Steven Soderbergh loves a good thriller – most people do, he knows. But he’s always conscious of making sure that whatever it is, it isn’t just “single use plastic”. “It’s got some aspect to it percolating underneath that keeps it from being completely disposable after you’ve watched it,” the American film director says. Needless to say, he was especially happy that the timing worked out for Kimi , a classic, edge-of-your-seat thriller about a home assistant device that records what may have been a murder and the tech worker (Zoë Kravitz) who hears it. Screenwriter David Koepp ( Panic Room ) had floated the idea years earlier after reading about the debates over whether Amazon Echo recordings could be used as evidence in crime cases. The script, which he wrote early in the coronavirus pandemic, had shades of Rear Window , The Conversation and Blow Up , and was irresistible to Soderbergh. “Thrillers allow you licence to do things stylistically that you can’t really get away with in a straight drama or a comedy,” he says. “It demands a sort of bravura visual approach because that enhances the story.” He even helped design the device. “I rarely have specific design ideas. But for whatever reason a shape occurred to me,” he says. “I took one of them home with me and I have it at the office as a memento.” This film, he knew, would live and die by its main character, Angela Childs, a prickly, agoraphobic analyst with her own personal traumas who the camera is on most of the time. Kravitz was not someone he knew personally, but he’d been a fan of her work for a while, especially in High Fidelity . Where to see the lavish interiors used in filming of HBO’s The Gilded Age “I was convinced early on, that’s a movie star,” he says. “There’s a specific challenge in having one person dominate the entire enterprise that I think is really fun if you have the right person and she just has all the tools. “In addition to being a natural beauty, she radiates intelligence. And she has molecular control over her body and voice and face. She just can do it all and this movie needed it all.” Kravitz was directly coming off of The Batman , a shoot that, because of Covid-19 complications, took more than a year. She’d wanted to work with Soderbergh, but she could also relate to Angela, having been essentially trapped in her own flat for six months over the pandemic. Because things moved so quickly, they didn’t meet until the first day on set, though they had had a chance to bond over text. She’d known from friends that he worked quickly, but she didn’t quite appreciate just how fast until she was there. And it was a refreshing change of pace from a massive blockbuster like The Batman . “It’s a whole experience,” she says. “Obviously the result is so amazing. But the opportunity to actually see the way this happens is a trip. The Steven Soderbergh experience is a trip … “Batman is such a big film and Matt [Reeves] is such a wonderfully tedious director – we do so many takes. It was cool to pivot to a very different style of filmmaking.” Soderbergh appreciated Kravitz’s commitment to really behaving like someone who is alone. She contributed ideas that they’d end up using about having bad hair dye, since, she knew, a lot of people stuck at home were experimenting. “She has this fearlessness,” he says. “She isn’t protecting anything, and that’s rare.” Although they filmed Kimi about 10 months ago, it feels current in the way it deals with the pandemic, where some people have moved on and some are still masking. It is, he thinks, a great time to be somebody who makes things. But, at the same time, he sees that the uncertainty in the industry is “absolutely unprecedented”. “People are overwhelmed and overworked,” he says. “I think it’s really difficult to be a company trying to figure out what the five-year plan should look like. Here’s what solves all your problems: Making some good stuff. That solves everything. “I’ve always encouraged anybody that I talked to at Warner to adopt the curation approach. It’s better to make fewer really good things than a lot of things that are OK.” Kimi is available on HBO GO, Now TV