Having previously helmed thrillers such as Contagion, Side Effects, Unsane, and Kafka, director Steven Soderbergh returns to the genre with his next film, KIMI, which debuts exclusively on HBO Max on February 10. Soderbergh teamed with Spider-Man and Jurassic Park screenwriter David Koepp for the New Line film, which stars The Batman’s Zoë Kravitz and was made during the pandemic.
IGN can exclusively debut the trailer for KIMI, which can be viewed via the player above or the embed below. We also spoke at length with Soderbergh about the film, the highlights of which can be found below.
The film’s title refers to a fictitious Alexa/Siri-like voice-activated digital assistant called KIMI. It hears everything you say all the time, recording everything for a Big Brother-like corporation. Kravitz plays Angela Childs, a voice stream interpreter who overhears a murder on a recording she was analyzing. Angela is shaken after reaching out to her colleagues. Why are her employers resistant to her trying to bring this to the authorities’ attention?
Cinephiles may find echoes of Coppola’s The Conversation and Hitchcock’s Rear Window in KIMI, influences Soderbergh was only too happy to confirm in his recent Zoom chat with IGN. “Oh, absolutely. In terms of influence, those are both movies that I adore and watch repeatedly. And then, in this case, throw in a bit of Panic Room, and that's the mixture that we were going for,” the Oscar winner said.
The Panic Room influence is apt considering KIMI screenwriter David Koepp also penned that David Fincher film. Indeed, as Soderbergh recalled, the project originated with Koepp, who pitched him the story a few years back. It wasn’t until the COVID-19 pandemic struck that the true crime-inspired project finally came together:
“I love thrillers, generally speaking. It's the kind of movie that I like to watch. And so when the opportunity comes along to make a thriller that has something underneath it that keeps it from being single-use plastic, then I'm interested. So this kind of happened slowly and then really quickly. Some years ago when David Koepp was living in London, we had drinks when I was over there. And he said, ‘Oh, have you read about this story, this murder case where they think they got it recorded on an Alexa, and they're trying to use it as part of the litigation, the criminal case?’ And the impression that everybody got was that Amazon wasn't being very helpful. And so David said, ‘I'm thinking about an idea of a voice analytics person who works for one of these companies that has a listening device. And they think they hear something, and the company really wants her to drop it.’”
“And so I said, ‘That sounds like a great idea. That's a perfect Hitchcock sort of premise.’ And then I didn't hear from him for a while. And just before New York went into lockdown the first time, David and I saw each other again. And he said, ‘Are you still interested in that? I'm ready to write it.’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ And so he wrote it during lockdown and handed it to me last fall. And there we go.”
Soderbergh and his team shot KIMI under COVID protocols last year. Signs of the pandemic will be evident in the film as some characters will wear masks in scenes, and Kravitz’s character Angela is agoraphobic so, as Soderbergh explained, “[Angela] is very much an indoor cat. And so what we've all been going through, doesn't really bother her much at all because she’s kind of drawn toward staying at home anyway. This is sort of part of her character that ends up being crucial to her having to decide how much she wants to pursue what she thinks is a bad incident. So it was tricky when we were shooting in the spring to judge where we would be when the movie comes out.”
Soderbergh understood the risk of possibly alienating some viewers by acknowledging the pandemic in his film: “You could make an argument that people, for the most part, don't want to watch something in which this is still going on. They want to live in a world in which we're past this. So I totally understand that. In this case, it kind of added something to the story. And we had a lot of discussions about, ‘Wow, where are we going to be in a year?’ And none of us could have seen Omicron coming in March or April of last year, but it turns out, I kind of leaned toward us still being in the space where masks are an issue, just because I thought it's possible. So you see when she interacts with people, not everybody's wearing one, but clearly, it's still a thing in the culture.”
The pandemic, though, isn’t the focus of KIMI. Corporations like Amazon and devices like Alexa are. “I'm just sort of stunned that people allow these devices in their homes at all. The idea that it is only ‘activated’ when you speak to it and activated is just ridiculous to me. I mean, the idea of just having no privacy,” Soderbergh said. “There's no ‘get’ for me that would make it worth it. I was interested in working with a story in which that is a central question. Is it worth it to have one of these things in your home?”
Soderbergh believes “you should be” scared of companies like Amazon: “These companies function like governments and like countries they're that big. As far as I can tell, there's no country's economy that's working the way shit’s working over at Apple right now. These are incredibly powerful influential entities. Run by people who are not elected and yet have arguably as much or more control over our daily lives than our government does. It's this kind of quiet transfer of influence and power that's taken place in the last two decades [that] is interesting to me. It invariably leads to consequences that nobody could have anticipated, and as we know the law is so far behind what's actually going on in the culture, that by the time they start having hearings on this it's too late.”
KIMI debuts only on HBO Max on February 10. In addition to Zoë Kravitz, the cast includes Jaime Camil, Erika Christensen, Derek DelGaudio, Robin Givens, Charles Halford, Devin Retray, Jacob Vargas, and Rita Wilson.
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IGN can exclusively debut the trailer for KIMI, which can be viewed via the player above or the embed below. We also spoke at length with Soderbergh about the film, the highlights of which can be found below.
The film’s title refers to a fictitious Alexa/Siri-like voice-activated digital assistant called KIMI. It hears everything you say all the time, recording everything for a Big Brother-like corporation. Kravitz plays Angela Childs, a voice stream interpreter who overhears a murder on a recording she was analyzing. Angela is shaken after reaching out to her colleagues. Why are her employers resistant to her trying to bring this to the authorities’ attention?
Cinephiles may find echoes of Coppola’s The Conversation and Hitchcock’s Rear Window in KIMI, influences Soderbergh was only too happy to confirm in his recent Zoom chat with IGN. “Oh, absolutely. In terms of influence, those are both movies that I adore and watch repeatedly. And then, in this case, throw in a bit of Panic Room, and that's the mixture that we were going for,” the Oscar winner said.
The Panic Room influence is apt considering KIMI screenwriter David Koepp also penned that David Fincher film. Indeed, as Soderbergh recalled, the project originated with Koepp, who pitched him the story a few years back. It wasn’t until the COVID-19 pandemic struck that the true crime-inspired project finally came together:
“I love thrillers, generally speaking. It's the kind of movie that I like to watch. And so when the opportunity comes along to make a thriller that has something underneath it that keeps it from being single-use plastic, then I'm interested. So this kind of happened slowly and then really quickly. Some years ago when David Koepp was living in London, we had drinks when I was over there. And he said, ‘Oh, have you read about this story, this murder case where they think they got it recorded on an Alexa, and they're trying to use it as part of the litigation, the criminal case?’ And the impression that everybody got was that Amazon wasn't being very helpful. And so David said, ‘I'm thinking about an idea of a voice analytics person who works for one of these companies that has a listening device. And they think they hear something, and the company really wants her to drop it.’”
“And so I said, ‘That sounds like a great idea. That's a perfect Hitchcock sort of premise.’ And then I didn't hear from him for a while. And just before New York went into lockdown the first time, David and I saw each other again. And he said, ‘Are you still interested in that? I'm ready to write it.’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ And so he wrote it during lockdown and handed it to me last fall. And there we go.”
Soderbergh and his team shot KIMI under COVID protocols last year. Signs of the pandemic will be evident in the film as some characters will wear masks in scenes, and Kravitz’s character Angela is agoraphobic so, as Soderbergh explained, “[Angela] is very much an indoor cat. And so what we've all been going through, doesn't really bother her much at all because she’s kind of drawn toward staying at home anyway. This is sort of part of her character that ends up being crucial to her having to decide how much she wants to pursue what she thinks is a bad incident. So it was tricky when we were shooting in the spring to judge where we would be when the movie comes out.”
Soderbergh understood the risk of possibly alienating some viewers by acknowledging the pandemic in his film: “You could make an argument that people, for the most part, don't want to watch something in which this is still going on. They want to live in a world in which we're past this. So I totally understand that. In this case, it kind of added something to the story. And we had a lot of discussions about, ‘Wow, where are we going to be in a year?’ And none of us could have seen Omicron coming in March or April of last year, but it turns out, I kind of leaned toward us still being in the space where masks are an issue, just because I thought it's possible. So you see when she interacts with people, not everybody's wearing one, but clearly, it's still a thing in the culture.”
The pandemic, though, isn’t the focus of KIMI. Corporations like Amazon and devices like Alexa are. “I'm just sort of stunned that people allow these devices in their homes at all. The idea that it is only ‘activated’ when you speak to it and activated is just ridiculous to me. I mean, the idea of just having no privacy,” Soderbergh said. “There's no ‘get’ for me that would make it worth it. I was interested in working with a story in which that is a central question. Is it worth it to have one of these things in your home?”
Soderbergh believes “you should be” scared of companies like Amazon: “These companies function like governments and like countries they're that big. As far as I can tell, there's no country's economy that's working the way shit’s working over at Apple right now. These are incredibly powerful influential entities. Run by people who are not elected and yet have arguably as much or more control over our daily lives than our government does. It's this kind of quiet transfer of influence and power that's taken place in the last two decades [that] is interesting to me. It invariably leads to consequences that nobody could have anticipated, and as we know the law is so far behind what's actually going on in the culture, that by the time they start having hearings on this it's too late.”
KIMI debuts only on HBO Max on February 10. In addition to Zoë Kravitz, the cast includes Jaime Camil, Erika Christensen, Derek DelGaudio, Robin Givens, Charles Halford, Devin Retray, Jacob Vargas, and Rita Wilson.
Continue reading...