Timur Bekmambetov

Timur Nuruakhitovich Bekmambetov (born 25 June 1961) is a Kazakh-Russian filmmaker and tech entrepreneur. He is best known for the fantasy epic Night Watch (2004), the action thriller Wanted (2008), and the historical horror film Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012), as well as for the screenlife films Unfriended (2015), Searching (2018), Profile (2018), and War of the Worlds (2025).

Bekmambetov was born on 25 June 1961 in the city of Atyrau, Kazakhstan (then part of the Soviet Union), formerly known as Guriev.

After graduation from school, Bekmambetov entered the Moscow Power Engineering Institute in 1979 and left it in 1980, on the eve of the 1980 Summer Olympics. He was deported from Moscow on the grounds of being "unreliable" and moved to Tashkent, Uzbek SSR, to study at the Alexander Ostrovsky Theatrical and Artistic Institute, from which he graduated in 1987 with a degree in theater and cinema set design.

Bekmambetov started his career in the late 1980s as a production designer at the Ilkhom Theatre in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, and at Uzbek national film studio Uzbekfilm.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Bekmambetov moved from Uzbekistan to Moscow, where he started making commercials for the Russian market. His commercial series World History, retelling life episodes of the world's prominent rulers (from Nero and Tamerlan to Napoleon and the last Russian emperor Nicholas), is still considered the best video advertising in Russia. In 1994, he founded Bazelevs, an advertising and film production company, in Russia. Its advertising division continues making commercials for major Russian and international brands; in 2021, its commercial featuring Apple's new iPhone in the Hermitage Museum interiors was nominated for the Cannes Lions festival.

Bekmambetov's directorial debut was Peshavar Waltz (1994) depicting the war fought by the USSR in Afghanistan. The film was dubbed in English as Escape from Afghanistan and released direct-to-video by Roger Corman in 2002. In 1998, Corman invited Bekmambetov to direct his production of The Arena (2001) starring Karen McDougal and Lisa Dergan. The film was a remake of the 1974 gladiator exploitation film The Arena.

In 2004, Bekmambetov wrote and directed Night Watch (2004), a Russian fantasy film based on the book by Sergey Lukyanenko. The film was the first Russian production which, after the demise of the Soviet Union, managed to top the domestic box office, making $16.7 million in Russia alone, thus overtaking The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. The sequel to Night Watch, Day Watch (2006), was likewise written and directed by Bekmambetov and set a new record for the Russian domestic box office, having grossed more than $26 million in the first two weeks. The Russian blockbuster epic attracted the attention of Fox Searchlight Pictures, which paid $4 million to acquire the worldwide distribution rights (excluding Russia and the Baltic states). In 2010, Night Watch was named among the 100 Best Films of World Cinema by Empire. The film also received positive reactions from American directors Quentin Tarantino and James Gunn.

Bekmambetov's Hollywood directorial debut was Universal's action thriller Wanted (2008), an adaptation of the graphic novel series created by Mark Millar and J. G. Jones. Starring Angelina Jolie, James McAvoy and Morgan Freeman, the action film grossed $341 million worldwide, and became Universal's highest grossing R-rated film, as well as earning two Oscar nominations.