The super-charged Wanted, a Hollywood blockbuster to the core, is the work of a new breed of post-Perestroika film-maker. Timur Bakmambetov tells Donald Clarkeabout making movies in today's Russia, about going West and about working with Angelina Jolie

WHEN Sacha Baron Cohen chose to make Borat a citizen of Kazakhstan, he was assuming few westerners would know one end of the Eurasian republic from the other. What were the odds that a Kazakh would pop up any time soon to disabuse us of the notion that the country was full of deranged anti-Semites in nylon suits?

Say hello to Timur Bekmambetov. The burly, amiable director has arrived in London to promote the summer's most deranged blockbuster. Wanted, based on a graphic novel by Mark Millar, follows an office worker as he grapples with the revelation that his late father was once a member of a cadre of super-powered assassins who receive their instructions from a magic weaving loom. Starring Angelina Jolie as a nuclear-powered demolition engine and James McAvoy as the perturbed wage slave, the film is more fun than a truckload of robot puppies.

"The difficult thing was to make it look solid, rather than funny or cool," says Timur. "The story is an ancient Greek tragedy wearing the dress of a fantasy-action, 21st-century movie. It's about a son and a father. It's about the big existential questions."

Well, yes. But it's also about bullets whose trajectories can trace out impossible curves. It's about car chases that defy all of Newton's Laws of Motion. It's about men being flung off skyscrapers. You don't get that in Camus or Sophocles.

The hysterical tone will be familiar to fans of Bekmambetov's earlier vampire adventures, Day Watchand Night Watch. Both those films, though extravagantly baroque, were made on a limited budget in a Russia that was still trying to rebuild its crippled film industry. Even if you didn't care for the material, you would have to acknowledge that the movies constituted an extraordinary logistical achievement.

"Everybody involved was a friend," he explains. "We had all made commercials together and we thought: 'let's change course of history. Let's make the first Russian blockbuster.' So we did all you do with a blockbuster. We did a lot of advertising. I regard everthing associated with the movie - the press, the promotion - as being part of the creative process."

Bekmambetov, now 47, comes across as a polite, witty fellow, but he clearly has formidable reserves of will and ambition. Born in the Kazakh city of Guryev, he moved to Uzbekistan during his late teens to study at the Tashkent Theatrical and Artistic Institute. Following a spell in the army, he dabbled in theatre and began experimenting in film.

I wonder if, during the Soviet era, he could ever have imagined forging the career he has today.

"There was once a huge movie industry in the Soviet Union," he says. "They made a lot of really epic movies about the second World War. The version of War and Peacethey made was the biggest budget movie of all time; they are still trying to work out how much it cost. Then all that was all destroyed by Perestroika."

It is interesting to hear a former inhabitant of the Soviet Union express affection for that era. Then again, you can see echoes of that attitude in Day Watchand Night Watch. "Yes, those films were all about a battle between good and evil, between dark and light. The dark is something western and the light was something traditionally Russian and Soviet."

Many readers will be surprised to hear somebody from one of the former Soviet republics associating the USSR with "the light". We have been led to believe that Kazakhs and Uzbeks and Georgians all uniformly embraced independence. Yet here we have an apparently liberal, Hollywood-friendly film-maker going slightly misty-eyed at the memory of the Communist epoch.

"Yes, yes. Well, I grew up in that country, remember. Like a lot of people who grew up in that era, I don't feel like I am Russian or Kazakh; I feel I am from the Soviet Union. My mother was Jewish. My father was Kazakh. I believe in that kind of unity of difference. I think the EU is great for the same reason. Alexander the Great won his battles because he believed the world should be united in that way."

At any rate, the new political arrangements in early 1990s Russia were, it seems, catastrophic for that nation's film industry. Still, Bekmambetov managed to make a living in the advertising business and, by the turn of the last decade, had caught the eye of schlockmeister supremo Roger Corman. The notoriously frugal American producer was looking for somebody to direct a remake of a female gladiator film called The Arena.

"I learnt a lot from him," Timur says. "He said I had $300,000 to make a film about Roman gladiators. Well, I quickly realised that that gave us just about enough money to travel to Rome with nothing left over to actually make the film. Then I realised the Roman Empire stretched a long way into northern Europe. We could make the film in St Petersburg. And we did."

Corman films are cheap and - with notable exceptions - tend to look cheap. But Night Watch, made for a relatively meagre $4.2 million, looked as if it cost 10 times that amount. Detailing a battle between mages and vampires in a heightened version of Moscow, the film and its somewhat overheated sequel demonstrated that you could get Matrixeffects without spending Matrixbucks.

Not surprisingly, Hollywood soon came calling. Fans of Night Watchand Day Watchwill be delighted to hear that Bekmambetov has not watered down his approach for Wanted. The film is every bit as joyously unhinged as his early work.

"I was surprised I was allowed to work as I normally do," he says. "I was surprised that it ended up looking so much like my own movie. We were really in control, though. They asked me for unused scenes for the DVD, but there weren't any really. Everything I shot is in the movie."

I imagine he was quite used to working with snazzy special effects, but it must have been an interesting experience directing one of the world's most famous women. Even somebody as self-assured as Timur would, surely, quake a little when the faintly terrifying Angelina advanced towards the set.

"She is very famous. She is also responsible and creative and tough. She is a non-conformist. But you are aware that she knows everything she says will be reported around the world. That's hard. But she is sincere. She will only do work if she believes in it."

If Wantedmakes as much money as it deserves to, Bekmambetov should have his pick of the noisiest, priciest blockbusters Hollywood can offer. But he still feels a duty towards the Russian film industry. He and his wife, a costume designer on his movies, currently manage to live both in Russia and the US. Surely, he will, at some point, have to choose between East and West.

"The Soviet empire was a big empire with big ambitions," he muses. "Like France after the war, and Germany and Britain, it developed its own film culture. I grew up in that world and then it disappeared. But I am creating it again in Los Angeles."

It's a mighty ambition, but I wouldn't bet against him achieving it.

Is Angie worth it?
EARLIER this month, Forbesmagazine named the slug-lipped Angelina Jolie as the third-most powerful celebrity in the world (bethind Tiger Woodsand Beyoncé). Her appearance as a ruthless killer in Wantedshould, therefore, guarantee a big opening for the movie.

And yet. In recent years, Jolie's adventures in creative adoption have garnered more column inches than her movies. Her contrasting arrangements with the two men in her life (estranged dad Jon Voightand frightened-looking husband Brad Pitt) have sparked more interest than her interactions with co-stars. Jolie's last bona-fide commercial hit came in 2005 with Mr and Mrs Smith. Since then, she flitted briefly across the sluggish The Good Shepherdand delivered a fine performance to empty cinemas in A Mighty Heart. Beowulftook in a fair whack of change, but it offered only a virtual, creepily nipple-free version of the actress. Can Jolie still justify her $14 million price-tag? You, the public, must decide.