Is this the future of film? How to finish a shoot when the coronavirus strikes

When the pandemic halted his war thriller, Timur Bekmambetov popped his leading actor inside a video game and completed the shoot from 1,200km away. Will other movies now be made this way?

Who says everything in the film business has ground to a halt? Some directors are finding ways of keeping the cameras rolling. Timur Bekmambetov, best known outside Russia for making the Angelina Jolie thriller Wanted, was midway through filming his second world war fighter-ace film V2: Escape from Hell when the coronavirus pandemic broke. So the Kazakh-Russian sanitised his shooting schedule and, last week, pulled off what he believes was a cinematic first: a feature-film scene shot entirely inside a live video game.

Bekmambetov had originally intended to shoot his dogfight the Howard Hughes way: real sky, real planes. But to minimise social mixing, he instead put his lead actor, Pavel Priluchny, in a plane cockpit on a St Petersburg soundstage with a skeletal crew - while he directed the scene remotely, from 1,200km away in Kazan, Tatarstan.