Source Creative Interviews: Ilya Naishuller
Hot on the heels of the release of his first feature, ‘Hardcore Henry’, we chat to the Great Guns director about putting the audience in the middle of the action.
We knew we liked Ilya Naishuller’s work from the opening seconds of his breakthrough music video / online short ‘The Stampede (aka Insane Office Escape)’. Playing out like a mixture of parkour-based-videogame Mirrors Edge and ‘The Matrix’ the film saw a hapless worker fighting their way through a litany of henchmen in order to exit their workplace with a mystery object and, more importantly, their life. The difference between that vid and a million action movies? In this one, the camera was strapped to the head of a talented lunatic and the resulting 3 minutes put you IN the action.
Skip forward three years and the Great Guns director is releasing his first feature film, ‘Hardcore Henry’, utilising the same POV style for its ENTIRE DURATION and cranking the stunts up to ‘utterly spectacular’.
We dropped in on Ilya as he was finalising the sound mix in Sony Studios, Los Angeles, to chat about how he maintains the gimmick for the length of a feature film, the journey from working on music videos to a widely released movie and just how he convinced a handful of athletes to staple GoPros to their noggins and jump into danger.
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