conversation while taking into account the COVID-19 pandemic being utilized as a way to explore the lead character's paranoia:
“The aftermath of [COVID-19] is an aspect of the story. So there’s that, because it ties into certain psychological issues that our lead character is battling. Overlaid is a very contemporary, zeitgeist-y issue of giant tech companies who have a lot of listening devices in a lot of homes. What are they picking up?
What if you worked for one of these companies analyzing streams that have been flagged for some reason or another, that the voice recognition software – there’s some aspect of this recording that it doesn’t understand or it has a question about, and it gets kicked to a human analyst to listen to it. So they can go, ‘Oh, that’s a slang term that this thing hasn’t heard of. Now I’ve got to load it into the system so the software can now recognize [it].’
This is what this person’s job is. And she hears something that sounds not cool… [It’s] pretty much [the 2021 version of The Conversation], and a little bit of Rear Window, and a little bit of Panic Room. So it’s all my favorite stuff.”
The story sees actress Zoe Kravitz as an agoraphobic Seattle tech worker who discovers recorded evidence of a violent crime during an ordinary data stream review. However, as she tries reporting it up the chain of command at her company, she is met with resistance and bureaucracy and soon realises she will have to do the thing she fears the most – leave her apartment. Byron Bowers, Erika Christensen, Devin Ratray, Jaime Camil, Jacob Vargas, Derek DelGaudio, and Emily Kuroda are also co-starring with the film set to be on HBO Max as well. Stay tuned!
Terrible director.