Translated material
I dreamed of being a clown
—Are you nostalgic for your youth?
-- Always. I live with my head turned backwards. Maybe this is an echo of the fact that I didn’t play enough as a child. But I am deeply convinced, and this is actually the case, that all people who create and invent something, no matter whether in science, in art, in business, have a child living inside them. It happens that life spans do not coincide. That is, the person is physically alive, but the child in him has died. I guarantee you that this person is absolutely not creative in anything, in any field. As Schweik said about one hero who had a certificate that he was an idiot after he fell from a barn onto the shafts: “he can hold any public position.” They are like walking shells, the living dead. A person’s full life is as long as a child lives inside him. Because this child’s curiosity, in fact, moves the world.
— Do you select your group using the same principle?
-- Certainly. Only such people do animation. Others don't survive. In general, there are no other people in art and there cannot be, by definition.
— Alexander Mikhailovich, why did you go into animation?
- Because it interests me. My father, Mikhail Semenovich Tatarsky, a playwright, wrote a lot for the circus. Somewhere in 1998, he was even listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the world's most famous circus author in terms of the number of officially registered reprises and clowneries. His reprises and clowneries were performed by all our famous clowns: Karandash, brothers Shirman, Berman, Ingibarov, Vyatkin, Oleg Popov, Nikulin and Shulgin. That is, I am a circus person, I spent my entire childhood there, behind the scenes. I grew up around clowns and dreamed of being a clown. I talked a lot with Nikulin and took a lot from him. And so, dreaming of becoming a clown, after school, of course, I went to work in the circus. Animal care workers. But I quickly realized that I wouldn’t make a clown. Only Nikulin could allow himself not to be able to do anything - for this you need to be a genius, which he was. All the other clowns walk on a wire, juggle, perform acrobatic acts, and master a lot of circus genres, and they master them very well. And all of them are craftsmen, and this also played a role.
- So, it was in the circus that you learned many of your skills?
-- Certainly. Here Oleg Popov, in makeup and a cap, worked out his reprise on some tour and went to his trailer. He had a vice in the trailer, and he began to quickly saw something. He made all the props himself. They knew how to do all this. I remember Shulgin glued me reels of plexiglass tape for a non-standard size tape, not for 17 minutes, as was provided, but for 25 - at that time there was nothing on sale. And there were many such non-standard solutions. Therefore, after a long conversation with our clowns, I became a walking encyclopedia and know a lot of technical things that are constantly useful in life: what to glue with what, and how to remove stains, and how to make sure that the cement does not allow water to pass through... But in the end I realized that I was no clown, that, apart from a childish desire, I had no real chance. By that time, my father was already working at the Kyiv film studio, writing scripts for cartoons. I saw this environment, this wonderful studio and, of course, I wanted to work there. I came to the film studio to start everything from scratch. I was not yet 17 years old, and as a result I learned absolutely everything.
— And the Pilot studio, which you now run, was born, of course, much later?
-- The Pilot studio has been around for many years, almost 20. It is the oldest of the new studios in modern Russia. The country's first independent private studio.
— Was it your idea to create such an enterprise?
-- No. When the law on cooperation appeared on the double page in the Pravda newspaper, they called me to the Minister of Cinematography and said: let’s make a cooperative out of your studio as an experiment. The new studio “Pilot” already existed by that time, but was part of the Goskino system. By making it a cooperative, we were legally identified as a completely independent studio. It is clear that we are no longer a cooperative, but we still remain an independent studio. At that time we were the 37th cooperative, that is, we were among the first hundred cooperatives in the country.