Description:
Ilya Naishuller is a film director, actor, producer, screenwriter and the frontman of indie rock band Biting Elbows, founded in 2008. From 8 to 14 he studied in London, and later graduated from the British International School in Yasenevo. Naishuller dropped out of the Institute of Television and Radio Broadcasting, then entered university in New York, but did not graduate. In March 2013, Ilya directed the Biting Elbows' "Bad Motherfucker" YouTube video with over 45 million views.
In 2015, Naishuller wrote and directed the action movie "Hardcore Henry" with Shalto Copley, Hayley Bennett, Danila Kozlovsky, Dariya Charusha and Svetlana Ustinova; and also produced and co-directed the TV series "Barvikha." He shot a video for The Weeknd's "False Alarm" in 2016, a video for the group "Kolshchik" in 2017, and recently directed the hit action-comedy "Nobody" starring Bob Odenkirk in 2021. Naishuller married actress Dariya Charusha in the summer of 2010.
Birthday
November 19, 1983
Born In
Moscow, RSFSR, USSR [now Russia]
Height
184 cm
Parents
Viktor Naishuller
Trivia
His first-person-POV music video Biting Elbows: Bad Motherfucker (2013) attracted approximately 33 million views on YouTube and another 21 million on Vimeo. The reactions were enthusiastic, for example director Darren Aronofsky wrote a Tweet, calling it "So well done" and Samuel L. Jackson wrote "This is some Buck Wild shit!". Timur Bekmambetov contacted Ilya Naishuller through Facebook and offered to produce a feature film in the same style.
Quotes
[on Hardcore Henry (2015)] The balance is that you do everything you can practically and then you help it with CG. You don't do everything with CG and help it practically. I love practical stuff and I love all the prosthetics and things with real, physical weight. I love designing that stuff. Actually, I don't design it. I talk about it with my designer and he does his concepts. There are about 1,800 CG shots in the movie, which is a huge number. But it's all augmentations. There's practical blood, but we added a little more so it's more visible. There is wirework, so we had to hide all the wires. But the stunt man really is jumping from that bicycle at fucking high speeds and [landing] on the top of a van and he needs the wires and there's the shadow of the wires that we have to take out. There were 70 shots where you see [a lighting rig] and that had to be taken out. That was time consuming and obviously not too cheap. [2016]
