How Russian director Ilya Naishuller made his way to Hollywood.

Ilya Naishuller's film Hardcore (in international release) was released in more than 30 countries in April 2016 and grossed $14,3 million - a very good result for a film that cost about $3 million to film, not counting advertising. budget.

The film itself became possible thanks to the success of a viral video that appeared because of the music - Naishuller played hard indie rock in the band Biting Elbows, which he created in 2008. The video for the song Bad Motherfucker, from which the idea for the film was born, collected 10 million views on YouTube in the first ten days.

The video captured on a GoPro video camera, fixed on the face of the main character, is a short action movie in which the hero beats off from numerous enemies in the office and on the streets of the city. To date, more than 34 million people have watched it.

Attention: frames of the clip may shock

The next day, after the video was posted on YouTube, Nayshuller received a Facebook message from a person with whom he was not familiar with at that time: “Bad Motherfucker turned out very good. I would like to talk to you. Timur. "

A week later, he and the second producer of the clip, Ekaterina Kononenko, were sitting in Los Angeles in the office of the author of the message, a famous Russian director and producer Timur Bekmambetov, who has been working in Hollywood for about 10 for years.

Bekmambetov, the founder of the Bazelevs film company, suggested Ilya Naishuller to shoot a full-length film on GoPro, acting as an investor and co-producer of the film. The company Bazelevs was engaged in hire "Hardcore" in Russia.

True, Naishuller was not at all so sure that, based on the shock, but a short clip, an equally effective hour and a half movie could turn out.

“Agents vied for me to cooperate, and I asked them: guys, you understand that this is a clip, maybe I will not do anything else? That is, I knew that I was cool. But how do they know that? They did not even see other works, ”says the director.

Despite third-party offers, after talking with Bekmambetov, it was decided not to sell the rights to the next film, but to make it in partnership with a famous producer. Naishuller admits that if it were not for Bekmambetov, he would not have thought of shooting a merry and bloody fighter.

“I wrote a very serious movie - spy, dramatic, psychological, after which it was difficult to switch to such a “fan”,” he explains. They decided to shoot the big film with the same GoPro camera.

The production of the film in the first two years cost about 200 million rubles ($3 million at the current exchange rate - ForumDaily note). About half was invested by Bekmambetov, the rest by Russian investors attracted by Naishuller.

They decided to shoot in Moscow - they could have done it in Hollywood, but the whole world has already seen in the cinema what Los Angeles looks like. From this point of view, the Russian capital seemed to Nishuller less hackneyed. As planned, the viewer sees the whole "Hardcore" through the eyes of the protagonist, cyborg Henry, who rescues his wife from the villains.

In this case, Henry himself does not appear at all in the frame from the side, so the main "face" of the film is Jimmy, cyborg accomplice. It was played by the fashionable South African actor Charlto Copley, who previously appeared in the films “District No. XXUMX”, “Oldboy” and “Maleficent”.

“I panicked for a whole week thinking that this would be a character that Charlto could not refuse. Then I realized that the actor would not refuse to play many roles at once, and came up with the idea that Jimmy is constantly reincarnating. And of course, he immediately caught fire, because he loves characters, he is what is called a characteristic actor, ”Naishuller recalls.

In the role of the villain, Danila Kozlovsky agreed to play, in the episodes also the leader of the Leningrad group Sergei Shnurov, director Kirill Serebrennikov and famous British actor Tim Roth flash.

When the first version of the film editing was already ready, the producers decided to attract additional funding to finalize the film through a crowdfunding campaign on the platform Indiegogo.com. As a result, we managed to collect almost $ 255 thousand, then spent on sound, graphics, music and other post-production.

Hardcore Henry was one of the first full-length films in the world, almost entirely filmed on a GoPro camera. The protagonist with a camera on his face does not say a word for the entire film, all the action takes place around him, but this action is very much: fights, chases, explosions, escape from the tank and falling from the clouds in a glass capsule.

Shooting stunt scenes in the film took 90 shifts, which left the bulk of the budget, recalls Naishuller.

Due to the peculiarities of shooting on GoPro, the graphics for the film went up by 35 – 40% of the original budget. But the GoPro company supplied the Hardcore team with cameras, software and round-the-clock support in the person of a dedicated engineer for free.

“We were the seventh in the world who received such software. Before us, it was received by George Lucas, Michael Bay, the dudes who did Need for Speed ​​- in a word, all serious people. And here are the new guys from Moscow: they say, we have helmets and we want to run. When you make an interesting film, people pull themselves up, ”says Naishuller.

Shoot the film decided in English. This helped the film to become successful in the international box office, says Nikolai Borunkov, director of the Twentieth Century Fox CIS Filmmaker’s film distribution development department.

“For the American and Western audiences in general, it is very important that there is not only a language, but also cultural peculiarities, cultural values ​​that are understandable to their society. It is very difficult to produce exclusively national films in the USA, in principle, European cinema as such and Russian in particular work very poorly, ”Borunkov notes.

According to the website Box Office Mojo, $9 million of the $14,3 million in worldwide box office receipts come from the United States and $2,7 million from Russia and the CIS. The authors say they could have collected more, if not for the age limit for viewing 18+ and the R rating assigned to the film due to the abundance of bloody scenes and obscene language.

STX Entertainment, an American company, bought the rights to an international film rental for $ 10 million, which then invested about $ 600 thousand into film refinement: the film was re-voiced, added graphics and rescheduled the final scene, thereby bringing the final budget to more than $ 3 million.

Naishuller is already seriously preparing for the next film. In June, he, along with producers Ekaterina Kononenko and Ruben Adamyan, founded Versus Pictures - Bely Ut Film Company LLC, with which he plans to engage in search and direct production of films in Russia and the United States. American firm Naishuller registered with another co-producer of "Hardcore" Inga Weinstein-Smith.

The rest of the hardcore's fee (its director doesn’t disclose) Naishuller invested two scenarios in the development. One of them is for a horror thriller in collaboration with Russian scriptwriter Nikolai Kulikov, the author of the scripts for the films “The Crew” and “Legend No. XXUMX”. The second is the 17-serial “spy” television film in English along with American screenwriter Will Stewart.

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