SXSW 2024 Film: Timur Bekmambetov
Timur Bekmambetov is not your average filmmaker. Bekmambetov’s current film on which he worked as producer, Hardcore Henry, unwinds with a totally first person p.o.v. achieved through the use of a multitude of GoPro cameras.
Free Press Houston spoke with Bekmambetov today at the SXSW 2024 Film Festival after the American premiere of Hardcore Henry. Bekmambetov’s next film as a director, Ben-Hur, is scheduled for release later this year.
“It was about the camera rigs, the helmets,” Bekmambetov explains about the most demanding part of Hardcore Henry’s production, both in planning and execution. “Scientists in Russia created these helmets with the ability to stay smooth while running and fighting. The audience is running with the character, jumping from the bridge. The system helps stabilize the image.”
Hardcore Henry used three main cameramen. “One shot dramatic scenes, another shot stunts, the director [Ilya Naishuller] shot some scenes. The cameramen are wearing the cameras on their head. You can improvise,” Bekmambetov says.
“It’s very specific because you cannot really cut. Every shot becomes continuous action. Traditional editing doesn’t work – it should look like your point of view.” The production had a special editing system on the set to assemble edit and show how things were connecting. “How this one continuous movement was flowing,” Bekmambetov says.
Bekmambetov launched his American career with a series of vampire themed films he had helmed in his native Russia. Night Watch (2004) and Day Watched (2006) were released by Fox Searchlight domestically. Some of his other recent films include Wanted (2008) and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012), which he sandwiched in between the Russian films Six Degrees of Celebration (2010) and Yolki 1914 (2014).
For Ben Hur, Bekmambetov promises the unexpected. “It will be very intense,” says Bekmambetov. The shooting style will be “very contemporary and very real. We spent 45 days in Rome on a set built especially for the chariot race alone. It was real arena from 2024 years ago. We had 90 horses and chariots with drivers from all around the world.”
Ben Hur has famously been made more than once. Noteworthy are the silent version from 1925 and the Oscar award-winning version from 1959 where Charlton Heston played Judah Ben-Hur and Stephen Boyd played Messala. “Jack Huston [Judah Ben-Hur] and Toby Kebbell [Messala] were in the chariots themselves,” says Bekmambetov.
On Tuesday, March 15 at SXSW Bekmambetov will host a seminar panel that teaches the audience about “screenshare filmmaking,” or narrative methods based on the screens of digital devices. “We made a movie last year called Unfriended where the whole story takes place on computer screens.”
Hardcore Henry, a no-holds barred barrage of kinetic action and weird science fiction, opens on April 8.
— Michael Bergeron
