Mongol director Sergei Bodrov on navigating the perilous Hollywood battlefield
Just over a decade ago, Russian director
Sergei Bodrov made his mark on the West with his
Academy Award-nominated movie
Prisoner of the Mountains, which transplanted a Tolstoy novella for children to Russia's war with
Chechnya. Though
Prisoner seemed an unlikely calling card for
Hollywood,
its blend of commercial technique and humanistic storytelling swept
Bodrov onto the studio radar — which brought him nothing but
aggravation.
The Quickie (2000), a mob thriller he co-wrote and produced starring
Jennifer Jason Leigh, went straight to DVD. The family horse movie
Running Free (2000) suffered running interference at every level and ended up inviting snorting comparisons to
Mr. Ed. And in 2005, Bodrov walked onto the troubled set of
Nomad:
The Warrior, after the original director,
Ivan Passer, ran out of money.
In response to all that — and to the tragic death in an avalanche of
his son Sergei Bodrov Jr., a star of Russian television who had made his
film debut in
Prisoner — Bodrov did the smart thing. He quit
being a director for hire and made the movie he wanted to make. "My life
changed," says Bodrov, sprawled on a couch at the
Beverly Wilshire in L.A., looking exhausted from months of promotional globetrotting for his latest film,
Mongol. "I wanted to go away, and to be busy."
A two-hour epic that rewrites the life of
Genghis Khan from boyhood to his forging of a Mongolian Empire out of warring tribal clans in the 12th century,
Mongol was planned as the second in a trilogy following
Nomad, which Bodrov, who completed the film, now dryly calls "a learning experience." But
Mongol, which was shot in
Mongolia, China, and
Kazakhstan,
stands alone as a terrific picture furnished with gorgeous scenery,
visceral battle scenes worthy of an Asian action picture, a passionate
love story complicated by a male-buddy scenario, furry costumes to die
for, and a score fortified with music from a Mongolian folk-rock band.
In other words, the movie, which brought Bodrov a second Oscar
nomination earlier this year, is well placed to hit all four demographic
quadrants and make a splashy swan song for departing distributor
Picturehouse.
Mongol director Sergei Bodrov and Mongolian actress Khulan Chuluun
Trained by
Andrei Tarkovsky,
Bodrov cut his teeth as a screenwriter and director making sardonic,
semi-experimental critiques of Russia under Communism. (His early film
The Non-Professionals,
which features a cow, a scruffy rock band touring the Kazakh outback,
and an old-age home for worn-out lady Communists, is a must-see.) But
Bodrov has powerful commercial instincts, a screenwriter's practiced
funny bone, and a maverick's suspicion of official stories. Indeed,
Mongol is nothing less than a revisionist biopic, if revisionist is the word
for a man about whom next to nothing is definitively documented. "His
history was written by his enemies," says the director, who never quite
believed the tales of brutality he grew up on in Russia, which was occupied by the Mongols for 200 years. To read more:http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/2008-06-19/film/warrior-king/
