"Films are more interesting"

June turned out to be saturated for Vasily Sygarev: the premiere of his new film “Country Oz” took place on the Kino -Taurus, at the MMKF in the “Eight and half” program, they showed a short documentary “Our Crimea”, mounted from a material shot on an amateur camera, the director’s mother during a tourist trip along the SC . As if all this was not enough, Sigarev made his debut in the field of theatrical directing, releasing the play “Wiy” in the theater-studio of Oleg Tabakov based on his own play based on the Gogol novel. About the theater, about plans, about life and about the prospects for the future with Vasily Sigarev talked for Colta . Ru Alena Solntseva.

- Your performance is made based on Gogol’s story, it sounds Ukrainian, Ukrainian songs; Is his plan somehow connected with the events in Ukraine?

- No. I conceived it two years ago and even earlier, wrote a play, but the theater and I agreed that I would put it after I would shoot a movie.

- Have you already tried yourself in theatrical directing?

- Yes, it was once. But this time I wrote a play precisely in order to put it myself. I wrote specifically for himself as a director - and under Andrei Fomin as an actor.

- What does it mean “for yourself as a director” - did you imagine the image of a ready -made performance in advance?

- No, this is impossible, because you write about life anyway, but to build all this in the theater, then you have to look for an appropriate solution.

- I watched the performance and was surprised - how do you manage to come up with such remarks? They are short, aphoristic, bright and at the same time very recognizable, accurate.

- I do not invent. The character must be born, and he begins to speak himself . This speech is like him, like, in the blood. The words themselves appear. It always seems to me that I just write down the characters.

- Do they exist so real in your head?

- Yes. They communicate, sometimes, sometimes, they stop communicating. They live.

-Is this something like visions?

- These are such pictures. I see this with scenes. Then, when he had already come to the theater, he began to understand, made a distribution - and, say, it seemed to me that Rosa Khairullina was very suitable for the role of the father of the panel. The line there is so, not paternal, not maternal, but parental, common to father and mother. The rose was supposed to become this generalized parent.

- At the same time, you wrote the play for a particular actor - Andrei Fomin?

- Yes, but that means that for the character the basis of character is taken. When I write, I don’t see my face, I can’t imagine how exactly this person looks. That is, not that I see in the head of the cinema. I do not know how to explain this with words. Whoever writes will understand.

- You have a wonderful scenography: the scene is small, but you filled it with large scary men who made the world close, terrible, threatening. The staging idea to turn space into a tin box occurred to you after the play was written?

- Yes. When the artist Kolya Simonov and I began to invent a scenography, this idea dictated a lot ...

- On the stage of the carcasses of chickens, the heroes all the time eat boiled eggs, raw eggs break on the back of Homa. Chicken and egg - a semantically significant image; At what point did you feel for him?

-Somehow it was born by itself. Then I realized that Gogol has a whole scene in which heroes discuss roosters and evil spirits. I really liked this roll call - but nothing happened! This scene was in the text of the play, but we, inventing the scenography, for some reason we didn’t remember it ... When you come up with an image when it is born, I don’t want to load it in advance by a certain meaning-let the audience seek meanings, everyone will find their own. We decided that everyone would eat only eggs: both the seeds will be eggs and the ducks - eggs, all - eggs.

- How do you choose the actors? By type, in appearance or in internal properties?

- If there is a type and a certain appearance, then everything will be appropriate inside. Usually, with rare exceptions, it happens.

- Why do you, a successful film director, theater?

- In fact, I do not see much difference: the theater is the same creativity as the movie. If I had no obligations to Tabakov, maybe now I would not go to the theater. Two years ago I wanted this, but since then I shot the film, everything changed, and I made myself to join the theater, I thought I couldn’t succeed, I am no longer interested. Kolya Simonov helped a lot - we talked a lot with him.

- And where did the idea of ​​raping the panel come from?

- Well, it is all described there - not directly, allegorically. I always knew that they were someone there ...

-The play has a lot of remarks you wrote, but they sound very ghostly.

- Gogol does not have a lot of dialogs at all. And even when in the process of rehearsals something had to be cut, they removed those pieces that I took from the main Gogol text, it turned out that the actors could not pronounce them so that they sound correctly. Therefore, I had to compose it myself. This is not even a stylization - you just try to understand the heroes at first, and then it flows on its own. Well, with what to compare this? As you hear a person on the street - you don’t write down his phrases literally, but you try to remember the manner of speaking and then try to convey this feeling.

-Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, surprisingly accurately hearing modern speech, believes that you can’t write a person on the recorder and insert a literal decoding into the play-it will sound incorrect, false: some phrase must be changed in the writer's head. For me, this is a perfect miracle - how is this happening?

- The sense of the tongue works, probably. I always hear when the actors change even two words in the phrase or insert their own: the phrase begins to sound differently. Someone may not feel-but I hear. This is not a falsehood even, just a poetics breaks itself.

- Do you write poetry?

- It was business. I love them, let's say.

- How do you feel about the documentary theater? After all, at the beginning of the career, you were close to the circle of "Theater. doc "?

- At that time it was just Lyubimovskaya party. I once made a “pit” for them, a documentary play, and immediately realized: something is not right. A documentary theater cannot exist for one simple reason: a person, when you put a voice recorder to him, immediately begins to behave in a completely different way-you won’t achieve the truth. You can only remove the hidden camera, then it will be documented. I realized that this is not mine, not there, and stomped on. And there the movie was not far off.

The character must be born, and he begins to speak himself. This speech is like him, like, in the blood. The words themselves appear.

- And how does the fate of your other plays that entered the “Golden Fund” of the new drama develops - “Black Milk” , “God's cows are returning to earth ” ? They still put them?

- Of course, they go, they feed and sing. Thanks to them.

- Do they put you a lot?

- Well, I would like more. But for this you need to constantly write something new, but there is somehow no time.

- It’s more interesting to shoot a movie than to work in the theater?

- The movie is more interesting.

- Why?

- Because this is a more complicated process in itself. And a lot of things have to be done there. Many objects. Just more interesting - according to the result. I love the movie more than the theater. I would never go to the theater in my life if I had the opportunity to go to the cinema right away.

- How did you even decide to study for a playwright?

- I studied at the Pedagogical Institute in Nizhny Tagil, walked along the corridor, saw an announcement that playwrights were being recruited in Yekaterinburg under the Literary Institute program, a seminar of Nikolai Kolyada. Well, I took the documents - and went to him.

- The first play made you famous, “ plasticine ” , which was set by Kirill Serebrennikov, who began to work in Moscow then.

- Well, yes, I showed the play by Kolyada, he printed three hundred copies and sent it to all theaters. But she was not put anywhere - only Serebrennikov. Still in Chukotka, in the Chukchi language.

- Did you manage to evaluate the quality of the translation?

- Unfortunately no. At some point, this performance was included in the Poster of the Golden Mask-as I understand it, as a comedy, in order to get a little a little to the Moscow public. There was such a cult performance of Serebrennikov, and after five years, the Chukchi make “plasticine” in the Chukchi language ...

- An adult, an artist, is difficult, in my opinion, to exist in a world that constantly offers simplification, aggression. How to deal with this time - fenced off, resist?

- Don't even know. To do your favorite thing ... I am jokingly, of course, I say. Well, I have no advice ... to work - and that’s it. What else can you do.

- Are you trying not to notice what is happening around?

- It depends not to notice. If something serious happens, then, of course, you are indignant, you go, you go out somewhere. You begin to think about how and what can be changed. If you want Roizman to become mayor, then you support him.

- Have you participated in the campaign?

- Well, it’s not that I participated, Yana (actress Yana Trojanova. - Ed. ) On the site I wrote the text in his support, and I at home. At least so. As they could.

- Did you move from Yekaterinburg to Moscow for good?

“We have been here for more than a year.” Always, when the cinema was finished, we lived in Moscow. But, probably, yes, we have already finished with the city of Yekaterinburg.

- Is the Sverdlovsk period of your life important for you?

- Of course, this is a whole life that gave a lot to creativity. And in general, the silushka gave the heroic one.

- Do you have a feeling of regional solidarity?

- We always support each other, of course. In fact, there are different people everywhere. There are such creatures in Yekaterinburg - just drown in the Black Sea. But there are the same people in Moscow. So no difference. In general, many in Yekaterinburg were mired in provincialism, it is difficult to communicate with them because the shores do not allow the world to perceive the world normally.

- Are you going to continue to work with the theater?

- Not yet.

- Do you have a feeling that the theater is another space, that there is a special theater language that I would like to develop? “Wii” , of course, is a very good play, brightly and clearly set, but I still don’t see if you have your original key to the theater ...

- There are probably special theater directors who go this way - developing the language. I'm probably trying to engage in such things in the cinema. The theater is for me such one -time landings.

- It always seemed to me that it is easy to work with your texts to good actors - if the artist is organic and fits type, he should do everything by itself ...

-Yes, I just need to explain a little bit-I do not work with the actors. The main thing is to make a good casting, I will spend time better on it, I will choose the actors for sure. In the cinema, in fact, when you go to the site, there are not so many creativity. The main thing is to have time. To evaluate all the frames that you have planned, you run from the object to the object, from point to point ... This, maybe, only Herman could afford to shoot one frame for several days.

- What is the main thing for you on the set, what are you achieving?

-For each film, differently. Different tasks are worth it. I like to mount the most - this I understand, this is creativity, you can sit, twist like this, twist a kind. And invent. In the filming period, of course, there are breakthroughs when something suddenly came up with: once-and suddenly changed everything. But the main thing, as a rule, is well played - and so that there is no marriage by film.

- Installation can change the meaning of the picture - or only improve, clarify?

- Installation gives the picture both meaning and rhythm, all at once. At the installation table you do a lot of things ... Sometimes you just save the actors - if they didn’t succeed, you can assemble the phrase by the bean.

- Can you glue one remark from pieces of film?

- Certainly. Sometimes you have to do it.

- It seems to you, the film you make are collected from pieces, what is needed for? For pleasure?

- Probably yes. Don't know. Pleasure can be different. There is from the fact that you spent the time well. And there is a pleasure from what hooked you. Suppose the film "Go and watch." I enjoy him. Although I am not a sadist and not a maniac, I am sitting in front of the screen in horror - but I get aesthetic pleasure from the film.

- You have a very unpleasant theme of feces for many people in “Lake”. Why did you need to break this taboo?

- In the prose of Andrei Ilyenkov, my friend and co -author of the script, this topic often appears in a fairly metaphorical way - I am very interested in how he works with her, I decided to develop her. And you can watch a movie about feces, but you can about something completely different. And I'm glad that the film shares people in this way-someone sees only shit in this life ...

- Oh, so this is a metaphor ...

-Actually, this is instinct. This is a component of life. Everything is in it, you won’t cut anything. Andrei knows literature very well. He is a philologist. He would give a lot of examples from the classics where this topic is developing.

-They said that because of her your film did not receive invitations to any international festivals?

- This is actually no idea, everything is so. Abroad, our metaphor is simply not read purely. They watch domestic cinema rather superficially. Therefore, films like “Fool” are perfect there-the simplest social cinema with an active hero ... I generally think that the movie that I make can hardly have any prospects in the West.

- At the same time, with the “wolf” and with the film “Live” you traveled many foreign festivals.

“We tried to live with the film“ Live ”so that someone already traveled instead of us,” the festival life bothers very quickly.

- And what is your sensation from the Western world? Do you feel it well? Or is it someone else's and you are more likely here?

- I'm bored there. And in a week already bored. I probably even be closer to me. Although, again, it bothers quickly there. I could not, let's say, buy an apartment in Spain and sit in it. It seems to me that nothing would have been written.

- And here, in Moscow, what do you need to write?

- Sometimes from this business to depart and go to communicate with people - and live another life.

- To communicate - how is it?

-Yes, differently. I don't even know. Just exchange energy ...