Exclusive Clip: Hardcore Henry Filmmakers Talk About Creating A First-Person Movie

If you saw the trailer for Hardcore Henry ahead of Deadpool, as many of our readers did, you [...]

hardcore-henry

If you saw the trailer for Hardcore Henry ahead of Deadpool, as many of our readers did, you likely remembered it for quite a while afterwards.

The film has...well, let's say a distinctive visual fingerprint. It's shot as a first-person movie in much the same way as many video games are, with a group of actors and stunt performers wearing a GoPro camera on their bodies while shooting the film.

As part of the film's Blu-ray and DVD release today, Universal has provided ComicBook.com with an exclusive peek into the disc's bonus features -- with a one-minute clip from a featurette about the challenges of working with a first-person character lead.

Here's what Sharlto Copley, who plays the film's (on-camera) lead, Jimmy, had to say about the experience during our recent interview:

The hardest part of the job was acting; not into a camera because it's easy to act into a camera lens, I find. What was tricky with this was that the GoPro wasn't a traditional camera; it's attached to, most of the time, a stuntman. There was something like 12 or 13 or 14 different people in total, 12 of which I think were stuntmen, playing Henry. What you had was a person behind the camera so that the GoPros are sitting, as you might have seen in behind the scenes footage, just below the normal, human eye. We put sunglasses over the real eyes so that it wasn't distracting for me. I could use the GoPro as the person's eyes.

What you had was, sometimes you would have an actor that you were acting against because they would interact with you. Whoever is playing Henry is interacting and doing something. It's almost like, "Oh, I'm actually acting with a person." Then sometimes Ilya, as the director, or the DoP would be playing Henry and he's kind of looking, because you could actually monitor on the GoPro, he's just kind of framing you. He's just a cameraman framing you, using his head as a tripod, using his body as the jib. We constantly shift. I've got someone that I'm acting with. No, no, I don't. I've just got to pretend that it's a camera. Normally you have either somebody or you have an eye-line for a visual effects movie. It's like you're looking at nothing.

This is some sort of hybrid. Sometimes there's somebody there, sometimes there isn't. Sometimes I'm giving a stuntman tips. I'm helping him from an acting point of view. "Well, you know, dude, actually why don't we try this?" I'm trying to direct the stunt guys, sometimes helping with the acting because he's trying to focus on setting himself on fire and not screwing up the shot. It was very tough. It was a very, very hard film to make for everybody, especially the stunt guys. I have so much respect for them and for Ilya's sheer resilience that he had in making this film.

Hardcore Henry is on Blu-ray and DVD now.

0comments