BEVERLY HILLS, Calif.

THE first time Gina Carano met with the director Steven Soderbergh she arrived with a black eye and an air of depression. Just days earlier she had experienced her first loss as a professional mixed martial arts fighter: She’d been taken to the mat in 4 minutes 59 seconds by an impressively sturdy Brazilian, Cristiane Santos, who is known as Cyborg. What Ms. Carano couldn’t have known until Mr. Soderbergh told her — especially because she’d never heard of him — is that he had recently experienced the film industry version of a technical knockout: Sony Pictures had pulled the plug on his version of the sports drama “Moneyball.”

“It was an interesting place for us both,” Ms. Carano, 29, said recently, recalling how their moods were perfectly in sync during that initial meeting at a cafe in San Diego, where her parents have a home. “We were two wounded birds just sitting there, going, like, ‘Life isn’t fair sometimes.’ ”

Mr. Soderbergh had an antidote for the bitter pills they each had swallowed. “The first thing you need to do is just immediately get back to work,” said Mr. Soderbergh, who, post-“Moneyball,” had been wallowing in front of the television when he spotted Ms. Carano in a match. He was struck by the notion that she would be ideal as the lethal covert operator in a “pseudo-Bond” action film he had been thinking about. “She needed to get her head out of that fight,” he said. “There’s nothing, in her case, like somebody saying, ‘You’re going to be the star of a movie’ to put yourself in a different space.”

Taking a page from the Chuck Norris and Steven Seagal franchises, Mr. Soderbergh envisioned “Haywire,” opening on Jan. 20, as a revenge thriller that capitalized on the effortless-looking athleticism of the pretty dark-haired Ms. Carano, who is considered one of the world’s top female fighters. What didn’t concern him was that her on-camera experience until then had been limited mostly to televised mixed martial arts bouts, a brief cameo in the direct-to-DVD movie “Blood and Bones” and a two-season stint competing under the name Crush on the reality contest “American Gladiators.”