The panel for Steven Soderbergh’s Haywire certainly brought some important lessons. First among them: do not mess with MMA fighter Gina Carano.
Yes, the trained kick ass-artist proved that she’s got the moves and knows how to use them against such people as Channing Tatum and, in the bruising fight scene that Soderbergh brought to Hall H at Comic-Con, Michael Fassbender. Carano plays Mallory Kane, a female special ops agent who is betrayed by her own people and must go on the run before tracking down those responsible...
Asked about when he first discovered Carano, Soderbergh told the story: “I saw Gina fighting on TV. I Tuned in out of curiosity, and literally thought, ‘why doesn’t someone build a movie around her?’ I’d never seen someone fight like that in a cage! Then two years ago exactly I took the train here to meet her to talk about being in a movie.” After what the Carano described as “an amazing four-hour conversation,” Soderbergh decided he had to try to get something going. So he contacted Lem Dobbs, writer of The Limey, to come up with a “female revenge movie.”
Says the director, “I felt it would be interesting and unusual if we created a female character who performed physically, for real. No doubles, no cutting away. The rule was it had to be real…the result is that the film’s fights are shorter than you’re probably used to seeing in movie. In a realistic fight scene, somebody’s gonna get the drop kick and it’s over.” Although the guys wore a little padding, Soderbergh admits he could tell with Fassbender’s scenes “that those pads weren’t really a lot of help.”
Tatum also took the brunt of Carano’s power. “She actually knocked someone out in rehearsal,” laughs the G.I. Joe star. The silly lad also asked her to kick him harder at one point during their big fight. She obliged. “It was a challenge and I lost.” Talking of challenges, he faced a big one when called upon to hit her with a ketchup bottle at one moment, but couldn’t quite bring himself to go through with it. Carano soon cured him of that. “She called me a female p-word and then I had to do it for my masculinity. But then she hit me twice as hard and I didn’t want to hit her anymore…She pretty much kicked my ass.”
But Carano faced her own challenge, since she’d never acted before. “I just stayed open to it. I had to learn a lot about acting. I got acting 101. It ruined movies for me for a couple of months, but now I appreciate them even more.”
Oh, and last word to Soderbergh, who addressed all the talk about his retirement. Now we know whom to blame! “Matt Damon is apparently as about discreet as a 14-year-old girl… I had this drunken conversation with him in Chicago and four days later it was in the paper. He remembered it verbatim! I was just drunk and going off. It kind of got blown out of proportion there, and it’s Matt’s fault.”
Haywire, which also features Ewan McGregor, Antonio Banderas, Michael Douglas, Bill Paxton and Michael Angarano, looks to be a solid action thriller from Soderbergh.
Check out the trailer, which premiered at the panel, below…