Translated material
Zhenya, Sukhov, Volkonskaya and Katyusha
— Vladimir Yakovlevich, you are known as an avid traveler. They say that the entire Soviet Union has been traveled far and wide. And in your films you also traveled - through very different eras. They looked into modernity, it seems, only once, in the film “The Horses Carry Me,” and even then it was based on a Chekhov plot. Tell me, are your two passions - for real space travel and fictional time travel - somehow connected?
- I loved and love the feeling of freedom, and my wanderings, perhaps, gave me this feeling. Among other things, without complete freedom - I am convinced of this - true creativity is impossible. Consignment to the past, of course, did not provide complete copyright freedom. Such freedom does not and cannot exist in cinema, where the artist feels his dependence, perhaps more acutely than in any of the arts. And yet.
- How did you, with your heightened love of freedom, still choose cinema - and leave the theater where you started?
— I have been in love with cinema since childhood. This was the cherished dream of an exiled boy who had no other joys than those films that the cinema transport brought to our wilderness and showed. My father, a Polish emigrant, was repressed and perished in Solovki. My maternal grandfather, a Belarusian peasant, was declared a kulak only because he acquired a strong farm and built a house for his large family, and even because he, a horse owner, did not want to donate his small herd for the benefit of the collective farm. The whole family, including me, was exiled to the North, many died there, my mother’s sister went crazy... And then the film transport came there, bringing “Jolly Fellows,” comedies with Charlie Chaplin, whom I adored... I watched These films are endless - as many sessions as there were, I watched as many. And I couldn’t imagine any other future for myself after school - only cinema, only VGIK. I graduated from school in 1945 and immediately went to Moscow. Directors were then recruited by Igor Savchenko. I successfully completed two rounds, and from Savchenko’s reaction I saw that he liked the way I answered. The third round remained - the interview. And I walked him.
- Consciously?
- It happened that way. I was seventeen, my first love, ninth-grader Nina, came to me from Solikamsk. She came specifically to see me. I met her and forgot about everything in the world. At night I climbed up the fire escape to her on the third floor: she was very afraid that the neighbors would complain to their parents, and forbade me to appear at the door. I climbed in - and we were with her for two days... In general, I realized it when the exam had already begun. The war has just ended, there are no taxis in the city, even if I could scrape together the money for it. To VGIK you have to take trams, with a transfer... I've arrived. Cigarette smoke billows in the corridors, and some lonely figures wander around. I was told that Savchenko had already left. What can I say? Life is gone. I trudged towards the doors. Then a girl from the commission called out to me: “Where are you going? Crazy, call Savchenko immediately! He remembered you and will definitely come up with something.” I called and my wife answered that he was not at home. After some time, he called again - his wife again, clearly angry. Then he dialed the number for the third time and hung up. I suddenly felt ashamed, I decided not to attack Igor Vladimirovich anymore with my calls and went to Sverdlovsk. My mother lived there, and there I entered the theater school.
— Don’t you consider your theatrical years to be lost time for cinema?
-- Of course not. The theater gave me a lot. He taught me how to work with an actor in detail and instilled in me a taste for good drama. Without this foundation, I would not have been able to do anything worthwhile in cinema. After college, I worked a lot in the provinces - toured five or six theaters, staged about thirty performances. I even staged it in Bulgaria, but that came later. And in Moscow, at the Theater of the Soviet Army, even later - already when I came to the cinema. All those years I continued to dream about cinema, and as soon as I got the opportunity to get there, I immediately took it. In Khrushchev’s time, being the chief director of the Sverdlovsk Theater for Young Spectators, I learned that the local film studio employed guys who, like me, had a theater education, and this did not prevent them from working in cinema. I rushed to this studio, which at that time made mainly newsreel films, and Yuli Karasik took me on as his second director. This is where it all started. If it weren’t for Karasik’s work, I don’t know if my debut film “Children of the Pamir” would have happened.
- It took place far from Sverdlovsk - in Tajikistan.
- Yes. But Anatoly Grebnev, a strong playwright and a very good person who wrote the script for “The Wild Dog Dingo” for Karasik, recommended me there. He heard that they were looking for a director in Dushanbe for “Children of the Pamir,” and, knowing about my long-time passion, he recommended me to them. So, with Grebnev’s recommendation, I was accepted at Tajikfilm for one production.
- They didn’t need a VGIK crust?
“They made inquiries, found out that my performances had participated in some kind of shows, had some certificates and awards, and this was enough for them to entrust me with the film adaptation of the poem “Lenin in the Pamirs.” Lenin, of course, never visited the Pamirs. The author, the national Tajik poet Mirshakar, had in mind the light of Lenin’s ideas in the Pamirs. I read this poem and realized that I was in trouble. Mirshakar is a laureate of the Stalin Prize and even, it seems, the speaker of the chamber of the Supreme Council of Tajikistan, in general, a very influential person. You can't refuse. But how to make a script out of this is completely unclear. Nevertheless, I took it. Mirshakar warned me that he must see the script before filming begins. I promised. In his poem, the main conflict was that the son of a rich man is a scoundrel and a rogue, and the children of the poor are bearers of truth and justice. I was the son of an “enemy of the people,” and my imagination in working on the script developed in the exact opposite direction. I was inspired by the very opportunity to turn Mirshakar’s conflict inside out, and in a way unnoticed by the author. The studio was then headed by Nasriddin Islamov. He was an Uzbek, that is, a stranger at Tajikfilm, and allowed himself not to follow all the instructions of the authorities, but to have his own point of view on everything. For some reason, he immediately liked me and accepted my script. But I set the condition that I would film only in the real Pamirs, no imitations. And this is a border zone, a special border zone, and going there with children is a completely unthinkable idea. But somehow it happened, Islamov and Mirshakar together managed to break the resistance of the border troops, and I ended up in the Pamirs. I went there with my bookish ideas about these places, and when I arrived I was completely shocked by this wild nature, these villages, these pure people. True, there was no talk of an idyll - there were enough dangers. Once, the cameraman and I almost froze high in the mountains. We were already returning home and the car stopped working. If it weren’t for the Uzbek guy who, at two o’clock in the morning, was the only one driving along that road in a truck and picked us up, we would have definitely died from the cold, watching the moon rise - huge, across the entire horizon. Fortunately, everything worked out. It was there, on the set of “Children of the Pamirs,” that I became attached to traveling—finally and irrevocably.
- How did you end up in Moscow?
— Ivan Aleksandrovich Pyryev liked my film, and he took me to his Second Mosfilm Association. But I didn’t fit in there. I submitted applications and they were rejected.
- Do you remember which ones exactly?
- I don’t want to remember. It's like rummaging through rotted papers. I can say about one thing - I submitted it after the defeat of the almanac “Tarussky Pages” with Bulat Okudzhava’s story “Be Healthy, Schoolboy”. I didn’t fight myself, I didn’t have time. But Bulat went through the war and was wounded. I really liked his story and pushed me to write my own story about an intelligent boy at war. I didn’t quote “Scholar” there, the plot was original. But when it was roughly put together by me, I realized that I could not do without Bulat - without his experience, without his poetry and songs. And I went to St. Petersburg, where Bulat was then staying, to talk with him about co-authorship. At that time, he was just beginning an affair with Olga Artsimovich, he had no time for me, he was also ill, and it took me a lot of work to persuade him. He denied it and said that he didn’t know how to write scripts. He read what I brought and asked why he, Bulat, surrendered to me, because I already had everything. I explained why. Yes, he knew his own worth and was modest, a little slyly.
—Did I understand correctly that you went to Okudzhava without securing studio support, on your own initiative?
-- Certainly. On the contrary, they told me that taking Okudzhava as a co-author is madness and the certain death of the whole idea. But I was adamant in my desire to make this film with him. As a result, it was not possible to perform “Zhenya, Zhenechka...” at Mosfilm, and I again went to Leningrad, to the famous Third Lenfilm Association, led by Vladimir Vengerov. It was the most progressive association, and they accepted my application, and then launched the film.
— Did you immediately decide that Oleg Dal should play the main role?
— I started looking for an actor, and one of the theater people told me that there was an excellent actor Oleg Dal, who had already been kicked out of several theaters allegedly for drunkenness. I've heard about Dal before. We met and I really liked him right away. This is exactly how lanky and thin I imagined my Zhenya Kolyshkin to be. But most of all I liked that Dahl behaved absolutely independently, and this is very rare in auditions. There was nothing ingratiating or pleading in his gaze. He did not try to please me at any cost, answered my questions in monosyllables, and did not indulge in detailed explanations. In short, he was decidedly unlike the others. And he was dressed provocatively, completely not according to Soviet standards: a bright crimson velvet jacket, light trousers. Then, during filming, I had to make sure that the stories about his heavy drinking were not completely unfounded. He lost his temper twice. And once I even received fifteen days. We were filming German “ruins” in Kaliningrad then. Dal came to the hotel drunk, for obvious reasons, was in a hurry to get to his room, and the attendant, smelling the smell of alcohol, stood up out of the blue and did not give him the key. Having lost patience, he swore at her, snatched the key and ran to the room. She immediately called the police, and they took him away. Bitch, of course. What's her business? Well, the man drank, so he came home to spend the night. But for our entire group, these ten days were a golden time of quiet work. I persuaded the head of the Kaliningrad police not to disrupt our filming: after all, the military equipment was rounded up, the soldiers were from military units. Therefore, a completely sober Dahl was brought to the site under escort, the guard waited for the shooting to end, and then again accompanied him to the jail.
— And what exact scenes were filmed with Dahl during his “incarceration”?
“These are just the ones where Zhenya himself sits in the guardhouse, so everything came together very organically.” There were no more serious breakdowns. Although he and Mikhail Kokshenov loved to stage pranks on the verge of a foul. Let's say they're leaving a shoot in an open truck - in uniform, with machine guns, as expected. At some point, Dahl jumps out of the slowed down truck and runs away, and Kokshenov shouts “stop, you scoundrel, you won’t leave!” fires blanks at him from a machine gun. All this is observed by the Kaliningrad public who understands nothing. And they're having fun...
— Did Okudzhava write a song about the drops of the Danish king especially for the film?
-- No. I asked him to write a childish, almost naive song. There was no way he could do it. One day I came to his house, he was already living with Olga in Bezbozhny Lane, and by chance on his table - Bulat lingered in another room, and I was waiting for him - I saw a piece of paper with this poem. “Bulat! - I shouted. - So there you go! Did you write this for me? He says: “No. I’m currently preparing a collection...” “This is exactly what I need!” - “Yes? Well, take it." That's all.
— Is it true that it was not Anatoly Kuznetsov who was first cast as the Red Army soldier Sukhov in “White Sun of the Desert”?
-- Is it true. Georgy Yumatov, the then superman actor, was approved. There were many contenders, but in the end there were only two left - Yumatov and Kuznetsov. The experimental association of Grigory Chukhrai, where I made this film, advocated for Yumatov because he was famous, and the goal of this self-supporting association was to make profitable films. They did not pin any financial hopes on the little-known Kuznetsov. Grigory Naumovich, we must give him his due, did not put pressure on me in my choice, but I considered it necessary to agree with the studio. Although, of the two Sukhovs, I was closer not to Yumatov’s sort of superman from American westerns, but to Kuznetsov’s sharp-witted peasant. I remembered Tolya Kuznetsov from filming the film “Wait for Letters,” and I really liked him. But in the end I didn’t have to choose. On the eve of filming, Yumatov spoke at the wake of his friend, who died in a car accident. A fight broke out, and as a result, the next morning there was no living space on Yumatov’s face - everything was swollen, covered in abrasions and bruises. The experimental studio instilled in me that the worst thing for their production is downtime. If for any reason you stop, it is a crime against the very idea of the experiment. And here it is. First day of shooting. We're going to Luga to film an imaginary meeting between Katerina Matveevna and Sukhov. The cortege of cars stops in front of the Oktyabrskaya Hotel, the administrator goes after Yumatov and returns absolutely frightened. He says he doesn’t open the door. When the door was finally broken down, everyone saw it. I was very upset for him. A most talented actor, he wanted to play this role, he rehearsed with me enthusiastically, he fantasized a lot. It was he who came up with the scene where Sukhov alone deals with several armed bandits. I composed her entire “choreography”... I didn’t enter the hotel room - I didn’t want to see Yumatov in that position. Taking it off meant asking Chukhrai to stop for at least ten days, or even half a month. And without getting out of the car, I send a telegram to Anatoly Kuznetsov: “Tolya, forgive me, help me out, forget the insults, I promise you an interesting life in our film.” Well, that's roughly what the text was. Tolya answered immediately: “I’m leaving on such and such a train, meet me.” He arrived in Luga, they put Yumato’s robe on him - remember this scene from the dream? - and he became Sukhov.
— At the “Star of Captivating Happiness,” I heard that you were not allowed to cast the leading roles of those artists you wanted, due to the ideological importance of the film about the “knights of freedom.”
- I chose one actor - he was not approved, I chose another - again. I won’t name names now to remind people of that misfortune. Because for them, the most talented people, Goskino’s refusal to approve them was a misfortune. But at Goskino the Decembrists were known only for having awakened Herzen, and therefore they had to be played by major masters from the recommended list.
- For example, the positive hero Oleg Strizhenov, who has little in common with Prince Sergei Volkonsky.
- Yes, it was Goskino’s choice.
— And Alexey Batalov for the role of Trubetskoy?
-- Same. But I worked with them with full dedication, of course. Yes, they were not to blame for anything.
— Did Goskino also dictate the names of actresses for the roles of Decembrists?
- Partly. In the role of Maria Volkonskaya, I wanted to shoot an unknown, inexperienced, but talented, graceful and outwardly very similar to the real Volkonskaya actress. The sample was excellent, but they didn’t give it. There was a different problem with Polina Gebl. I tried a dozen actresses - none of them had the French charm that I needed. Then I got Goskino to allow me to film the Frenchwoman Agnès Dupere, whom I saw in a small role in some French film. It was not easy, but I insisted, and they allowed me to build bridges, since she was a relatively inexpensive actress. But for some reason Dupere could not fly to the auditions, and I did not agree to film without auditions. They didn’t let me go to see her in France. Then I decided to look for my Gebl nearby, within the socialist camp. Cameraman Dmitry Meskhiev and I went to Warsaw - after all, Polish women have always been known as sexy women, and I was convinced of this then. An acting agency helped me there; it selected six candidates, and they were all wonderful girls, but Polina Gebl was not among them. I was already completely desperate - and then I remembered that just before leaving, my daughter, then a ninth-grader, showed me some Polish magazine with a pretty girl on the cover and said: “By the way, dad, she could become your Polina.” Not really believing in success, I nevertheless asked my assistants to find the binder with this magazine and pointed at the photograph. “Ewa Szykulska? - they are surprised. “What do you mean, she’s a completely inexperienced actress.” "Call her." Eva came to the auditions, they turned out quite well, but it was clear that she was really inexperienced. And what especially embarrassed me was that she was very indecisive and modest. I wasn't sure. He appointed the second test, it was a scene of the meeting with Annenkov in Petropavlovka. Filmed in winter, in the cold. I recalled her and said: “Eva, Igor Kostolevsky’s kiss so that he forgot about everything ...” And she kissed. Then I realized: he will play. And with some artists there were not only no problems, but they also helped me with the organization of filming. In the script there was an episode where Nicholas I in excitement will run up the palace ladder. I chose for these purposes the front staircase of the Winter Palace, but they told me that this is impossible. In general, I was strictly forbidden to shoot this film in genuine interiors: it was impossible either in the winter or in Peterhof nowhere. But the “White Sun of the Desert” had fans, and they helped its author, that is, to me. Often with a risk for yourself. I achieved the reception with Boris Borisovich Piotrovsky, then director of the Hermitage. He listened to me and said that, of course, it would be very happy to help, but there is, you know, a categorical ban from above, and therefore he, Piotrovsky, is in a difficult position. At this moment - and we agreed on everything in advance - Vasily Livanov entered the director’s office with a decisive step in the royal uniform with the words: “Mr. Piotrovsky, I would like Nicholas I to be surrounded by genuine interiors. It is extremely important to me. And I ask you to make an exception for us-after all, we are making a film about the holy pages of Russian history. ” “You know, I intended to refuse Mr. to the director,” Piotrovsky smiled. “But when his imperial majesty asks me ...” He spread his hands and gave the go-ahead to shoot.