Interview with Zoë Kravitz on “Kimi”: “The world is a wild place, we don't know who is watching us”

“It's like watching a genius work,” Zoë Kravitz summarized the experience of filming Kimi with Steven Soderbergh . “He is a director for actors”, defined the director of Traffic (2000), Ocean's Eleven (2001) and the series The Knick (2014-15). “I've been a fan of his work for a long time, and I honestly never thought I could work with him.” But one day he received the call from the filmmaker —” every actor's dream” — and had the opportunity to see firsthand what some colleagues had told him.

Her character is a voice interpreter for a company that makes devices such as Alexa or Google Assistant, Amygdala. That which allows him to earn a living from home - an important detail, since he suffers from agoraphobia. “My job as a voice interpreter for streams is to listen to people while using the Kimi device to see if it's working well,” he told Infobae. “If there's slang or something Kimi doesn't understand, I can make adjustments. So one day I'm at home, listening to the streams, and I listen to what looks like a woman in distress.”

The screams horrify her. He checks the audio over and over again, cleaning up some sounds, to hear better, and he realizes that the woman was a victim of a crime, perhaps a rape or a murder. “I report it to my company, I follow all the protocols they tell me and I feel that no one pays me the attention they should. I finally have to leave my house to do what I think is the right thing to do, which ends up getting Angela into serious trouble.”

That's easier said than done. “Angela is a person very attached to routine,” the daughter of musician Leni Kravitz analyzed her character. “It's not just that I want to make sure this person is okay: he doesn't know how to live his day if he doesn't do everything as planned. That gives him peace and a sense of control.” But suddenly on his to-do list there is an item that cannot be crossed out to go to the next one.

“In the end this kind of obsessive-compulsive disorder ends up saving the situation,” he added about a twist in David Koepp's script. “It's the best script I've read in a long time. I've reached a point where we take a lot of notes on scripts. But I finished this script and I didn't have any. So perfectly executed, so concise, so efficient, so playful... I couldn't wait to watch the movie.”

Not to mention the pandemic and its effects, the script seems to refer to a world traumatized after COVID-19. In a 2021 interview Soderbergh spoke of the environment of greatest anguish in which one lives, and directly alluded to the state of Angela's character. The film also explores how millions of people opened the doors of their homes, even more than before, to different technologies that made life easier during confinement but invaded privacy and influenced their decisions.

“David and Steven play with something very interesting,” Kravitz continued, “what is paranoia? The world is a wild place, we don't know who is watching us. This character has irrational fears, and her friends, mother and therapist treat her as if she were crazy.” But Kimi's recording is there, and the woman is still screaming in it. It's not paranoia. “What do we do when no one listens to us? You have to do things for yourself. His desire to help this woman is greater than his fear of leaving her home.”

One of the people who apparently listens to it is a sub- Sheryl Sandberg played by Rita Wilson, who uses all the good manners of Silicon Valley to bureaucrically hinder anything that could do bad to the tech business. “Rita is very well chosen for the role,” the Catwoman from The Batman observed about her partner in one of the scenes she most liked doing. “Play a kind of maternal figure, someone you feel you can trust. I think we understand why Angela trusts her, and when she changes it's scary.”

It is climates like those in that scene that revealed to him what it is to be directed by Soderberg. “What he does, even with the tone of this film, is not what I felt when I read the script. He created a much creepier atmosphere, something that greatly elevated the story.”

He was amazed by the way Soderberg works, with an even physical commitment: “I've never seen anything like it before. He's so fast, so smart, he knows exactly what he wants... He edits himself, because he's the one who operates the camera. It is very interesting to see him think about what he is going to film next: he looks at the place, he sits down for a second and then says “I want to be here”. It's like he's watching the movie in his head and then creating what he's already seen.”

Just as Kimi seems to have been an inadvertent witness to a crime, the public will follow the facts seen from that camera. “It's great to see someone who has done this for a long time and loves to tell stories, and is constantly trying to find new and creative ways to do it. It's extremely inspiring. I've never felt so eager to see a movie I'm working on.”

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