Nicholas Gyeney’s ambitious “Beta Test,” a throwback to ’90s action films, centers on an evil megacorporation that develops a futuristic video game in which an electronic implant turns one of the heroes into a robot remotely controlled with a game controller.
Nicholas Gyeney wants to make movies like the ones he grew up loving.
Films like the Bond films. Like “Star Wars.” Like “Terminator 2: Judgment Day.”
Especially like “Terminator 2.” Born and raised in Seattle, Gyeney used to watch that one with his father Örs Gyeney, a Hungarian immigrant who loved splashy American megamovies like “T2.” He passed that love on to his son, and when he died when Nicholas was 12 years old, the filmmaker “dove into movies more than I had ever done before.”
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That was, he said, “a game changer.” A future filmmaker was born.
Flash forward to this past Friday. It was Nicholas’ 30th birthday, and the day before he was front and center at the Uptown theater in Queen Anne for the Seattle premiere of “Beta Test,” his fourth commercial feature and his most ambitious — and widely released — movie yet. (It opens Friday, July 22, in Seattle.) Shot on a budget of just under $2 million at a variety of Seattle locations — its climactic fight scene was filmed at Seattle City Hall — Gyeney calls it “a throwback ’90s action film that has all the elements: cheesy one-liners, over-the-top henchmen” and a scene where the action pauses to allow the villain to explain the plot up to that point.
That plot centers on an evil megacorporation that develops a futuristic video game in which an electronic implant turns one of the heroes into a robot remotely controlled with a game controller by the movie’s other hero. Gunfights, martial-arts slugfests and tire-squealing stunt driving ensue.
The production values are impressive. Its big set-piece fight scene, a six-minute battle filmed in one continuous take on the interior stairs at City Hall, was beyond ambitious. “We talked to a lot of professional Hollywood stunt men, and they all thought I was crazy for even attempting this,” Gyeney said. When he told them he intended to use mostly amateur stunt people and to shoot it all in one take, “they all laughed me out of the room.”
But he recruited people who were “hungry.” “They pushed through the inexperience and made it happen because of that fire inside,” he said.
Gyeney made his first feature at age 19, and it and his three successive movies have all been shot in the Seattle area.
A graduate of Henry M. Jackson High School in Mill Creek, Gyeney attended film school at the University of Southern California on a scholarship and lived in Los Angeles for seven years. He moved back to Seattle to make his movies and try to become a big fish in a smaller ocean.
Acknowledging that his first movie, “The Falling” released in 2006, was “terrible — I was overzealous … it was all ego” — he buckled down to learn the business.
He formed his own Seattle-based production company, Mirror Images Ltd., in 2007 and taught himself to rein in his ego. “What I learned is to not delude yourself into thinking your screenplay is going to be the next work of Shakespeare.” He concentrated on “rewriting the script, fine-tuning it, chiseling it down into something that was solid.”
“Beta Test” will be opening at the Uptown on Friday, July 22, and in 17 other cities, including New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. It’s the biggest release any of Gyeney’s movies has received.
He views “Beta Test” as essentially an audition. His goal, he said, is “to show the bigger fish down in L.A. what I can do.”
And what he wants to do is “make films that are fun.”