Nicholas Gyeney isn’t trying to make it in Hollywood.
Instead, he’s already making it at home.
The Mill Creek native, who graduated from the University of Southern California film program, has shot three movies in Washington and started filming his fourth here today.
“I’m one of a very small handful of filmmakers who’s really doing anything in the Northwest,” said Gyeney, 28, a writer-director-producer. “In L.A., I’m one of thousands.”
Gyeney’s movies have been shot in Mill Creek, Everett, Seattle, Des Moines and on Whidbey Island. His upcoming project, an independent action thriller called “Beta Test,” is filming at a house in Lake Forest Park, inside Seattle City Hall and on top of Seattle’s Dexter Horton building.
“The movie is about a Seattle-based video game tester who is given a new game to beta test by this company called Sentinel, which is a giant video game empire,” Gyeney said.
The protagonist, played by Larenz Tate (“Menace II Society,” “Rescue Me”) comes to realize that the character he’s playing in the video game is a real person somewhere out in Seattle.
He tracks that person down and the two team up to take down Sentinel’s leader, who Gyeney describes as a “Steve Jobs-type, multibillionaire, world-domination-hungry kind of guy.”
Manu Bennett (“Spartacus,” “The Hobbit”) will co-star as the video game character. Linden Ashby, most known for playing Johnny Cage in the “Mortal Combat” movies, will be the villain.
“Beta Test” will culminate in an eight-minute choreographed fight sequence at Seattle City Hall — all in one camera shot with no cutting.
“The longest long-take fight sequence currently on record is three-and-a-half minutes, and it’s held by the Korean movie ‘Oldboy.’ Our goal is to destroy that record,” Gyeney said.
Gyeney believes shooting such a movie in the Northwest will diversify the local film community, which is mostly dominated by indie dramas.
“It could lead to an entire wave of action-oriented material being shot here, which would bring tons of work to local stunt teams and stuff that is totally nonexistent right now,” Gyeney said.
The story of how Gyeney, a first-generation Hungarian-American, came to be born and raised in Washington is something out of a movie, and he tells it like it is one. “The reverse of ‘The Bourne Identity,’” to be exact.
“My mom was Jason Bourne, my dad was along for the ride,” he said. “My family defected from Hungary during the Cold War. My mom was a very high-prized asset to the government there.”
His mother, Ilona Gyeney, an Olympic sprinter and a Ph.D., was pressured with threats of violence to join the Communist Party in the 1970s. She and husband Ors Gyeney fled the country, spent some time in Paris, then emigrated to the U.S. as political refugees in 1980.
They settled in Seattle, where Ilona Gyeney started an international trade business and Ors Gyeney opened a car repair shop called Best Service &Repair.
On the side, Ors Gyeney was a musician, an athlete, a tech junkie and, most of all, a movie buff. He introduced his young son to “Star Wars,” “Indiana Jones” and all the other action classics that had come out of Hollywood.
That film education was cut short in 1998, when his son was 12. A semi-pro Hungarian team was coming to town and Ors Gyeney was asked to play in an exhibition match.
“He scored a goal, was happy, laughing, and then he just collapsed, fell over,” Gyeney said. “Heart exploded, cardiac arrest. No explanations.”
Ors Gyeney passed away at 51 years old.
“He went and never came home, and our life changed like when you turn a key,” Ilona Gyeney said. “Both of my children became so mature so early. It was a good thing and a bad thing at the same time.”
She took over Best Service &Repair, despite not knowing anything about cars, while her son retreated into the world of film.
“I started watching movies a lot more — to escape, to kind of hold on to that pastime that we had,” Gyeney said. “I was watching movies over and over, and they were helping me get through this ordeal. I started realizing that if all these movies helped me get through my loss, maybe I could give back and make a movie one day.”
He was 13 when he decided he wanted to be a director. A couple of years later he enrolled in a video production class at Jackson High School and eventually applied to USC, where he got a full ride in the film production program.
After his freshman year at USC, Gyeney rallied a skeleton crew and made his first feature film, “The Falling.”
“I made all the mistakes in the book,” he said. “It was all ego.”
The movie made money, Gyeney says, thanks to a certain demographic of people who like to hang out with their friends and watch bad movies.
“There was a market for these really low-budget, supernatural horror-type movies at Blockbuster,” he said.
He made his next film, “The Penitent Man,” in 2010. It starred Lance Henriksen – known for roles in “Alien” and “Terminator” – and gets its name from a line in “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” (“The penitent man shall pass”).
This movie made money, too, and Gyeney had officially become a full-time filmmaker. He moved back to Washington in 2011 and reconnected with David Friedle, his high school video production teacher. Gyeney asked him to join the crew for his third feature, “Matt’s Chance.”
“I was sort of like Nick’s bench coach,” said Friedle, who now teaches at Nathan Hale High School in Seattle. “He just wanted me to be there on set next to him. He would make decisions and bounce ideas off of me. It gave him some confidence.”
“Matt’s Chance” began filming in late 2012. The story is a dark comedy about a disgruntled 30-something who sets out to get revenge on his cheating fiancée. Gyeney loosely based the movie on a true story: a friend had told him that he walked in on his wife with another man.
“It just drove him insane,” Gyeney said. “I said, ‘Wow, this has just got dark comedy dripping out of it.’ So I started writing a script.”
He sent the script to Edward Furlong, who shot to fame at age 7 for playing John Connor in the first two “Terminator” movies. Gyeney had randomly met the actor while on a family trip to Euro Disney in Paris in 2004.
“I told him, ‘I just got into USC. One day I’m gonna make a movie with you,’” Gyeney recalled.
Sure enough, Furlong signed on to “Matt’s Chance.” The former child star has been public about overcoming alcoholism and drug addiction to return to acting, and Gyeney says that fit right in with the theme of the movie.
“The movie is about second chances, so I tried to cast people who reflected that theme,” Gyeney said, listing off the cast: “Lee Majors, former TV star. Gary Busey, former movie star. Margot Kidder, former movie star.”
The movie might have featured a budding star, too: Marshawn Lynch of the Seattle Seahawks played the role of a bodyguard, listed as Massive Goon in IMBD. At the time Gyeney didn’t even know who Lynch was, but soon enough he was riding with the nervous running back to the Seattle premiere, dragging him out of the limo when they pulled up to the red carpet.
“Matt’s Chance” made the rounds at film festivals, had a limited theatrical release and inked streaming deals. Gyeney is riding that momentum into “Beta Test,” which he hopes will be a “game changer” both for his own career and for the Seattle film industry.
The first three films were funded by non-film industry investors from the Northwest, while “Beta Test” has received backing from out of state sources.
Directing four movies by the age of 28 might seem like a lot to accomplish, but Gyeney still feels like he has a long way to go.
“Losing my father early made me very impatient, because I have a very strong awareness of mortality and how little time we have. If I had it my way, I would be 5 to 10 years ahead of where I am now,” he said. “But the actual course of my career has kept me grounded: baby steps, one movie bigger than the last.”
You can watch “Matt’s Chance” on iTunes, Vudu and the Sony Playstation store. Read more about Gyeney and his projects at mirrorimagesltd.com.
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