It happens when the name sounds foreign — you try and remember by association.
Shortly before meeting the Russian-origin director, Ilya Naishuller, and repeatedly forgetting his name, I just told myself: Ilya, as in ‘Elia’ from Jaun Elia, the Pakistani poet, who was ‘Nice’, and a ‘Chiller’!
Said together, Ilya Naishuller would come back to me.
It’d be the same for Priyanka Chopra that could be tongue-twister in the West, perhaps? Priyanka starred in Ilya’s breakout, mainstream movie, Heads of State (on Amazon Prime Video).
Ilya tells me he had seen a few of Priyanka’s Bollywood movies earlier, adding, “I should’ve looked up the names this morning…” Same language issue!
Ilya says Priyanka “charmed” him in “45 seconds” flat! Unsure if she’d watched his debut, Hardcore Henry (2015), where he also played the villain. She would’ve been on greater guard.
Hardcore Henry (on rent, on Apple TV) is sheer, inexorable headbanger of a bloody actioner, with a banging background score, that owes its idea to a Biting Elbows’ music-video of a thrash metal track, ‘Bad Motherf*****’, that Ilya had directed, impressing the likes of Darren Aronofsky (Requiem for a Dream).
As with the music-video that lasts four and half minutes, Hardcore Henry carries on for an hour and half, with the lens/camera planted to the PoV (point of view) of the protagonist, whom you don’t ever see.
And what the protagonist sees, as do you, is essentially a kinetic video game, live in cathartic action — with the tip of his weapon in sight, and hordes of humans, even cyborgs, equally dehumanised, charging at the hero. He whacks, mauls, shoots, kills by the dozen. He keeps jogging/walking.
Such that Ilya had to employ rigs to ensure audiences don’t get motion sickness watching the movie.
As a drama — involving pods in space, cloned humans, battle tank, helicopter, even horse — it appears deranged enough to seem drug-addled.
Imagine Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17 (2025) as a music-video. Or Luc Besson (La Femme Nikita) on stronger steroids, veering toward the Indonesian cult, The Raid (2011).
Aptly titled, Hardcore Henry won People’s Choice Award at Toronto film festival’s Midnight Madness section. Midnight being the category, where madness is kosher, at a serious movie fest. Which is also the section at Toronto that premiered Nagesh Bhat’s Kill (2024), subsequently picked up by John Wick director, Chad Stahelski, for a Hollywood remake. And the only Indian film I know that comes close to Ilya’s debut.
Stills from the films Hardcore Henry and Heads of State
Ilya is also a musician, and lead-vocalist of the aforementioned rock band Biting Elbows that, among other accolades, has opened for Guns N’ Roses in Russia.
Which explains the main-character energy that the mixed-tape music score exudes in his movies. What, after Hardcore Henry? Evidently nothing for some time; and then Nobody (2021; rentable on Apple TV).
Which, if it feels a bit like John Wick flicks, is not a coincidence — its writer Derek Kolstad scripted it.
At its onset, you could argue, Nobody is in the mould of Mukul Anand’s Hum (1991), or more recently, Lokesh Kanagaraj’s Leo (2023). As in a man with violent past, who lives a quiet, family life, until that’s disturbed.
Bob Odenkirk, best known for Better Call Saul (2015), plays that ‘nobody’.
The hand-to-hand and gun violence he unleashes — after returning to his past life, for personal redemption — borders on the stupendously self-aware, silly, sometimes! It’s also the sorta action that blows up the box-office, more often.
Ilya tells me he shot this second film in “Winnipeg, Canada, without budgets to fly down talents from across the world.” Likewise, his debut was set in Russia.
Heads of State, his third and most global film stars the pucca American, John Cena, with worldwide fame as WWE wrestler, playing the US President.
This is besides Idris Elba (The Wire, Luther), Londoner of African descent, for British PM; and ‘desi girl’ Priyanka Chopra as an MI6 agent, kicking ass.
Ilya tells me, “It’s not like we thought, white guy, black guy, Indian [brown] girl… [Diversity] seemed natural.”
Also, in terms of budgets, “2600 people worked on Heads of State — apart from extras on set — from different races and origins.” What Ilya finds in common with Priyanka, for instance, is they both “come from a place that’s not Hollywood.”
He praises, “While being so successful back in India, she said, ‘I’m gonna see, if I [can] make it [in the West].’ It means the person’s got incredible drive to drop a few levels, start with a couple of network TV shows, and build up, build up… And get to this!”
Kinda feel the same about Ilya. Heads of State is his “first PG-13”, Hollywood blockbuster-like movie.
‘American President’ is a film genre of its own. His favourites being Seven Days in May (1964), and the series, West Wing (1999).
But for inspiration, he watched a lot more “buddy movies”, merging two genres, hence, to pull off a comic-action blast-fest; inevitably, comfort watch, about two heads of state, so unlike each other.
Glad, I caught Ilyas’s first two films, after his third — wouldn’t have believed it otherwise — given they have such little in common, besides the villain, who’s somehow always Russian!
I’m told, Heads of State has done well for Prime Video. Certainly, that counts.
Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture.
He tweets @mayankw14 Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com
The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.