A film portraying a world of vampires in modern-day Moscow helped revive the Russian film industry, introducing the term "blockbuster" in a country whose major studios collapsed with the communist government.
The fantasy-horror tale "Night Watch" (Nochnoi Dozor) is based on a dark Russian novel, but the film by brand-savvy director Timur Bekmambetov uses special effects and techniques more common in Hollywood than Moscow.
As the film set box office records in Russia, an American studio saw the ingredients for a successful import. Fox Searchlight Pictures, which is releasing the film inside the U.S. on Feb. 17, believes its appeal will extend beyond the arthouse crowd to a general audience.
"This is not a typical foreign film _ it does not sit automatically with a typical older art film audience," said Stephen Gilula, the studio's chief operating officer.
"Night Watch," the first in a film trilogy based on a series of novels by Sergei Lukyanenko, was made for $4 million (A3.3 million), a small budget by Hollywood standards. But Bekmambetov's resourcefulness resulted in a visually stunning picture with impressive special effects.
The film opened in Russia in July 2004 and outgrossed "Spider-Man 2" and "Lord of the Rings: Return of the King" in the country's cinemas. It has also done well in other foreign markets including Germany and the United Kingdom, grossing $16 million (A13.37 million) in sales, Gilula said.
"The film came out of nowhere in terms of budget and appearance," said David MacFadyen, a professor and expert on Russian film and culture at the University of California, Los Angeles.
"The term 'blockbuster' even started to get used in reference to the film, substituting the 's' with a dollar sign," MacFayden said.
Bekmambetov, 44, a former engineer who became an advertising guru after the fall of the Soviet government, said he received some of his most valuable lessons as a director from the prolific B-movie producer and director Roger Corman.
A 2000 film proposed to the director by Corman about women gladiators titled "The Arena" taught Bekmambetov how to get the most out of a small production budget and "helped me to feel and taste real filmmaking," he said in a phone interview from Los Angeles.
The Kazakhstan native also has an intuition for Hollywood's commercial side. Even before the deal with Fox Searchlight, Bekmambetov was using product placement in "Night Watch," a revenue-generating technique that is relatively new even to other Western countries.
Specific brands are mentioned in the book on which the film is based, Bekmambetov explained. "Brands are kind of gods for us," he said.
Product shots, including one of the film's protagonist making a cup of Nescafe coffee, have been criticized by Russian film purists. But the director said they were meant to be provocative. "The money is a bonus," he said.
The emergence of product placement illustrates the distance from Russia's era of state-funded film studios, which suffered after the fall of the Soviet Union. The television industry rebounded first and began to finance film productions.
Night Watch was bankrolled by major Russian television station Channel One, and the film was promoted aggressively on TV airwaves and billboards.
"It's reached a point where television stations have enough money to produce an American-grade production," MacFadyen said.
Fox Searchlight will debut the film _ in Russian with subtitles _ in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, adding smaller domestic markets such as Gainesville, Florida, in the following weeks.
The studio has also obtained the foreign distribution rights for a subtitled sequel, Day Watch (Dnevnoi Dozor), which is currently playing in Russia, and the last installment of the trilogy to be produced in English. The filming of Dusk Watch is also expected to include U.S. locations.
Bekmambetov recently traveled to California to meet with the studio about the third film and Universal pictures for another film based on a comic book.
The new deals have brought bigger budgets. The special effects made possible by the computer-generated imagery (CGI) industry require less of the improvisation learned from Bekmambetov's mentor, Corman, but have given the director a Hollywood brand of cynicism. "I think CGI's mission is for me to make them richer," he said.
Contemplating his future work in the U.S., the director considers the use of product placement a common cultural ground. "Moscow has Ikea, the same brands of Russian vodka are here and there. Brands make the world global," Bekmambetov said.
And while the Russian government continues to provide some funding for films, Bekmambetov remains uninterested.
"I never took a penny from the state _ I think it's useless," he said. "We're here to serve people, it's not for the judges."
Nu, zayats, pogodi!
__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com