A view to a kill

Hardcore Henry | Sharlto Copley stars in the firstperson feature rewriting the action cinema rulebook.

It truly is a jaw-dropping experience.” Admittedly writer/director Ilya Naishuller may be a smidge biased when telling Buzz about his debut film.

But watch the trailer for Hardcore Henry – or indeed the first-person ‘Bad Motherfucker’ music video shot by Naishuller for his band Biting Elbows, and it’s hard to imagine anyone emerging from the auditorium without a gaping orifice in their face.

Shot using a head-mounted GoPro rig, with two lenses located just beneath the nose of the operator (typically a stunt man), the film takes place entirely from the perspective of faceless protagonist Henry – a resurrected cyborg who mounts an insane rescue mission, with the help of Sharlto Copley’s Jimmy, after his wife is abducted by a superpowered warlord. “The immersion was the number one thing,” Naishuller explains. “Part of the reason why this film works really well is that you are the guy for 90 minutes.”

After ‘Bad Motherfucker’ racked up over 120m views, Naishuller started writing a “more serious and slow burn spy movie” for Tim Roth (who cameos here), until a call from Wanted director Timur Bekmambetov encouraged Naishuller to expand his music video to feature length. “I was a little hesitant,” Naishuller admits. “But he asked me a really important question: ‘Wouldn’t you want to see a good action POV film in a cinema?’ I got cocky and thought, ‘If anyone should do it, it should be me or James Cameron – and he’s busy.’”

Describing the film as a “love letter to movies and games” the arduous shoot took more than a year and proved a huge learning experience for all involved. “Pretty much all the prep was useless because as soon as we got on set we’d realise that it looks like complete shit! So a lot was improvised. But every time something worked there was double the achievement of, ‘That shot’s great’, but also, ‘Fuck yeah – that’s never been done.’” JF