"I had to go." "I had to do it." "This film was about artistic freedom." "It's about the desire to attain artistic freedom." "I'm gonna do something right this time." "Human beings are human beings." "You play a human being, you don't play a communist." "Why don't we do it." "Just go." "Take control of our own lives." "That sense of pride and love for your country." "I was supposed to give up everything so that you could live in Disneyland?" "What we were doing was creating something that hadn't been done stepping out and trying something different." "White Nights began as my desire to do a dance film." "I'd seen Gregory Hines perform, was completely smitten with him." "Of course I had seen Baryshnikov perform before." "And I hadn't thought about putting them together." "I was just interested in doing a dance film." "And I met with Mike Medavoy who was the head of Orion at the time and he made the suggestion that we combine Greg Hines who I was suggesting, with Misha Baryshnikov." "And then I set about looking for a story." "I wanted to do something that I believe a film musical should be which is instead of just stopping the action to do a dance to try to do something that carried the narrative forward in the actual performance piece." "I met with a writer named James Goldman." "And I told him the idea and he came back with this concept of a political dance thriller." "I'm a tap dancer" "That's your problem." "Gregory Hines and Mikhail Baryshnikov are great dancers, great artists." "I think that at the time, they were the best in the world without question." "Both had done pretty much everything that they possibly could do in that discipline." "Artists always look for something to push the envelope." "They're always looking for something they haven't done that tests themselves against." "When I mentioned this to them, they both were quite intrigued." "They knew that there was gonna be something here that was going to challenge them and they didn't shrink from that." "Gregory Hines, his character was somebody who was hurt in America." "They called us coloured in those days." "He was a great artist, but he was also a black man in America." "And although he could do all the dancing that he wanted on the stage, when he walked off the stage and into society, he was walking into a racist society." "What do you know about it?" "You ever been to Harlem?" "To say that our country has not been racist in its past I think would be a fallacy." "It does really not happen to my knowledge that any American artist left America to work in Soviet Union." "To assume that Gregory Hines leaves America to go to Russia because America is racist, it's also a fantasy." "I treated you as an intelligent man." "I show you respect, but now, no more." "And we assume that because the ideal of communism is everybody's equal, we didn't think they had racism but now we know, now that the Wall has come down that they have a tremendous problem with racism." "So I don't think that Gregory Hines would've been so happy." "And you know what they say about black studs." "Raymond went to a place he believed might be better than the place he's from." "We oftentimes feel that way." "You know, you never know truly about your system until you go live in another system." "So for him to go across and go into this experience and being transported to Russia as a propaganda tool but after the propaganda value was gone, he has to live within that system." "When it came to dancing from abstract paintings to a certain kind of dance." "The modern dancing was forbidden." "ln our society, we revere the individual." "The artist is the expression of the individual imagination." "ln the Soviet Union, in a socialist connotation everything has to be social." "Everything has to be in a group." "So the individual expression of an artist is not recognized as valuable." "It's recognized as an egocentric, narcissistic exercise." "The result of it was that a lot of individuals have been repressed." "A terrible thing that the Soviet system did was if people defected, they punished the families." "And that was what stopped an awful lot of people from defecting." "Be quiet!" "It's impossible." "Russia had a system that found artists as long as they played political ball they would lift them and elevate them within their society." "You can see how sincere the offer is." "But also, Russia had the highest rate of suicide of artists of any place in the world." "Here you're just a criminal." "Defection was a crime in Communist Russia." "Mikhail Baryshnikov, when he defected, became a criminal." "You know, he was approached many, many times about returning because it would be a great publicity coup." "But, of course, he was always very sceptical as to the fact that he would be welcome with open arms and would not be punished." "Misha was nominated for an Academy Award on a film called TurnÝng PoÝnt which he had done many years before and then was too busy dancing to continue his acting career." "So I think in the back of his mind, he was thinking:" "" As I grow to be older, is there a possible development for me, for my career, into acting?"" "There's a lot you don't know." "I think that's why he allowed White Nights to tell a story that maybe vaguely some people might've thought it was his biography." "It's a story of a defector." "If I had asked you to come with me the first time would you have come?" "No one was a more famous and more respected dancer than he was, at that point in his career." "Baryshnikov was at the time artistic director of the American Ballet Theatre." "You know, Baryshnikov had to take a leave of absence from the American Ballet Theatre." "This was an invaluable time period." "When we did the film in the early '80s there was still Soviet Union, there was still the Cold War Berlin Wall hadn't come out, Gorbachev hadn't come in." "Because it was made by an American film company at the height of the Cold War the sort of overriding attitude of the film was that everybody wants to leave Russia." "And you know, that really wasn't the case." "The vast majority of Russians, even if they didn't particularly like the Communist system didn't want to leave Russia." "Taylor organized it that I could go to Russia and I did go, and I had a rather extraordinary experience." "I was taken in great secrecy backstage at the Kirov through contacts I had made." "And that was an amazing, sort of, research tool." "You're here now." "Face it." "Make the best of it." "Taylor Hackford wanted me and Gregory Hines to have a sense of the Soviet Union, and he did send us to Leningrad before the film." "We had a glimpse of the Soviet Union." "I remember that we were surprised that when you walk down the streets people don't really look at you." "They look through you." "There is a different eye contact." "Very big poverty." "People are suspicious, or at least they were suspicious of us." "Gregory looked completely American." "There was very little food." "I remember going to a hotel, very luxurious but ran-down." "They give us big menus all written with very interesting calligraphy." "It was their dream menu because every time we said:" ""I'm going to have the...," you know, whatever this big French name, they said, "We're out of it."" "The only thing they always had was potatoes." "That was the only thing they had." "We had great laughs with Gregory about that." "Eleven rubles." "Eleven pirouettes." "Gregory's very warm and very funny and he likes people." "He was everybody's friend." "I was lucky that way." "You know, if I had to play opposite an actor that might've been more private, more shy, a little bit more irritated with a young debutante, maybe I wouldn't have done a good job." "You know what I'm trying to say?" "Gregory was tremendously helpful in making me feel comfortable." ""Your beautiful interpreter was already standing by your side."" "This project began with me first seeing him and deciding I wanted to do something with dance." "I felt he was this incredible talent." "He could dance." "He could sing." "He could act." "And within that he had this shining light that I think stars have." "First thing in a long time that's given me some hope." "Gregory looked at this, realized that it was a dangerous role for him." "But he was moving from the world of dancing into acting." "And this role was going to require him to reach for places that he'd never tried before." "My wife, Darya." "ln the first role, Raymond's wife, we were looking for somebody who would be a credible Russian." "Somebody who had met him after he defected to Russia and fallen in love with him and now was living with him but suffering under the manipulation and oppression that he was experiencing." "You, go, pack quickly!" "One bag!" "She's going away." "I couldn't help but see Isabella Rossellini's picture everywhere because she was the Lancome face." "Extraordinary look." "Very reminiscent of her mother, Ingrid Bergman but also, there was a certain soulful depth there." "She was thinking of pursuing an acting career in the United States." "I had a very big career as a model." "And I had been solicited even when I was young to be an actress just because, I think, my family was in films so film came my way." "When I was working as a model, I was always told that modelling wasn't going to last very long." "Generally, by the time you are 30, you are finished with that career." "Everybody said you have to give it a shot at acting, and you have to try." "She had that right soulful quality." "I couldn't have been any happier than I am with you." "She just has a personality that could calm storms." "It's good to see you smiling." "It was her first film in America." "And gave birth to a quite active and illustrious career." "I remember that for me the biggest difficulty that I had on the set especially in the first two weeks, was really to control my emotion." "Every time it was action my heart would beat so fast." "I would get so nervous." "I would get so panicked, really." "But it was very difficult to feel sad or happy feel whatever the character had to feel." "Because my feelings as Isabella were always overwhelmed." "Are you crazy?" "It will be suicide." "Listen." "And this is one of the things that happens with experience." "You are really able to control your emotion." "As the film went on I became more friendly with the people." "And they seemed to be not so frightening to me anymore." "Especially Misha Baryshnikov." "And Gregory Hines, who played my husband." "But why are we speaking Russian?" "Helen Mirren was known to me at the time." "I had seen her work in various movies." "Now the young ones don't even know your name." "How does that feel?" "What I wasn't aware of was that half of her family is Russian." "I happened to be in Los Angeles making the first film that I'd ever made in Hollywood." "And I happened to be playing a Russian in it." "That was a film called 2010." "I came back from London and defended myself to the KGB." "I had my Russian accent down and I'd learned a bit of Russian for that film." "Galina is the head of the Kirov Ballet." "She's a very important, powerful person." "A great ballerina in the Kirov Ballet who had obviously been his lover and his confidante." "And when he had defected, he had left her behind." "You're just as selfish as you always were." "You've never thought about anyone in your life but yourself." "So I wanted to present a character who loved the country that she lived in and wanted to participate in that country and participate in the culture of that country." "My place is here." "I mean, yes, maybe it's got faults but I'm a patriot." "I love my country." "I love Russia." "I love what Russia represents." "Helen and I worked really well together." "Also fell in love and we've been together for, you know, over 20 years." "We did move around in this film quite a lot." "You know, you sort of open the door in Lisbon and, you know, walk through and be in Finland." "It takes place inside of Russia." "And this was, logistically, a very interesting film to deal with." "Because we could not shoot inside Russia with Baryshnikov." "We're landing in Russia!" "Baryshnikov was never gonna risk going to Russia, and shooting." "So we had to shoot in Europe." "We built our interiors in London." "Then I have obvious exteriors in Leningrad." "That was a very fascinating process to get." "We found a Finnish film crew who had had good contacts in Russia." "I sent them into Russia to make a travelogue." "And they went in for two weeks and we never heard a word." "We got worried." "They were supposed to be back." "They were about three or four days late." "Finally I got the call." "They were out." "They had the film." "He should be on the other side." "Who?" "There was a curiosity for Americans to really have an up-close glimpse into this great city that we were not allowed to go." "There's the River Neva." "There's the Moika Canal." "There are six-story statues of Lenin." "There's the Kirov." "There's the Mariinsky Theater, the exterior." "Anyone from Russia looking at it couldn't believe it." "Traditionally, you look at great dance films you've gotta be able to see the whole body." "On the other hand, I didn't want to just sit back and let all the dances do everything." "I think that Taylor spent an enormous amount of time studying how to film the dance the best." "Generally, ballet is filmed very poorly while it happens on theatre." "But it isn't filmed for the sake of ballet." "The way musicals were done." "So I used a fair amount of camera movement." "But I would always come out wide to be able to see head to toe." "I'd cut in for dramatic effect, but we come out wide." "To get the fluidity without it looking wooden or without just having a camera that's just sitting there and the person is dancing within the shot." "To have a shot that moves but can anticipate the dancer's moves is a very difficult thing to do." "The dancers were responsible, and Twyla Tharp and Roland Petit." "We began with La Jeune Homme et la Mort by Roland Petit." "Which is a modern ballet from the 50s that was originally danced by Jean Babilée." "Baryshnikov loved the ballet and wanted to do it." "Roland Petit is a hugely respected French choreographer." "And one of the reasons that Misha wanted to leave Russia was because he wasn't allowed to dance Roland Petit's work." "The first time you see Gregory Hines he's doing a number from Porgy and Bess "There's A Boat Leavin' Soon For New York."" "There was a dictate that was always there in Gershwin's will that only people of colour can play this role." "So for his wife in the piece, we had to go find a woman of colour who was Russian." "You have a fantastic moment where Greg has to dance out his frustration." "Greg danced alone, not to music." "It was free form." "He just went out and danced his heart out in a tap moment." "To see Greg dealing with Misha...." "Now, the first thing that happened is that we put them together." "And of course, Greg came in and immediately called Misha "Mike."" "Greg just called him Mike." "I don't think anybody in Baryshnikov's life had ever called him Mike." "But he allowed Greg to call him Mike because they were collaborators." "They discovered each other." "So what they did is they fell in love with each other's styles." "They discovered that each had come up from a young age into a discipline and they had both become the best in the world." "And they both could do things that the other one couldn't." "There's a really thrilling moment where you see these two great dancers dancing together." "And this is the moment that both artists have to learn some of the discipline of the other." "As brilliantly as they can dance in their own discipline, they can't because then they leave the other person behind." "So they had to subjugate some of their style learn this common language and dance together." "And to me, it's the high point of the film." "I've had six number-one songs out of my movies." "Out of WhÝte Nights, I had two number-one songs." "You know, "Separate Lives" with Phil Collins and Marilyn Martin and "Say You, Say Me" with Lionel Richie." "That helped this movie." "You had two songs reach the top of the pop charts right as the film is being released." "White Nights." "Coming this Christmas." "You know the film was not a blockbuster." "It was never intended to be." "I thought it had too much complication for that." "But it did make it's money back." "It got critical slings and arrows from each side." "From the left, from the right." "But there's nothing there for me now." "The Reagan-era people they hated the movie because, of course, they felt it was unpatriotic." "Funny, the Americans didn't want you any more than we did." "On the other side, the left you know, attacked the movie, saying "Oh, it's, you know, attacking Russia and the Russian system which, you know, we're trying to build bridges to."" "You're free." "The film came out, it was incredible that three years later it was an open country." "We didn't feel that when we were doing the film at all." "We didn't have the feeling that Russia was going to open up." "It's important to say that this film unfortunately, is a memorial to Gregory Hines." "Gregory was the most incredibly warm, generous human being." "Of course he hadn't told anyone that he was sick." "And all of a sudden, he was gone." "He was taken from us way too soon." "And he had so much to give." "And he had so much talent that was still growing." "I look now at the making of WhÝte Nights as this incredible gift." "You have Gregory Hines doing some of his best work ever." "And creating this ethos that we all experienced." "It's a tribute." "It's a tribute and a memoriam, I think, to a great artist."