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.](https://img.youtube.com/vi/USoajhM4T7U/mqdefault.jpg)
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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.
