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Timur Bekmambetov is Russia's answer to Peter Jackson. A cinematic innovator, whose movies are funny, fast and wildly entertaining for those who can keep up with them, the 46-year old Kazakh director smashed Russian box office records with his low-budget though seemingly large-scale Night Watch and Day Watch vampire flicks.
He is taking on Hollywood, directing Wanted, a comic book adaptation starring James McAvoy and Angelina Jolie, while co-producing the post-apocalyptic animated feature, 9, with Tim Burton. Dusk Watch, the third movie in his trilogy, is still to come.
"Wanted is big, big," he explains, spreading his arms out wide. "It's sad for me how much money you have to spend to produce an American movie. I'm the producer in Russia so naturally I'm a little nervous. Night Watch only cost US$4 million ($5.21 million); Day Watch was US$6 million. Wanted is around $70 million. Aggh! It's impossible to imagine."
It's midnight in Berlin and we are speaking on the blackened stairs of an underground nightclub in the former east. The occasion is the after-party following the Berlin Festival premiere of Day Watch at the Internationale Cinema situated on Karl-Marx Allee (formerly Stalin Allee), the ultra-wide boulevard lined with enormous ugly apartment blocks that was the pride of the socialist regime. The location is appropriate, as Bekmambetov used Soviet iconography in this Moscow-set vampire movies.
"I like it. It's cool. It's from our past. When I was young it was for everybody. For me it's reality. In Moscow there are a lot of new buildings and new ideas but it hasn't completely changed. In many ways the old reality still exists."
Even if allegories abound in these stories of good versus evil, Bekmambetov is not explaining any of it. In Night Watch the truce between the Light and Dark forces could be seen as the end of communism, while the Dark ultimately prevailing might be seen as the plight of modern Russia. At least the everyman hero, Anton (Konstantin Khabensky), makes good by the end of the second movie which continues on where the first left off.
"The whole idea of the movies was to create a drama between the two cultures, to combine the remnants of old Soviet heritage with American film-making. It's like a cinematic melting pot, where we're creating two worlds in an attempt to reflect what is happening inside us. But the reality of our lives can be very dull so we were looking into the fantastic realm."
Bekmambetov's story zig-zags through time and hurtles along at a dizzying pace between Earth and a kind of vampire purgatory or limbo. To understand what's going on, it's almost essential to have seen Night Watch and once you have entered this exotic universe it's difficult not to be hooked, like half of Russia. "In Russian, too, it's a difficult film to understand," he concedes. "If you don't understand 70 per cent of the illusions or the quotations, even 30 per cent allows you to get something out of it. Obviously if you pick up everything that's in the film your long orgasm will turn into pain."
So as you watch the characters living amid ghastly patterned wallpaper, or a car careering across the enormous, semi-circular, glass Hotel Cosmos, you simply have to go with the flow. For Russians, though, even the Cosmos, a hub for gangsters, drug dealers and celebrities in the 80s after it was built for the Olympic Games, is symbolic. Now it's the site of a television cabaret show and a host of such local celebrities even appear drinking in the film's final party scene.
In fact, the film's supporting cast includes some of the region's finest: Valeri Zolotukhin who wields a huge butcher's axe is one of Russia's top comedic actors, while Nurzhuman Ikhtymbayev, who plays the Buddha-like Zoar, is Kazakhstan's leading star. (No, it's not Borat.)
Whether or not the extra US$2 million made the difference, Day Watch boasts a slicker story. It starts off by recapping the details of the previous film. As the Night Watch (a rag tag bunch of shapeshifters and sorcerers) enforces the medieval truce between the Light and Dark Others (a mix of witches, warlocks and vampires), each side has gained a powerful Great Other - Anton's 12-year-old son Egor on the Dark side, while his love interest Svetlana is the hope of the Light. Now Night Watch recruit Anton, in true Frodo style, must find the Chalk of Fate to save the day.
Unlike the Lord of the Rings, though, the action is earthed in reality, even if Bekmambetov bombards us with computer effects, which he says are now par for the course, "just another film-making tool".
"I was a commercials director for 15 years and during that time I developed a relationship with the audience every day. The ads were very successful and communicating with a big audience became like a drug. On these films I'm working with the producers of the biggest Russian television station and they like that huge audience, too. I like it when people repeat in the street what's in the movie. It's an energy you get; you can use this energy."
Who: Timur Bekmambetov, director
What: Day Watch, sequel to Russian box office phenomenon, Night Watch
