"was filmed in Russia over 124 shooting days. The editing of the material, recording and sound mixing took place in Los Angeles. 13 studios were involved in computer graphics, nine of which were American. The editing, which took 6 months, was directed by Vlad Kaptur And Steve Mirkovich, famous for his work on such major projects as “The Passion of the Christ” and “Con Air”. The 20-time Oscar nominee did the sound mixing at Sony Studios. Kevin O'Connell.
The starting point and stylistic basis for “a” was music video"Bad Motherfucker", filmed by Ilya Naishuller for his indie rock band Biting Elbows in 2013.
The video became one of the hits on YouTube, appeared in the news releases of federal Russian television channels and was noted by major foreign directors, actors and musicians: Robert Rodriguez, Darren Aronofsky, Samuel L. Jackson, Sylvester Stallone, Sacha Baron Cohen, Tim Roth, Parkom Chan Wook, Jared Leto, group Placebo and others. One of the first videos to rate:
« I was struck by the freshness of the idea and the style of filming, I found Ilya’s contacts and called him on the same day,- recalls the producer. - As a viewer, I wanted to see feature film, filmed in the same manner, and invited Ilya to work on it. He was wary of the idea, because no one had done anything like this before, but after some time Ilya nevertheless took up this experiment».
The film was shot entirely on a portable GoPro camera, popular among extreme sports athletes, which was mounted on the cameraman's head. Through his eyes, the film will be seen by viewers who will be able to feel themselves in the shoes of the hero of an action-packed action movie and face their enemies literally face to face.
According to the plot, the main character of the film Henry wakes up in a military research laboratory for creating cyborg people. All he knows about himself is that he was once happily married to the beautiful Estelle(Haley Bennett), which just brought him back to life. Without having time to understand his past, Henry is forced to go to war with the villain Akan(),who kidnaps Estelle. In search of his beloved, Henry destroys everything in his path. The only one who isn't trying to kill him is the mysterious Jimmy(),who has his own scores to settle with Akan. The heroes will have to not only save the girl, but also stop the creation of an army of cyborgs capable of laying the world at the feet of Akana.
For the sake of filming “e”, he not only changed his usual role and played a villain, but also radically changed his appearance.
“According to the plot, my hero Akan is a villain with telekinetic abilities. When they put a blond wig on me for the first time, put on white eyebrows and inserted some unrealistic lenses, it became clear that the filmmakers had a great feel for the image, and I just decided to trust them. In general, everything worked out for me in this project: great idea, an unusual format, a special dimension created by Ilya Naishuller, and, of course, the role of the main villain. It’s great that this is a debut film for many of its participants: they place high stakes on it and treat it as something new in their lives, which gives additional energy and creates a unique atmosphere on the set.”
Partner Russian star based on the film became a Hollywood actor . He gained worldwide fame and love from film fans after leading role in the science fiction film "". A new surge of interest in the actor around the world occurred after his participation in the film “,” where Matt Damon became Sharlto’s partner, and the fantasy “Maleficent,” in which Copley challenged Angelina Jolie herself.
« I knew Timur before - we considered ideas for joint projects, but before that I had never had the pleasure of working with him. Although, I admit, I had doubts about this film: this is a serious challenge for me and our entire team, because “Hardcore” is completely unlike any film that has ever been released. My first question to Ilya Naishuller was probably unoriginal: “The short film is great, but can you create something like this for ninety minutes?” Today I have no doubt about this, and we all really hope that audiences will watch “Hardcore” in theaters - for the sake of complete immersion in the atmosphere of the film».
To obtain a high-quality and clear image that meets the requirements of a large screen, the creators of “Hardcore” developed unique system camera stabilization. GoPro's smooth movement was achieved using magnetic stabilization and a frame made of particularly durable material, which allowed the cameras to withstand fights, pyrotechnic explosions, shooting, falls and other extreme situations. During the filming of such episodes, the camera was mounted on the head of one of the stuntmen, including a parkour dancer. Sergei Valyaev. In one of the scenes, he had to climb the walls of a high-rise building on Kotelnicheskaya Embankment and then jump from a height of more than 80 meters. To achieve maximum realism of what was happening and a feeling of complete immersion, the stuntmen performed all the stunts live: computer graphics were used only for auxiliary purposes, for example, to remove safety cables from the frame.
« We jokingly call our film a “stunt parade”: it will feature great amount stunt scenes with a minimum computer graphics, - explains Ilya Naishuller. - In addition to the already known ones, we came up with tricks that no one had filmed before. Two teams were involved in staging the stunts at once, under the leadership of Alexander Stetsenko and Oleg Poddubny.”
The filmmakers achieved an authentic first-person view by using an unusual camera mount at chin level. Thus, the system operator could peek at the tiny monitor and understand what exactly he was filming. At the same time, the frame size did not change during the action in order to maintain the complete emotional immersion of the audience. And a spectacle awaits them that cannot leave them indifferent.
“One day we were filming on Old Arbat and, of course, we couldn’t block it completely, - the director recalls. - So we simply surrounded the area with tape and asked people to walk around it. Several times that day, in response to calls from concerned citizens, the police came until we thought of covering the mannequin representing the corpse with cardboard: thanks to the team of Petr Gorshenin FX DESIGN GROUP INT, which was engaged in plastic makeup, everything looked so natural that passers-by simply could not help but inform responsible authorities".
Watch the movie “Hardcore (2015)” in Russian for free online
“It seemed to me that good director should make serious films. And then I thought: you don’t have to be anyone, you have to do what you like,” says director and musician Ilya Naishuller. “If you like playing toy soldiers, let’s make a movie for a 15-year-old guy, like I would have made for myself 15 years ago.”
Ilya Naishuller was one of ten people who played the role of the main character in his debut film
Ilya Naishuller's film Hardcore (Hardcore Henry internationally) 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 including the advertising budget ). The film itself was made possible thanks to the success of a viral video that appeared because of the music, which Naishuller took up at a time when he still wanted to be a serious director.
“I knew I was cool”
“I wanted to make a film that people would watch and then say to their friends: did you see it, no? Sit down, you’re f***ing eating now!” — Naishuller openly describes the idea of “Hardcore”, sipping a spicy chai latte and taking a drag. electronic cigarette. The latter was first seen by actor Tim Roth, whom he met in California and persuaded to star in an episode of his debut film, he adds, as if by the way.
Naishuller dreamed of becoming a director since childhood. “My father was a resuscitator in an ambulance, and on the side he sold pirated cassettes; we had a huge number of these cassettes at home. Mom said: don’t watch horror and pornography.” And I watched everything according to this principle,” he recalls.
Having entered the Humanitarian Institute of Television and Radio Broadcasting. M.A. A Lithuanian, Naishuller left him after a year and a half, getting a job at Mosfilm: “I cleverly went through the pass system and looked every day for someone who needed an assistant. He played firecrackers, carried coffee, was an assistant, translator, and driver.” At the same time, Naishuller was writing a script for a big spy drama and playing hard indie rock in the band Biting Elbows, which he created in 2008. It was for his group in March 2013 that he shot a video for the song Bad Motherfucker - a short action film in which the hero fights off numerous enemies in the office and on the streets of the city. A video shot with a GoPro video camera mounted on the protagonist's face, which gives a "eye-to-eye" view, as in computer games, went viral and received more than 10 million views in the first ten days.
$255 thousand graphics and sound were collected by the producers of the film through the Indiegogo.com platform
Naishuller does not disclose how much it cost him to shoot the mini-film, he only says that due to financial difficulties, it took almost a year to film. The original sponsor refused the contract after seeing footage of a dog being thrown out of a window: at that time, Ilya already had half of the filmed video and a debt of 350 thousand rubles, which he borrowed for filming.
Help came from an unexpected place: the sponsor of the video was the Austrian manufacturer of Neft vodka, allegedly created by Siberian oil workers: a recognizable bottle of this vodka appears in the hand of the main character. “They gave me an amount that completely covered the video,” recalls Naishuller (vodka producers refused to communicate with RBC).
The day after the clip was posted on YouTube, Naishuller received a message on Facebook from someone he didn’t know at the time: “You did a great job with Bad Motherfucker. I'd like to talk to you. Timur." A week later, he and the second producer of the video, Ekaterina Kononenko, were sitting in Los Angeles in the office of the author of the message, director Timur Bekmambetov, discussing the details of filming the feature film.
“It was like a dream for us that suddenly became a reality. Two young people, a director and a producer, suddenly, out of the blue, find themselves in Los Angeles negotiating with a huge number of agents who make us various tempting offers,” recalls Ekaterina Kononenko.
True, Naishuller was not at all so sure that based on a shocking, but short clip, an equally effective one and a half hour film could be obtained. “Agents vying with each other offered to cooperate with me, and I asked them: guys, do you understand that this is a video, maybe I won’t do anything else? That is, I knew that I was cool. But how do they know this? They haven’t even seen other works,” he laughs.
Timur Bekmambetov, producer, founder of the film company Bazelevs, saw a video for the song Bad Motherfucker on YouTube, after which he suggested that Ilya Naishuller make a full-length film on GoPro. Acted as an investor and co-producer of the film, and the Bazelevs company distributed it in Russia
Ilya’s interlocutors doubted him much less. “I was not just a guy from Russia, but a guy who made a video that the whole world watches. I've met absolutely different people, from guitar salesmen to world-class directors who shook my hand and told me they hoped Hardcore would be on the same level as this video,” says Naishuller.
Despite third-party offers, according to Kononenko, after conversations with Bekmambetov, it was decided not to sell the rights to future movie, but to do it independently and in partnership with Timur. “There was no feeling that an adult and powerful producer was taking us under his wing and we were in awe of him,” says Ekaterina.
Naishuller admits that if it weren’t for Bekmambetov, it wouldn’t have occurred to him to make a fun and bloody action movie. “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.
“When we filmed for 2.5 weeks final scene with cyborgs on the roof, we poured 40-50 liters of artificial blood a day - on the extras, on the floor, on the walls. It was a very difficult shoot,” admits Ilya Naishuller (Photo: Andrey Kovalev for RBC)
Off-budget experiment
Initially, the producers of “Hardcore” planned to meet a budget of 100 million rubles, but at the time of signing the contract it was not clear how much the artists, music and stunts would cost, says Ekaterina Kononenko. “Since it was an experiment, no one had ever made such a movie and at the agreement stage there was no final script, it was not clear how many stunts and stunt scenes there would be. Ilya came up with absolutely mind-boggling things, and we understood that the budget would grow,” she says.
The production of the film in the first two years cost about 200 million rubles. About half was invested by Timur Bekmambetov, the rest by Russian investors attracted by Naishuller (he refused to name their names). “These were acquaintances of acquaintances of acquaintances who invested in cinema. Of course, it was easier for them to make a decision when I said that I already had part of the money from Timur,” says Ilya.
They decided to film it in Moscow; they could have filmed it in Hollywood, but the whole world had already seen in films what Los Angeles looked like. From this point of view, the Russian capital seemed less hackneyed to Naishuller. As planned, the viewer sees the entire “Hardcore” through the eyes of the main character, the cyborg Henry, who saves his wife from villains. At the same time, Henry himself does not appear in the frame at all, so the main “face” of the film is Jimmy, the cyborg’s accomplice. He was played by the fashionable South African actor Sharlto Copley, who had previously starred in the films District 9, Oldboy and Maleficent.
Sergei Shnurov starred in an episode of “Hardcore” as a businessman who leads a squad of aggressive security guards
Copley knew Bekmambetov and had seen the Bad Motherfucker video, and therefore became interested in the project, says Naishuller. “I panicked for a week thinking about what kind of character it would be that Sharlto couldn’t refuse. Then he realized that the actor would not refuse to play many roles at once, and came up with the idea that Jimmy is constantly reincarnated. And he, of course, immediately caught fire, because he loves characters, he is, as they say, a character actor,” he recalls. Danila Kozlovsky agreed to star in the role of the villain; Sergei Shnurov, Kirill Serebrennikov and Tim Roth as Henry's father appear in the episodes - the latter, according to Naishuller, himself invited him to play a small cameo.
But a week before the start of filming, Sharlto Copley suddenly refused to participate, citing the fact that the director did not have enough money and experience and the film would not be completed before the start of his filming in Neill Blomkamp’s “Chappy the Robot.” Naishuller, who flew to Berlin in a panic to persuade him, discovered that the actor had already changed his mind and was leaving the agreement in force: it turned out that he had been persuaded to take the risk by actor George Clooney, with whom he had had dinner the day before.
“According to Sharlto, Clooney said: if it turns out to be complete nonsense, the film will not even come out or no one will watch it. But if something normal turns out, the whole world will really watch it, so you have to agree,” says Naishuller. “I took Neft vodka with me as a small souvenir and left it at the hotel where George was staying. I don’t know if he drank it or not, but I wrote to him: thank you for telling Sharlto not to refuse my film,” he laughs.
According to the director, Copley did not charge a high fee, agreeing to receive a portion of the profits. “Actors of this level live in chain hotels, drive executive cars with security, so Sharlto’s rider cost us more than his fee,” recalls Ekaterina Kononenko.
Ekaterina Kononenko, producer, met Ilya Naishuller back in her student days. She co-produced the video clip for the song Bad Motherfucker, and together with Ilya was developing a full-length spy drama, when an offer was received from Timur Bekmambetov to film “Hardcore”. She supervised the production of the film as a producer. In addition to “Hardcore,” she participated in the production of the films “Loves Not Loves” by Klim Shipenko (2014) and “Oxygen” by Ivan Vyrypaev (2008).
As advertising sponsors, through the company Bazelevs, we attracted already familiar Austrian vodka producers Neft, as well as the manufacturer mineral water Arkhyz and Reebok sportswear (the companies did not answer RBC’s questions). According to Naishuller, product placement accounted for only 5-10% of the film's total budget because filming was delayed: instead of the expected one and a half years from the start of filming to the film's release, three years and one week passed.
When the first version of the film was already ready, the producers decided to raise additional funding to finalize the film through a crowdfunding campaign on the Indiegogo.com platform. Depending on the size of the donation, users were offered gifts - from T-shirts and posters with the symbols of “Hardcore” to a mention in the credits. Through the platform, it was possible to raise almost $255 thousand, which was then spent on sound, graphics, music and other post-production, says Naishuller: “For cinema this is not enough, but for crowdfunding this is the top 1% of all campaigns. And then, the profit in the advertising sense that this campaign brought was enormous, because everyone wrote about it.”
Post-production for the film accounted for about 25% of the total cost, and was done by a total of 13 companies. “One company could not handle 1,800 frames for processing, especially with our budget,” explains Ilya. According to him, many manufacturers were cooperative and made discounts: for example, the Boston company Zero VFX agreed to do the graphics in the car chase scene for only $100 thousand, although the average price was $350-400 thousand. “They just wanted a show reel (sample shooting for portfolio. — RBC) and believed that it would be a great movie,” says Naishuller.
“At first we had the idea that the hero kills 166 people so that the film gets into the Guinness Book of Records. But after a week of filming, I realized that I needed to focus on cinema, and not on records,” says the director of “Hardcore.” (Photo: From the personal archive of Ilya Naishuller)
"Savage violence as a joke"
Hardcore Henry was one of the world's first full-length films shot almost entirely on a GoPro camera. Main character with a camera on his face, he doesn’t say a word throughout the entire film, all the action takes place around him, but there is a lot of this action: fights, chases, explosions, running away from a tank and falling from the clouds in a glass capsule. Filming the stunt scenes in the film took 90 shifts, which took up the bulk of the budget, Naishuller recalls.
The main stunts were performed by a team of stuntmen from Tula under the leadership of Alexander Stetsenko, who were invited to the film by the second director Zaur Zaseev. As Stetsenko told RBC, thanks to the use of GoPro, all the tricks were staged a little differently than usual. “On the one hand, the stunt team could hide behind the camera. Because the camera was on the stuntman, we knew where the camera was looking and what it was seeing, and that made life a lot easier,” he recalls. However, such a camera creates distance, and all the stunts had to be performed in very close contact. “If you shoot with a regular camera, the cars are chasing each other at a distance of 3 m, and it looks normal. But here we had to move literally 50 cm to create the desired effect,” says Stetsenko.
Hardcore was one of the first films to be shot almost entirely on a GoPro camcorder. During filming, dozens of cameras were broken, recalls Ilya Naishuller (Photo: From the personal archive of Ilya Naishuller)
Due to the peculiarities of shooting on a GoPro, the graphics for the film increased in price by 35-40% of the original budget: unlike professional film cameras, the software for creating graphics does not automatically process video from a GoPro, and everything had to be completed manually. But GoPro supplied the Hardcore team with cameras, software and 24/7 support represented by a dedicated engineer.
“We were the seventh in the world to receive such software. Before us, George Lucas, Michael Bay, the guys who made Need for Speed received it - in a word, all serious people. And here are these beginner guys from Moscow: they say, we have helmets and we want to run. When you do interesting film, people are pulling themselves up,” says Naishuller.
We decided to shoot on English language. “In Russian it would be illogical. Why limit yourself to the CIS countries if you can limit yourself to the whole world?” - says the director. This helped the film become successful at international distribution, says Nikolai Borunkov, director of the development department of the film distributor Twentieth Century Fox CIS. “For the American and Western viewers in general, it is very important that there is not only a language, but also cultural characteristics, cultural values that are understandable to their society. It is very difficult to release exclusively national films in the USA; European cinema as such and Russian cinema in particular work there very poorly,” notes Borunkov.
After some thought, Naishuller abandoned the very serious tone of the film and rewrote the script. “I wanted people to laugh not at us, but with us, which is why the film works all over the world. When there is wild violence in the frame, and then an unexpected joke, because of the contrast, all the sensations are brighter,” says the director. In addition, he wanted to make the film as high quality and action-packed as possible. “I thought people should freak out about the action. They should watch the film and think: I've never seen anything like this! I came up with it, and it took my breath away, because I had never seen anything like this myself,” explains Naishuller.
According to Box Office Mojo, Hardcore Henry was released in more than 30 countries and grossed more than $14.3 million worldwide, of which $9 million came from the United States and $2.7 million from Russia and the CIS. I could have collected more if it weren’t for the restriction for 18+ viewing and the R rating assigned to the film due to the abundance of bloody scenes and obscene language, Kononenko believes. The producers did not want to soften the rating, although the film is largely aimed at teenagers, she says: “There is violence-violence, and there is violence-attraction. And we work in the plane of the attraction.”
$14,3
— film grosses at the worldwide box office
175 million rub.— fees in Russia
Sources: Box Office Mojo, kinopoisk.ru
The most important is the second one
The rights to international distribution of the film were bought for $10 million by the small American company STX Entertainment, founded in 2014, and distribution in Russia was purchased by Timur Bekmambetov’s Bazelevs. “The rental estimate was somewhat high, but in the end everyone was happy,” says Kononenko. “We didn’t make a dizzying revolution in world cinema, but our distributors and we recouped the costs.”
According to Ilya Naishuller, after purchasing the rights, STX invested about another $600 thousand in refining the film: they re-sounded the film, added graphics and reshot the final scene, thereby bringing the final budget, including post-production, to more than $3 million. Advertising costs were a separate line item , which were paid for by Bazelevs in Russia and STX in the USA: according to Kononenko, the advertising budget was comparable to the production part of the film.
Director Ilya Naishuller (left), who partially played the cyborg Henry, and South African actor Sharlto Copley as his accomplice Jimmy in Harkdor fight off the villains using improvised means (Photo: From the personal archive of Ilya Naishuller)
According to the portal kinopoisk.ru, box office receipts in Russia amounted to 175 million rubles. - an impressive amount of box office for an action thriller, says Nikolai Borunkov from Twentieth Century Fox CIS. “It’s rare for films in this genre to earn significantly more—a thriller on the border with horror with elements of unconventional presentation. This film is difficult to classify into one category or another, but for this genre and for this film it is a very successful commercial result,” says Borunkov.
Now the film's producers are placing big hopes on sale online (from July 12) and on DVD and Blu-ray, which will begin on July 26. “The target audience in the concept of Americans - video gamers - does not go to cinemas. There are a lot of examples when films for video gamers did not bring anything to the cinema, so now the most interesting things begin for “Hardcore,” hopes Ilya.
New fame brings new opportunities, and so far Naishuller the director defeats Naishuller the musician (Ilya continues to play in the band).
"When Bad Motherfucker came out, the Pixies (American alternative band.— RBC) conveyed to us through the agency: they say, we will let your group warm up for us in New York and Los Angeles, but for this you will have to shoot us a video. Very profitable proposition, but because of “Hardcore” I had to refuse: there is no other life during filming,” says the director.
Naishuller is preparing very seriously for his next film. “The hardest thing is the first movie, the most important is the second one, because it shows if you were just lucky with the first one,” he says. In June of this year, he, together with producers Ekaterina Kononenko and Ruben Adamyan, founded the company Versus Pictures - White Umbrella Film Company LLC, with the help of which he plans to search for and directly produce films in Russia and the USA (where Naishuller registered the company together with another co-producer "Hardcore" by Inga Weinstein-Smith).
Naishuller invested the rest of the fee from “Hardcore” (Ilya does not disclose it) in the development of two scripts: one of them is for a horror thriller in collaboration with Russian screenwriter Nikolai Kulikov, author of scripts for the films “Crew”, “Gorko”, “Legend” No. 17." The second is an eight-part “spy” television film in English with American screenwriter Will Stewart.
There are no specific sales or orders yet, but they will be if there is a cool idea, Naishuller believes. “Today art is something that is relatively easy to make, but not so easy to invent. So you decide how to come up with it and go do it, all the tools are there,” says Ilya.
April 7, 2016 of the year Film company BAZELEVS will release an action film in Russia "Hardcore" producer Timur Bekmamebtov and director Ilya Naishuller. Shot entirely from a first-person perspective, Hardcore offers viewers a unique, fast-paced fantasy action experience that has never been seen before on the big screen. The main roles in the film were played by Sharlto Copley And Danila Kozlovsky, who played a real villain for the first time. The film also features: Tim Roth Haley Bennett, Sergei Shnurov, Daria Charusha, Ravshana Kurkova, Svetlana Ustinova, Polina Filonenko, Alexander Pal, Kirill Serebrennikov and others. Daria Charusha performed on the project not only as an actress, but also as a composer. The Hardcore soundtrack included songs by Queen, The Temptations, The Sonics, The Stranglers, and Biting Elbows, which acquired a new sound in the film. Another musical highlight of the project was a track specially written by the vocalist of the famous System groups of a Down Serj Tankian.
In Russia, the film "Hardcore" will be released in partnership with a free multiplayer online shooter Warface gaming division Mail.Ru Group. IN Warface There are more than 30 million registered users from Russia and the CIS. The film and the game are brought together not only by the first-person view, but also by the incredible intensity of the action, of which every observer becomes an integral part.
“Hardcore” was filmed in Moscow, and the editing, recording and sound mixing took place in Los Angeles. 13 studios were involved in computer graphics, nine of which were American. The directors of the installation, which took 6 months, were Vlad Kaptur, and Steve Mirkovich, known for his work on such large projects as “The Passion of the Christ” and “Con Air”, and William Ye, who has the film “Equilibrium” under his belt. The twenty-time Oscar nominee handled the sound mixing at Sony Studios. Kevin O'Connell worked on such iconic films as Spy Games, Top Gun, The Rock, Armageddon, Pearl Harbor, Spider-Man (2002) and Transformers.
In the US, "Hardcore" will be released in wide release on April 8 under the title Hardcore Henry on 3,000 screens.
The world premiere of "Hardcore" took place on September 20, 2015 at International festival in Toronto (TIFF). Based on the results of audience voting, “Hardcore” was recognized best film programs Midnight madness. The film also received positive reviews from the international film press:
The Hollywood Reporter: “The special effects are superbly done, making the visual gags rich and vibrant... You'll be intoxicated by both the action and the superb technical execution.”
The Action Elite: “What I didn’t expect was how fun the movie would be; it's incredibly violent, but its violence is in the vein of video games - playful rather than offensive. The film contains several fabulous innovative ideas and a considerable supply of adrenaline. It's action-packed from start to finish and easily deserves the title of most original action film of the year."
Twitch Film: “Naishuller’s main ability in Hardcore is his ability to constantly raise the stakes. The fights are getting longer, the enemies are growing in number, and the stunts are impressivegetting stronger. Any concerns that it wouldn't be able to top the action from the impressive 'Bad Motherfucker' video are quickly put to rest."
Nerdist: « Luxuriously choreographed, extremely brutal fight scenes and chases allow you to forget that you are watching a film and actually feel as if you are Henry. The film is dark (oh yes, damn dark!), but more reminiscent of the work of Quentin Tarantino and Paul Verhoeven, because there is a lot of dark humor in it.”
The starting point and stylistic basis for “Hardcore” was the music video “Bad Motherfucker”, directed by Ilya Naishuller for his indie rock band Biting Elbows in 2013. The video became one of the hits on YouTube, appeared in the news releases of federal Russian television channels and was noted by major foreign directors, actors and musicians: Robert Rodriguez, Darren Aronofsky, Samuel L. Jackson, Sylvester Stallone, Sacha Baron Cohen, Tim Roth, Parkom Chan Wook, Jared Leto, group Placebo and others.
One of the first to rate the video Timur Bekmambetov:
« I was struck by the freshness of the idea and the style of filming, I found Ilya’s contacts and called him on the same day,– recalls the producer. – As a viewer, I wanted to see a full-length film shot in the same manner, and I invited Ilya to work on it. He was wary of the idea, because no one had done anything like this before, but after some time Ilya nevertheless took up this experiment».
The film was entirely shot on a portable GoPro camera, popular among extreme athletes, which was mounted on the operator’s head. Through his eyes, the film will be seen by viewers who will be able to feel themselves in the shoes of the hero of an action-packed action movie and face their enemies literally face to face.
For the sake of filming “Hardcore” Danila Kozlovsky not only changed his usual role and played a villain, but also radically changed his appearance.
“According to the plot, my hero Akan is a villain with telekinetic abilities,” says Kozlovsky, “When they put a blond wig on me for the first time, put on white eyebrows and inserted some unrealistic lenses, it became clear that the filmmakers had a great feel for the image, and I just decided to trust them. In general, everything worked out for me in this project: a great idea, an unusual format, a special dimension that Ilya Naishuller creates, and, of course, the role of the main villain. It’s great that this is a debut film for many of its participants: they place high stakes on it and treat it as something new in their lives, which gives additional energy and creates a unique atmosphere on the set.”
The Russian star's partner in the film was a Hollywood actor Sharlto Copley. He gained worldwide fame and love from film fans after starring in the science fiction film “District No. 9.” A new surge of interest in the actor around the world occurred after his participation in the film “Elysium: Heaven Not on Earth,” where Matt Damon became Sharlto’s partner, and the fantasy “Maleficent,” in which Copley challenged Angelina Jolie herself:
« I knew Timur before - we considered ideas for joint projects, but before that I had never had the pleasure of working with him. Although, I admit, I had doubts about this film: this is a serious challenge for me and our entire team, because “Hardcore” is completely unlike any film that has ever been released infilm distribution. My first question to Ilya Naishuller was probably unoriginal: “The short film is great, but can you create something like this for ninety minutes?” Today I have no doubt about this, and we all really hope that audiences will watch “Hardcore” in theaters - for the sake of complete immersion in the atmosphere of the film».
« We jokingly call our film a “parade of stuntmen”: it contains a huge number of stunt scenes with a minimum of computer graphics,– explains Ilya Naishuller. – In addition to the already known ones, we came up with tricks that no one had filmed before. Two teams were involved in staging the stunts at once, under the leadership of Alexander Stetsenko and Oleg Poddubny.”
The filmmakers achieved an authentic first-person view by using an unusual camera mount at chin level. Thus, the system operator could peek at the tiny monitor and understand what exactly he was filming. At the same time, the frame size did not change during the action in order to maintain the complete emotional immersion of the audience. And a spectacle awaits them that cannot leave them indifferent.
“One day we were filming on Old Arbat and, of course, we couldn’t block it completely, the director recalls. – So we simply surrounded the area with tape and asked people to walk around it. Several times that day, in response to calls from concerned citizens, the police came until we thought of covering the mannequin representing the corpse with cardboard: thanks to the team of Petr Gorshenin FX DESIGN GROUP INT, which was engaged in plastic makeup, everything looked so natural that passers-by simply could not help but inform responsible authorities".
"HARDCORE"HENRY)
A country: USA, Russia, 2015
Genre: action, thriller, comedy
Production: BAZELEVS, Versus films
Producers: Timur Bekmambetov, Ilya Naishuller, Ekaterina Kononenko, Inga Weinstein Smith
Director: Ilya Naishuller
Written by: Ilya Naishuller
Directors of photography: Vsevolod Kaptur, Fedor Lyass, Pavel Kapinos
Operators: Sergey Valyaev, Andrey Dementyev
Stunt coordinators: Alexander Stetsenko, Oleg Poddubny, Dmitry Tarasenko
Production designer: Margarita Ablaeva
Editing directors: Steve Mirkovich, William Yeh, Vlad Kaptur
Cast: Sharlto Copley, Danila Kozlovsky, Tim Roth, Haley Bennett, Sergei Shnurov, Ravshana Kurkova, Svetlana Ustinova, Daria Charusha, Polina Filonenko, Alexander Pal, Kirill Serebrennikov, Andrei Dementyev, Sergei Mezentsev, Alexander Mavrin and others.
Age limit: 18+
The main character of the film, Henry, comes to his senses in a military-scientific laboratory for the creation of cyborg people. All he knows about himself is that he was once happily married to the beautiful Estelle ( Haley Bennett), which just brought him back to life. Without having time to understand his past, Henry is forced to go to war with the villain Akan ( Danila Kozlovsky), who kidnaps Estelle. In search of his beloved, Henry destroys everything in his path. The only one who is not trying to kill him is the mysterious Jimmy ( Sharlto Copley), who has his own scores to settle with Akan. The heroes will have to not only save the girl, but also stop the creation of an army of cyborgs capable of laying the world at the feet of Akan.
Video compilation about how the movie Hardcore was filmed