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Wanted
Interview with director, Timur Bekmambetov
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Pedigree: The director of Night Watch goes Hollywood, with Angelina Jolie, James McAvoy and Morgan Freeman along for the ride. Estimated budget: $100 million. Predicted box office: $120 million (US gross), $195 million (worldwide).
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After Borat laid waste to the region maybe it's up to Timur Bekmambetov to make Kazakhstan cool again. A former commercials director, Bekmambetov is better known as the visual genius behind Night Watch and Day Watch. These films propelled Russia into the entertainment age, with vampires, shape-shifters and witches jostling for attention amid rock-scored, CGI-fuelled mayhem.
For his English-language debut, Bekmambetov isn't venturing too far from the Watch blueprint: like those, Wanted is a film about potential, in which a reluctant hero suddenly awakes from his mundane life to take charge of the powers he never knew he had. Based upon Scottish writer Mark Millar's graphic novel, it stars James McAvoy as Wesley Gibson, a mild-mannered wage slave who discovers he's "one of the greatest assassins who ever lived", and with the help of the self-explanatory Fox (Angelina Jolie), becomes inducted into "The Fraternity", led by Morgan Freeman's wry Sloan.
Filmed in Prague and Chicago, Wanted continues Bekmambetov's ongoing fascination with the theme of power and responsibility, while indulging his love of fast cars travelling in ways they really should not. "This world looks ordinary, but it's not," says Bekmambetov. "It's an industrial world filled with weaving machines, lots of traps, lots of looms flying back and forth predicting the future. The looms weave these fabrics, and the fabrics have a pattern, like a binary code, that has information. The Fraternity can read the fabric - they see the structure of it and they can read its messages. Then they know who has to be killed to keep the balance of the world."
But Bekmambetov won't be laying on the fantasy with a trowel. "We're trying to tell a fantasy story with real drama and without conventions," he says. "We are undercutting it with reality."
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