Daughter of marriageable age

I understand very well the difficult feeling that a father experiences when he gives his daughter away in marriage. On the one hand, she has grown up and has her own life. On the other hand, it’s unpleasant to think that she will go to someone else’s guy and in general it will no longer be yours.

I'm talking about film adaptations. Yesterday I attended the premiere of the film "Spy", based on my "Spy Novel". Everything was as it should be: he sat with the guests, accepted congratulations, shouted “Bitter!” I looked at my beauty and did not recognize her. I thought: “Well, why does she need all this? She would live at home. Was it bad for her with me? Why does she need this young, lanky one?” Director Alexey Andrianov was young and lanky. This is his first marriage film.

The director and I

I did not expect such adventurism from RTR and producer Sergei Shumakov: that they would give an expensive project to a debutant. At first I was disapproving of this idea. When the producers introduced us, I asked to give me a young man for a one-on-one conversation (a typical line of behavior between a father and his daughter’s boyfriend). We were given some kind of interrogation room without windows and doors, and I sternly asked: “Do you have honest intentions regarding my little blood?” Alexey began to tell me how he was going to convey the latent hooliganism of the novel using a visual device: to show not the real Moscow of 1941, but the city of Stalin’s fantasy, preserved on the General Plan of 1935. And I listened, and took the icon from the wall, and blessed it.

This is roughly the setting in which the action takes place.

The film turned out stylish. There is a rare thing in our cinema - there is absolutely no provincialism. If there is some sense of Tarantinism there, it is inimitable, without translation from American. Andrianov, perhaps, managed to create his own style. In general, I think we will work with this director again.

Starring Danila Kozlovsky (the role of “comic handsome man”). Despite the fact that he plays the offspring of a worker and peasant, a plebeian, the breed is visible in his habits and appearance, as befits a distant relative of Fandorin. By the way, Danila may well be suitable for the role of young Erast Petrovich.

Do you think it's suitable or not?

Fyodor Bondarchuk played exactly the kind of Oktyabrsky that I needed: Comrade Senior Major evokes a mixture of admiration, disgust and pity.

I think this is the actor's best role

Alexey Andrianov's performances are excellent, but I was especially impressed by the young actress Anna Chipovskaya. In general, she had no role. Her heroine is almost absent from the novel - for example, an indefinitely beautiful cloud flies around, and half of the scenes with her participation did not fit into the film version. And yet the character turned out to be completely alive. I don’t know how the actress managed to do it. We sat next to each other at the press conference. An absolutely modern girl, who, when asked by a journalist how she imagined pre-war life, replied: “I can’t imagine it at all. There’s something about white socks and sandals.”

But the face in the film is clearly from those times

“Spy” has the same problem as with the film versions of “The Turkish Gambit” or “State Councilor”: a certain confusion, a failure of breathing in the second half, when the editor begins to run out of screen time. Every time I try to convince the producers to make two separate scripts - for the film version and for the television version, and not cut to the quick. But I can’t convince him, and as a result I have to compress a full-length three-hour film into a cinema format. This took away some great scenes and even lines that I saw in the footage. Moreover, in the special edition of the book “Spy Novel” (with illustrations from the film) these shots are present, but not in the film.

For example, there is a bottom scene in the film, but there is no top scene

Apparently I'll have to watch the four-episode TV version when it comes out.

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