Image via Entertainmet
Remember the Doom film? It’s pretty terrible, but it was memorable for one action scene shown all from the POV of Karl Urban, perfectly recreating the first person shooter perspective of the original game. It’s only a four minute section, but what if someone made a whole film like this? That’s exactly what Hardcore Henry is. After Russian director Ilya Naishuller first had a viral hit in 2013 with his first person music video ‘Bad Motherfucker’, he has now turned it into a full-length feature.
And somehow, it works. The storyline is a bit too convoluted — it starts out with the silent Henry waking up in a lab and his wife being kidnapped, and ends up with superpowers, double crossings and multiple clones of District 9’s Sharlto Copley. But it just has a relentless energy, constantly throwing ideas and explosions at you, and Naishuller somehow manages to keep the action (mostly) coherent despite the odd perspective. It doesn’t all quite come together, but if you’re a fan of X-Men comics, old Hong Kong action movies and Call of Duty, you’ll have an amazing time. We spoke to Naishuller about how he pulled it all off, the films that influenced him, and the videogames that didn’t.
How did the idea of making an all-first-person action movie come together?
Back in 2011 I bought a Go Pro, and I went snowboarding in Italy, and recorded myself. I looked at the footage, and thought “If we lower the camera down to the mouth, I think we can do some great POV stuff with it.” At that point I was always shooting music videos for my band. We were getting not too many hits — 50,000, which is not bad for an unknown Russian band, but not much. I thought I should try and shoot something. So I got $20 and paid for pizza, and my friends came over and they’d roll down the stairs onto safety padding and I’d give them a slice. The video was called ‘The Stampede’ and that ended up getting a couple of million views. I thought that was pretty good, it didn’t cost much and was a lot of fun to make with my friends doing dangerous things. So then I wrote ‘Bad Motherfucker’ and released it in March 2013. The next day I got a call from [cult film director] Timur Bekmambetov, who’s a national hero in Russia, and he says let’s do a feature length version of this.
I thought it was a terrible idea, it’s a music video and no one wants to watch 90 minutes of this on the big screen. And at the same time I was prepping a Cold War spy thriller with Tim Roth. I wanted to make a serious, low key film. But Timur said “Don’t you want to see an amazing POV action movie in the theatre?”. I realised it was a once in a lifetime opportunity to do something that’s never been done before.
Shartlo Copley plays multiple characters, and almost guides the audience like a videogame tutorial. How did his part come about?
I realised I needed a sidekick character. I knew that shooting the film from the first-person perspective I needed a story that’s simple, but enough to have the basic emotional motivation for the character. I pitched it to Sharlto Copley, I said it’s a sidekick character, it could be complete garbage, but if we get this correct it could be phenomenal. He watched the ‘Bad Motherfucker’ music video, and said he played it like 25 times. I had a week to come up with the character, and I needed him so the film would be legitimate. I came up with the idea of him playing multiple characters. The action was going to be great, but if we have him as the emotional heart and soul of this movie, and do this crazy out there performance, then [the audience] is in.
I am incredibly thankful for Sharlto coming on board, because it was a tiny budget experimental Russian film with a first time director. No one expected him to come to Russia from Hollywood having just done Disney’s Maleficent, and be in this as much as everybody else was. But the crew and everyone worked so much harder and better because we had this example of someone doing it who doesn’t really need to be there — we were all better for it. He just raised the stakes. Another thing he brought was, at the start, I wasn’t sure if we should be more serious, or over the top and campy and fun. But as soon as he started doing those multiple characters, it became what it is.
That sense of fun really comes across in the film.
When I was much younger and The Matrix came out, I had a VHS of it, and each weekend for two months my friends would come over and watch it. The feeling of re-watching something so fun and fresh with your friends, and having a great time, is something I wanted to capture. Hopefully you watch Hardcore Henry in the theatre, have a great time, then you get a Blu-ray, put it on and you friends come over and you laugh and have a good time. A fun time was the goal.
Obviously, the film seems greatly influenced by first-person shooters like Doom, Half Life and Call of Duty. How much of a gamer are you?
I’m a gamer, I love first person shooters, but I never approached this like a homage to games, or a film for gamers. As much as I love games, films, books and music are bigger infatuations for me. It was always a film for film lovers, and the people who love movies who also happen to love games will get an extra kick out of it. I was very worried about thinking “Let’s make a film for the videogamers, it might be shit but those guys will eat in up”. There’s been plenty of those. The whole point of the movie was to transcend the gimmick.
People would be like, ”Let’s make the first kill with a crowbar, it’ll be like a Half Life reference”. No, people are going to know that the filmmakers play videogames, it’s pretty goddamn obvious. And then afterwards when I show people the film, they’re like “There’s an Assassin’s Creed reference — he falls into a dumpster.” I’ve never played Assassin’s Creed! But it all makes sense. There’s a bit where he’s going through a building — that kind of looks like Modern Warfare. And it was never planned to be. It was a cool game, it made a big splash when it came out, so why not?
Other films have attempted to show everything from the hero’s POV in the past…
There have been films since 1947, with [classic film noir] Lady In The Lake, and we have a poster of it in the film. That way when people say “Oh, you’re not the first!”, I can be like “I fucking know!”. We’re not saying we are, I know my cinema history. We actually have a bunch of posters from my favourite POV scenes in movies in the film.
Did you go back and research other films that have first person scenes?
I watched every POV thing there is to see, including porn. The reference points are so riddled when you are doing something as fresh as we were doing. Lady In The Lake taught me that the guy should not speak. It wasn’t because I wanted to do a reference to a video game, it’s because Lady In The Lake does not work because the guy speaks. The protagonist is saying things I wouldn’t want to be saying, so I’m not the character anymore. Keeping the audience as Henry means not breaking the immersion any more than we have to, so that’s why he doesn’t speak. I would have loved to write lines for him.
What POV shots from cinema history particularly stand out?
My favourite POV shot of all time is from Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days. I remember watching and re-watching that, and thinking it is a fantastic combination of absolutely perfect technical work and having the dramatic element behind it.
Have you ever seen the British sitcom Peep Show, that’s done in mostly POV shots?
I know that there’s over 50 episodes of it at this point, but I’ve seen very few. I did enjoy them, I thought it was a lot of funny stuff. I lived in the UK from ages eight to fourteen, so British humour was very formative for me. Is there any Peep Show in the film? I wouldn’t be surprised if there is.
Hardcore Henry is in UK cinemas now.
