"We are here now in the house of my mother, Inna Vladimirovna Makarova, and my father, Sergei Bondarchuk, where I fiirst met Andrei Arsenievich Tarkovsky many years ago." "To be precise, it took place nearby, across the street, in the house of Irina Zhigalko." "Irina Aleksandrovna Zhigalko was a teacher of Romm." "I was 13 at the time and I had already read Stanislaw Lem's Solaris." "Andrei Arsenievich hadn't yet read the novel at that time." "He was a student of Mikhail Romm, and Romm's students gathered there." "Somebody was trying to make a fiire in the fiireplace, and it was smoking." "Somebody was starting a samovar." "Somebody was rocking in a rocking chair, just as I am now." "The person near the fiireplace was Andron Konchalovsky." "The one with the samovar was Vassily Makarovich Shukshin." "And the one in the rocking chair, with a thin moustache, was Andrei Tarkovsky." "I gave him the book Solaris, which belonged to Irina Alexandrovna Zhigalko." "That's how we met, and later Andrei and I often recalled that time." "Now many years have passed." "I was 18 when I got my role in the fillm." "Now I am a little older." "And Andrei Tarkovsky is no longer alive." "I am now making a fiilm about Pushkin..." "my most serious fiilm, and I'm wondering, what is genius?" "And in general, do people need geniuses?" "They are not very agreeable people." "There are always certain problems with them." "I don't know if Tarkovsky was a genius, but he was extremely talented." "When I was studying at VGI K," "I remember hearing a rumor one day," ""The genius is coming!"" "And there, walking down the corridor, was "the genius."" "He was short, with a little moustache, in this little hat with a pom-pom and a scarf, which was a present from Marina Vladi." "A genius... as yet unrecognized..." "was walking by." "Nobody had seen his fiilms yet, but everybody knew he was a genius." "Everybody was whispering that he had come to cast the actors." "I asked for what fiilm and they said Solaris." "I loved the novel so much, and I loved Lem." "I really wanted to be in the fillm." "At that time I had already played young Phoebe in Catcher in the Rye," "Gertrude in Hamlet, 42 years old, and Gogol's Korobochka, who was 82 years old." "Perhaps Tarkovsky chose me because of this range." "I immediately found myself in the company of Donatas Banionis, who believed in me right away." "He helped me a lot and very much wanted me to get the role." "I remember acting, crying..." "Andrei Arsenievich came up to me after the audition, shook my hand, and said," ""Excellent, Natalya, you're acting very well, just like Gerasimov taught you."" "I asked, "And so?"" ""I'm not choosing you."" "I said, "May I ask why?"" "He said, "Look at yourself." "How old are you?"" ""Almost 18."" ""Aha." "Ask Donatas how old he is."" "Donatas was much older than me and he was a poor match as my "husband."" "Donatas was offended, but he kept it to himself." "To avoid wasting my talents," "Tarkovsky recommended me to his fellow director Larisa Shepitko, and she gave me a role in her fiilm You and I without an audition, based only on my audition with Andrei." "The fiilm was shot in Norilsk, and it was very interesting." "The script was by Gennady Shpalikov." "Half a year passed." "I came back from the shoot and found out that Tarkovsky had already auditioned many actresses, including even some foreigners." "He auditioned them all and still had not chosen the one." "Then..." "I was sly..." "I asked Larisa Shepitko to show her footage to Andrei." "They were good friends." "So she shows him her footage and he says," ""Hmm, who is this actress of yours?"" "She says, "She's the gift you gave me..." "Natalya. "" ""What gift?" "What's her name?"" ""Natalya Bondarchuk."" ""That's Bondarchuk?" "Give me back my gift!"" "And that's how I was approved for his fiilm based on her audition." "We started shooting." "Andrei fiirst of all creates the atmosphere." "He is a unique director." "I think he was the only Soviet director besides my father who was well known in the West." "His fiilms are addressed to a universal audience." "In our Soviet land at that time, these fiilms didn't make any sense." "They were all about eternity, and in our land eternity was not recognized." "We were all grave diggers, and his art was about eternity." "It was high poetry, which always rises to God." "He was a religious person." "Perhaps his faith was more of a cosmic nature, and he was involved with different things, but he was spiritual..." "that was very apparent." "Perhaps the harder the life of a great artist is... and Andrei's life was very hard... the more interesting his art is." "He had to transcend himself and prevail over the society that did not acknowledge him." "Andrei was a very nervous person." "Terribly nervous." "Beyond normal." "Almost like a disease." "I don't mean he was mad, but he was, like all of us, obsessed with art." "He was always nervous and biting his nails." "He lived the life of his characters, he lived their atmosphere." "Everything was important to him." "The amateurs in cinema may say, "Well, the acting and the sets aren't great." "Let's cover it over with music and it'll all be fline."" "For him everything was important, from the sets by Misha Romadin, to every nuance of the cinematography by the genius Vadim Yusov..." "a real genius, in my opinion." "Let me tell you a story about Yusov." "I love Vadim very much." "He is a very subtle artist." "There was a scene where they were fiilming me." "It's the scene where Hari, the character I play, meets "herself."" "A well known scene." "We shot it in Zvenigorod, not far from Moscow." "They showed me all the fiilmed material." "I look at the screen and think," ""How interesting these tree roots are!" "What a beautiful view!" "I've never been to that place. "" "And then I see that it's actually me standing there." "I suddenly realized that Andrei had directed it and Yusov had filmed it so personally that I didn't even understand at first that I was a part of this scene." "It was a different place, because it was shown through the eyes of another artist." "I hadn't seen it that way." "I hadn't seen those roots, that tree bark, my own face, and suddenly it turned out I was standing there." "It was phenomenal, because each artist is very individual." "He used to say, "If I can't make a long, boring film, I'll shoot myself."" "He was joking, of course, but that was the kind of thing he showed... grass swaying in the wind, etc." "When we are looking at a landscape, I mean, just looking, we look and look, and then we start waiting for something to happen." "Our attention becomes focused." "It's like meditation." "He was a master of this kind of thing." "If my father could film large action scenes like nobody else in the world, nobody could show "atmosphere" like Andrei." "It's as if reality moves into a different dimension, the dimension of art." "If we just look at a landscape, that's a documentary." "But if we start seeing and hearing something else, what the artist makes possible for us to see, that is art, and it bewitches us." "But it affects only those who have it inside themselves, who have already accumulated so much in their soul that they can take it in." "That's why this sort of art is certainly not for everybody." "How did we work together?" "I trusted him completely." "Completely." "For example, he might say, "My heart hurts,"" "and I knew that meant I didn't act well." "Most of all he disliked high pathos in art." "What does that mean?" "For example, I'd start acting too dramatically, and he'd exclaim, "What are you doing?" "You're a woman!" "They won't listen to you." "Why would they?" "You sound like a screeching door!"" "That's the way he directed." "Only later did I understand how right he was." "Because if I rose to high pathos, as if Hari were some kind of Soviet-era patriot, it would be the wrong image." "Hari couldn't be like that." "She was nobody, just a matrix, a mold." "She understands that she is not human, that she is just some kind of likeness." "It's an incredible conflict." "Later Andrei and I talked about it... we were close friends and kept in touch... and I asked him, "Andrei, you know who I was playing?" "I was playing the Little Mermaid." "She also had no right to love a human being." "She was a mermaid, with a tail like a fiish." "She lived for three hundred years, but she didn't have a human soul." "But she loved a man so deeply that she herself became human."" "So it was with Hari." "She had no right to love, but she did." "She starts understanding another person, and she herselfbecomes a person, right in front of our eyes." "This transformation is unique." "It's my favorite fiilm, even though I played in The Red and the Black, based on the brilliant novel by Stendhal, a fiilm made by my teacher, Gerasimov, and I played Maria Volkonskaya in Motyl's fiilm" "The Star of Enchanted Happiness." "I played more than 42 roles, but Solaris was the pinnacle for me." "It's my favorite fiilm." "When I became a fiilm director, I understood..." "There was a time I saw all his fiilms at once, one after another." "It was at a fiilm festival in Surgut." "Yankovsky came, Margarita Terekhova, all the best actors." "And we watched all Tarkovsky's fiilms end to end." "When it was over, we couldn't leave each other." "We were all thinking about this miracle, this phenomenon, because it felt as if we had watched just one fiilm." "One fiilm." "Because the most interesting thing in all of them is Tarkovsky himself." "He's in everything." "He was in my character, and in Donatas' too." "But it doesn't limit the fillm in any way." "It's almost strange." "Because when it's all about the director, it could be limiting, but it wasn't." "Perhaps because he so loved atmosphere, sounds, unusual characters, a movement of the eyelashes." "He created atmosphere like nobody else." "Once he had this strange idea to take four different cinematographers, the best..." "Antonioni, Bresson, I don't know, the best, the real genius directors... and let them fiilm one and the same story," "using the same actors." "He thought it would be phenomenally interesting, because they would make absolutely different fiilms." "His own fiilms are extremely individual." "Solaris received the Grand Prix du jury at the Cannes film festival." "Which is the second-highest offiicial prize at Cannes, an important prize." "Something else that was suppressed during the Soviet era:" "We also received the Catholic Church Prize for the divine nature of the fillm." "It was kept a strict secret in the USSR, because how could a Soviet director receive such a prize?" "I believe that the money he received from the Vatican helped him to survive." "Andrei's life at that time was terribly hard." "Solaris had not yet been released, and neither had Andrei Rublev." "That was the situation." "It was only for three months, but those three months could have cost him his life." "The censors told us to change 42 things." "We might just as well reshoot the fillm." "Most of their criticism, of course, focused on the scene of my resurrection." "It's the most serious scene in the film, and I did a lot of preparation for it." "They covered me with a crystal solution." "By the way, it was the first time this had been tried, and nobody knew whether I would survive it or not." "But nobody was concerned with that." "The main thing was to shoot the scene." "Whether I survived was secondary." "So they covered me with this stuff, which crystallized, and I was to keep it on forjust a few seconds." "I was supposed to hold my breath and appear to be dead." "I have just drunk liquid oxygen and turned to ice." "It was not clear how long I could stay covered with this stuff." "I could communicate with Andrei only through gestures." "He asked, "Do you think you can last for half a minute?" I said yes." "But I lasted for a minute and a half, because I used to dive and could hold my breath for a long time." "He was very happy that he managed to shoot the scene and exclaimed," ""Well done!" "You're my Snow Queen!"" "Then something terrible happened." "I couldn't resist a smile, but the crystal mask was still covering me, and it could easily have cut my face." "Fortunately, there was a bucket of water to thaw me out." "I grabbed some water and splashed it on my face, and the mask thawed." "Then I told him just what I thought of him." "But most of the time we were great friends." "Andrei took great care of me, and it was a great pleasure to work with him." "All of us actors worked in harmony with each other." "Donatas simply adored me, mostly because he and I rehearsed together in secret from Andrei." "Our genius categorically refused to rehearse." "He wanted everything to be like in real life." "For example, it would take me two hours to flix my hair, and then he would come and mess it up "like the wind did it."" "Then I had to spend another two hours fiixing it, because next time he'd say, "What's wrong with your hair?"" "The same thing happened with Donatas." "Andrei exhausted him." "The main thing was "just be brilliant... that's all."" "But how can you be brilliant if you haven't even seen the script yet?" "Especially since Donatas came from the stage." "He needed the essence of the part." "Andrei wasn't interested in the essence of the part." "He was interested in the actor's state." "Those are two different things." "The atmosphere on location was very interesting." "He treated each actor individually." "Most of all he tormented his favorite, Solonitsyn." "Solonitsyn played in Rublev, and Tarkovsky knew that unless he drove Anatoly crazy, he wouldn't get the best out of him." "So he would torture Anatoly until Anatoly's eyes started jerking back and forth... only then would Andrei begin shooting." "He treated me very delicately." "He would read me poetry to inspire me." "He was just wonderful." "With Banionis, however, he was somewhat competitive." "Banionis was a People's Artist, an important fiigure..." "Donatas sensed the competition, and he felt the lack of Andrei's attention." "Then there were Vlad Dvorzhetsky and Yuri Yarvet." "A fabulous cast of actors, every one of them superb." "My favorite scene was in the library." "Misha Romadin created this incredible microcosm." "They are traveling in space, and they've brought along all the best from Earth." "Pushkin's death mask, The Dragon, a Brueghel painting, and Donatas and I are floating in the air." "Working with him was very interesting and easy, because our faith in our director was absolute." "I liked it when he'd come up to me and say," ""You know, it's not important to me how you act or what you say." "What matters is that you are alive." "That your eyelashes tremble, that tears appear in your eyes..."" "Without being dogmatic, he could explain the life of the human spirit." "Spirit above all else." "Once he gave me a phenomenal suggestion." "In the freezing scene there is a moment when Hari is coming back to life." "He said, "She is being reborn through pain." "She is developing internal organs." "The corpse is returning to life through death."" "He suggested I should focus my attention on my hands." "That proved very helpful." "I came to believe that there is no death, that we shall survive everything." "There is no death." "I am convinced of that." "There is transformation, whatever, but the spirit does not disappear." "Only our body, the shell, disappears." "We shared the same life philosophy." "He also felt that this shell meant nothing." "When through this physical shell something else emerges..." "In the beginning of the fillm I look somewhat ethereal." "It wasn't Hari looking at you, not someone from Earth." "It was Solaris looking at you through her eyes, or Cosmos, or God, or whatever you like." "I think there are very few fiilms like this." "Very few." "I saw Solaris when it had just been released, and I've seen it many times since." "I traveled to 42 countries with the fillm:" "New Zealand, Australia, Bolivia, Guinea," "France many times, Italy, Canada, the USA." "It was shown at a festival in San Francisco." "Each time, I saw people stagger out of the theater, stunned by the divine atmosphere he knew how to create." "What is Solaris?" "For me, as I am today, it is life after life." "Each of us will have an encounter like that with our conscience, that conscience which no amount of earthly prayer can ever expiate or extinguish." "When we leave, each of us will meet his own "guest."" "It's something we are guilty of and which it's too late to correct, because these people are no longer alive." "And friends will tell you, "Hari's suicide was not your fault." "You had nothing to do with it." "It was an accident."" "But it wasn't an accident, and the heart knows it, that you did not love enough, or you mortally wounded her, and she departed... for nonexistence." "But it only seems that she departed, for in fact she draws closer and closer to you." "The older you get, the heavier this sin weighs on your conscience, and sooner or later you have to confront it." "All Andrei's fiilms were prophetic." "Unfortunately, they were also prophesies about his own life." "Because when he left the country..." "In Solaris there is a phrase..." "Let me try to paraphrase it for you:" ""We love only what we can lose." "Home, homeland, woman..."" "And at a certain point he lost it all and fell fatally ill." "The values he held as a person, the home he was almost never able to enjoy, the comfort that nobody gave him, a woman who could fully understand him," "and his homeland, which he loved very much but which neither understood nor accepted him." "For a long time he thought about escaping." "When his mother died, he could not return to his homeland to bury her." "It was then that the cancer cells attacked him." "Some believe cancer is a kind of self-defense on the part of the body." "I don't know." "But in any case, Andrei was always doomed somehow." "Doomed to suffer." "On one occasion, in Goskino... when they told us to change 42 things in the fillm... we stood together looking out a window, and he stood there and cried." "He said, "I bring unhappiness to everybody." "To you too."" "I said, "No, Andrei, you've given me great happiness... working with you."" "He always remembered these words." "And then there was the Cannes festival." "But the artist could hardly stay on his feet." "Once we went to visit Romadin." "Andrei was a bit of an epicure." "He liked fline things." "He was always impeccably dressed." "At dinner, he picked up a fork and a knife, and then a piece of food fell on the floor." "He picked it up, put it back on his plate and ate it." "He was hungry." "He had no money." "He owed 11,000 rubles and didn't have a kopeck in his pocket." "This was during Soviet times." "You may remember how much 11,000 was." "It was much more than $11,000." "I very much wanted to see Andrei when I learned that he had cancer." "But you had no way to get in touch with him, right?" "I'll tell you." "I got that opportunity when I went to France for a children's fiilm festival." "I had just fiilmed Bambi and had received several international awards, and I was traveling with the fillm." "So I asked if they could arrange a meeting with him." "The KGB man who followed me everywhere said," ""Absolutely not!" "I won't allow that!"" "And he drove right past the cancer clinic." "I will never forget that horror." "I was desperate and ready to jump out the door, like Hari when she broke through the steel door." "I didn't know then that Larisa had already abandoned him and left him to die in the cancer clinic." "I didn't know that, but if I had known," "I would have slipped away at night to see him." "I didn't know my way around France." "They took me to the provinces soon after and that was that." "That was a true horror." "One time he and I had an intimate conversation." "We were returning from the festival in Cannes." "The authorities were concerned that the two of us might stay in France, because on occasion we had been seen meeting Russian immigrants." "Baskakov was there." "He was watching us all the time." "We went to buy some perfume." "Andrei bought some for his wife, and I bought some too, and it got a little late." "We got back and found Baskakov all purple in the face." "I asked Andrei, "What's the matter with him?"" ""He thought we might stay here."" "I said, "What?" It had never even occurred to me." "Andrei said, "You know, we could." I asked, "What do you mean?"" "And he said, "Never mind." "Who needs me there anyway?" "I can only make my long, boring fiilms here."" "He said, "I love my home." "My son Andrushka has just been born. "" "No, he wouldn't have left if it hadn't been for Larisa." "Larisa wanted a different life." "And then she left him, and he never came back." "I was fiirst introduced to Tarkovsky during the fiilming of" "The Steamroller and the Violin, which was his graduation project." "That was a very interesting time for me, and I still cherish the memory of it." "I met this very likeable and charming young man." "That was my impression ofhim when we first met, and that's how he remained in my memory throughout his life and after his death." "I remember how the project for Solaris fiirst came up." "It received support as a promising project." "I know that Andrei's interpretation of the theme was slightly different from the way it is developed in the novel." "For him the theme of human moral conscience was most important in this material," "in this filim." "He was fascinated by the theme of the material and magical force of the Earth." "He conceived of it as Earth's sensual nature." "I remember our discussions and how he tried to explain his position, that it was something greater than our usual perception of earth, water, or grass." "It is greater, it is all alive, saturated with moisture and the movement of microscopic particles." "It follows the laws of physics and chemistry, but it's also a part ofhuman experience." "We are intimately connected to this sensual planet." "And the other planet is also created from protean material which is also alive but whose nature is unknown to us." "In the film we also had to create an image of this contrasting universe." "All Tarkovsky's fiilms are extremely expressive cinematographically." "It's easy to understand why, because through this medium he was striving to express his ideas." "We mustn't forget that cinema is a protean art, a visual art, and it conveys its ideas through images." "The entire history of cinematography confiirms this, from silent fiilms to sound." "There is no disagreement on this point, but rarely is it either fully understood." "Throughout his career in fiilm," "Tarkovsky always remained true to this understanding." "I started some things with other directors and carried them through to completion for them, directors who sometimes abandoned the visual nature of fiilm and veered off in the direction of complex theatrics or allowed themselves to be influenced by their actors." "For them the imagery was secondary." "This approach does not diminish the role of the cameraman, but neither does it allow the cameraman to be a full participant, which is why I consider myself very lucky to have met such a director." "I believe in a sense he was fortunate as well, because in me he found someone at his level, somebody who was not trying to impose his own ideas but was trying to help him reach his own objectives." "By then we had already seen Kubrick's 2001:" "A Space Odyssey, which served as a basis for comparison, and we had already had many discussions with Lem." "These discussions were not easy, because it was diffiicult for Lem to let go of his work." "Finally, Andrei managed to reconcile his position with Lem's." "It was done very intelligently and tactfully." "I don't think Lem was unhappy." "However, I don't know to what degree he accepted the fillm." "I can't really say." "He may not have fully admired it, but the contact between them continued throughout the production of the fillm." "As for our impressions of 2001:" "A Space Odyssey, it coincided with the beginning of fiilming on Solaris." "When we saw Kubrick's fiilm, we were mesmerized by the fillm's imagery, its expansiveness and space, the massive flying objects, and much more." "But as for the scenes of the birth of humanity, his understanding of it was alien to us." "They were logical for Kubrick's interpretation, but for us, who were inspired by different concepts, they could not serve as a good model." "We admired the space station in the fillm, and how he showed the cosmos." "We knew that with the technology available to Soviet fiilmmakers at the time, we could not reach the same level." "We knew it was a vivid example of the results that fiilmmakers in the West could hope to achieve." "We chose a different approach that was true to the objectives and concepts of the fillm." "Ours was supposed to be a handmade station." "It was meant to compensate the travelers for the loss of connection with people." "Also, it was shattered, half-broken, battered, tattered, somewhat unkempt." "In its early days it was in perfect condition, but by the time we get to see it, it's worn out and in bad shape." "Despite that, everything still works." "People still can take off from it and come back and so on." "Andrei was surrounded by like-minded people, among whom was someone who worked with us on the fiilms" "Andrei Rublev," "The Steamroller and the Violin" "and Solaris." "That was Vassili Petrovich Sevastianov, a special effects cameraman." "He has since passed away." "He was a person who invested much of his skill, his understanding, and even his health in the challenge of fiilming the scenes depicting the cosmic Ocean." "As we've discussed already, we had certain ideas about what Earth was and what space was." "This understanding had to be transformed into the fillm's images." "To convey our idea of Earth as a sensual source oflife, we tried to show things like underwater plants, fire, various textures of nature, and earthly elements." "But to create images of the station or another planet was a big challenge." "First, what textures to use to depict the Ocean." "In Lem's novel, there are mysterious fiigures that rise out of the Ocean, as if born out of the power of the deep." "At some point we even considered using animal viscera, from cows, for example." "Get some from a slaughterhouse and photograph a surreal intestinal texture, and in some way bring it to life on-screen to create an image of something vague, recognizable in texture but something the mind can't quite grasp." "But then we realized all the challenges we'd face working with, as they call it, "perishable product,"" "all the details of the textures involved, and working out all the details involving weight and volume and other problems." "We realized that we needed liquid, a liquid with a certain viscosity and a certain texture, and a certain color." "We came up with a solution by combining acetone with some mixtures." "We also used silver powder, or rather aluminum powder, and various dyes to achieve this unusual effect." "Something else that's important to remember when creating special effects is that the texture of an object betrays its scale." "That's why it was important to use only very fline, microscopic textures." "Finally, in combination with movement and the right fiilm speed, after many takes and double exposures, we found it." "Mind you, the entire fiilm was made using only original negatives." "The principal editing was all done with original negatives." "Duplicate negatives were used only for some secondary images." "Most of the fillm was done using only original negatives." "This was my responsibility as cameraman." "I believed that was the only way to achieve quality photography, its believability and authenticity, especially for the wide screen." "A wide-screen version was also an obstacle for certain special effects." "Anyway, that's how it was done." "It was an enormous and diffiicult task." "Andrei had an excellent team of like-minded people." "Besides myself, the cinematographer, there were the designer, the composer, the sound editor... a whole team of people who labored over the work." "I never saw anyone with an indifferent attitude during production." "There was hardly ever anyone we were not happy with or about whom we could complain, even if only in our mind." "Nobody is perfect, of course, including ourselves." "Andrei was not perfect either." "He and I received a lot of help from engineers and consultants, who introduced us to various technologies." "These technologies usually served only as a starting point for a creative concept." "Working on this picture was a very long process." "It took a lot of preparation and the help of many technical specialists." "Take the launch scene." "It was just a small rocket, but it was filmed inside a pavilion, and we had to create a screen "reality."" "It was only cinema, but it had to be believable." "We could not afford to make mistakes which would not be acceptable at a real rocket launching, which today is still done the same way." "When it came to creating the image of the house," "I think we were very lucky." "In Zvenigorod we found the "Earth house,"" "the house they come across at the end of the fillm on the island created by the Ocean." "We found a great location right near a monastery, on a hillside, in a small ravine not far from a road." "In this ravine there was a small pond." "It was a very special spot that allowed us to fiilm 360 degrees around without capturing any trace of modern life." "We were creating "the future."" "Not the technological future, but the future where people gravitate to life as it was in the past, not to the primitive life style of the past, but to past values and past aesthetics." "It was a wood house, and it was perfect, like a polished grand piano, which made it look different from the wood houses we know today." "We managed to include the pond, a bridge across the river and almost all the surroundings." "We also filmed this location from a helicopter." "When we shot the departure scene, we started with a crane and then cut to the footage taken from the helicopter." "Just before we left the location forjapan to fiilm the "city of the future,"" "the temperature suddenly dropped below zero." "The frost set in, the pond froze, but there was no snow." "It looked like it could have been" "Amsterdam when the canals freeze and there is no snow and people skate on the canals." "The trees were almost bare." "The pond was frozen, as if the water was dead." "We managed to get it all on fiilm." "We got lucky." "We managed to shoot the scene where the main character, played by Banionis, arrives on the island." "You know, nobody really notices it, but it works." "It's peripheral vision, and a contradiction built into the scene." "Everything looks real, like on Earth, but it is absolutely still." "There is no movement." "It was pure luck on our part." "How we fiilmed the station." "Every project, every situation in every fiilm, needs an individual approach." "I understand and greatly admire what Spielberg did in jurassic Park." "It's an incredible achievement, great technology." "It's perfectly planned, constantly moving upwards, one step at a time, overcoming obstacles, meeting new challenges, understanding, moving forward." "Our objectives were different, but we had a similar experience." "We used an "infra-screen,"" "similar to the blue screen used in America." "The movement of the camera had to be precise to fiilm the station, which was soaring above the Ocean." "The movement of the camera had to be precise." "What do I mean by that?" "It could not deviate even a micron." "So we brought from St. Petersburg a 12-meter-long mounting plate from a lathe machine that had been used to turn artillery barrels." "They used these platforms in factories to drill holes in the artillery barrels." "It had a precision platform on which we mounted the camera." "We moved it one centimeter at a time to film the scene of the station's approach." "It looks perfect on the screen, without any cinematographic defects, as if it had actually been filmed in space." "We had many heated arguments, but they never got personal." "Our arguments were always to the point." "You have to give Andrei credit, because he wouldn't tolerate any kind of conflict" "based on personal resentment." "Our arguments were only about images or dramatic composition or a specifiic scene." "These arguments sometimes were very diffiicult." "I was often the one arguing about something." "That doesn't mean I would argue for argument's sake." "But often Andrei introduced me to something new, no question about it." "In Andrei Rublev there is one scene." "We fiilmed it in Pskov, near the walls of a monastery." "I can't remember the name of it right now." "We wanted to create an image of a crater." "Tartars are attacking, people are struggling, and it looks as if they are being dragged down." "The topography of the location allowed us to do that." "We choreographed the crowd so as to create the illusion that they were being sucked down into a funnel, disappearing into nowhere." "We fiilmed at high speed so that on-screen it appears in slow motion." "Suddenly Andrei walks up carrying two geese under his arms." "Just imagine the director coming to the scene all excited, carrying these geese." "He said, "I'm going to throw them in." I protested, "Why the geese?"" "I was very tense." "I had been working on framing the scene for a long time." "He insisted, "Yes, they should be flying there."" "I gave up. "Fine, throw them in if you want." And he did." "Only later, when I saw it on the screen, did I realize what an incredible effect those heavy, low-flying birds created." "They were domesticated geese, so they couldn't fly far." "They were more falling down into the crater than flying, sluggishly flapping their wings." "We fiilmed this at high speed, so on the screen it runs very slowly." "It was a striking effect that I understood only when I saw it on-screen." "I have to admit that I didn't see or understand everything he wanted to do." "As for the concept of authenticity," "Tarkovsky understood, and we all agreed, that authenticity on the screen is a must." "We are creating a fairy tale about the past." "We know nothing about it." "It was so long ago, and there are practically no materials about that time." "A few architectural monuments built during the period are still standing." "There are the painted icons." "There are a few manuscripts left by the monk chroniclers of those days." "But for use on-screen, this material is very limited." "How do we turn it into believable visual images?" "That's one of the reasons he used black-and-white fiilm." "Color appears only at the very end, when it was necessary to emphasize the real power of the art of Andrei Rublev, his frescoes, his icons, his paintings." "Andrei was very easygoing, but he was extremely goal-oriented." "A person who gives himself completely to his work always commands respect." "And his team saw that." "Sure, he was a fiilm director, he liked fiiner things, to do this and have that, etc., but when it came to work, he was fully devoted." "For him nothing else existed in life besides cinema." "Of course, he wished he could have been fiinancially secure, but not by sacrifiicing or giving up his art." "But of course he wished his work was better compensated." "His fate seemed to protect him." "Sometimes it seemed he was almost ready to deviate from his goal." "Some offers were very tempting, but he never took that step." ""No, I won't!"" "He would think seriously about it, weigh all possible consequences, consider it anxiously, but in the end he always made the right decision." "In this regard, I don't think that his fate was unfavorable." "I can't say that." "In what other country does a young graduate get to make a full-length feature fiilm?" "He got the chance to make Ivan's Childhood right away and received an award at an international festival, and right after that he got to make the monumental fiilm Andrei Rublev." "It wasn't easy, though." "They did not hand it to him on a silver platter." "There was a long waiting period." "I remember, we were both really broke when we were awaiting the decision." "We waited and didn't take on any other projects." "Of course, I was only an attendant fiigure, but I remember the moral pressure that a person undergoes who's able to make a better living but doesn't because he's made a choice." "The thing was that to allow somebody to make a fiilm about Rublev in a country where religion was outlawed, and to let him make a fiilm about an icon painter... this was unheard of." "Not to mention the cost." "If it were a fiilm about revolution, that would be one thing." "But this was a fiilm about the past, many centuries ago, when religion ruled all these princes and principalities, everything that had been rejected... and suddenly there's a fiilm about it." "That's why I think it was a unique situation." "Nevertheless..." "and we often spoke of this... of course he did suffer." "But in Russia he had what he could not receive in the West." "Of course, we should be grateful to those producers who helped him make two fiilms in the West." "But what the Soviet Union made possible was his major work, the monumental picture Andre Rublev... this was amazing for a very young director." "They offered Andrei a project in the West, and they offered him creative freedom." "He was given permission to do it, and he left." "I think that when he left, he intended to return." "And that might have come about but because of other things that happened, and he never returned." "I was fortunate to meet Andrei in Milan." "At that time he was completing his fiilm Nostalgia." "In fact, he had just fiinished it." "It was a wonderful and memorable trip." "We were guests in many homes, everybody was very hospitable." "The Italians greeted us with open arms and with great respect." "We were all in a great mood." "I remember, we were sitting under the walls of a villa, the villa where we were staying." "It had been renovated from a Christian residence of an earlier era, built from old stones in an architecture typical of its time." "And, what was most important to me, it afforded a panoramic view of the valley." "It was an open space, and even though people lived in the area, we saw nobody." "Just the rolling hills and beautiful olive groves, silver leaves, mid-May, springtime, nature opening itself up to the sun." "It was very beautiful." "We were sitting in the sun, next to each other, and Larisa, Andrei's wife, says, "Andrei, we'll never go back."" "Andrei says, "Don't talk nonsense."" "He was sitting on the ground, bending forward, with his eyes downcast." "He says, "You see, I've been thinking about that, about what I should do." "I know that when I return," "I'll have to pay them back for this trip and fiilm whatever they tell me."" "Andrei knew he couldn't make films to order, or things that were not consistent with his ideas." ""Besides, my friends will say" "I went abroad just to make money." "The atmosphere around me will be very tense."" "I said, "Never mind your friends." "And as for refusing to do things, you've done that before, and you'll do it again."" ""It's all so complicated." "It may not be for me."" "He sounded pensive, as if weighing everything." "That's where our conversation ended." "I didn't feel it was going anywhere, and I didn't want to try to talk him out of it." "Andrei could think for himself, he had plenty of life experience, even though sometimes he was somewhat too naive and trusting." "People sometimes lied to him and he sincerely believed them." "In brief, his visit was over." "He invited me to travel with him." "But I said it wasn't possible and went to see him off at the airport." "I remember the last time I saw him." "At the Milan airport, they were moving away on the horizontal escalator." "They waved to me." "There were three of them:" "Larisa, Andrei, and a person accompanying them." "On our side it was our Italian friends and myself." "That was the last time I saw him." "We spoke on the phone seven months later, when I was in Rome." "But we never had a chance to meet again." "By that time he had already been labeled as a defector." "I understand it wasn't a simple decision for Andrei." "He didn't have enough work waiting for him in the West to support his decision." "Those close to him and those who appreciated his talent did everything they could to support him." "But not everything was in their power." "There are some Russian directors who successfully work abroad... for instance, Otar Ioseliani, and there are probably other examples." "But in Andrei's case, his most important works were created here in Russia." "Andrei and I met when Andron Konchalovsky brought us together." "We both used to have tremendous flights with our parents and had already been living on our own." "It seemed incredible to us that at 19 we were renting rooms, commuting to Perlovka, and living all over Moscow." "I was a pro at fiinding rooms for rent in Moscow." "At one time we rented a room we called the "shooting gallery" or "pencil box."" "It was a former corridor on the fiirst floor, with a window at the end." "It was a communal apartment, with neighbors walking by in their underwear... a classic Zoshchenko." "Andron called and asked," ""Would you like me to bring Andryusha Tarkovsky by?"" "To us at that time he was an unrivaled giant and a great authority because he had already received a Golden Lion in Venice." "He had not yet made Rublev, but he had already received a Golden Lion." "We of course said yes, and he brought Andrei over, and Andrei brought Vadim Yusov as well as..." "That was also how we met Volodya Vysotsky for the fiirst time." "The room was so narrow that Andrei, sitting against one wall, could rest his feet on the opposite wall." "He then offered me..." "He said, "I'm fiilming Rublev now."" "That's how we met and became friends, and we stayed friends for many years, up until the end." "We were very close." "We got together with Andrei every day." "He often slept over in our apartment." "None of us had any money." "We'd search for a few coins stuck in a coat lining for a taxi to go see each other." "The amazing thing was Andrei did not have a telephone then." "He told us that when they invited him to be on the jury at Cannes festival or some other festival, when they asked for his number..." "Somebody like De Sica asked, "What's your telephone number?"" "And he answered, "I don't have a telephone."" "They grew quiet and didn't believe him, but it was true." "During that first visit he invited me to work on Solaris." "At some point we became friends, and I often stopped by to see him at Mosfilm." "On one occasion I overheard a discussion about the "flying man" in the fillm Rublev." "There was this scene about a man with wings who jumps from a bell tower." "Andrei kept asking, "How can we do it so that he doesn't resemble an angel, so that there is no symbolism?"" "The designers and the cameraman were there, and they couldn't think of anything." "Somebody said, "Let's make the wings of wood."" ""No, that won't work either." "We need to do something to eliminate the symbolism."" ""Let's make the wings out of feathers."" ""That's another symbol." "It'll look like a live angel."" "And it occurred to me..." "I said just one word." "It should be a sack, a flying sack." "Andrei was thrilled, and that's how it was done." "That's how Rublev begins." "He asked me to draw a sketch, and I did." "From then on he kept that sketch under the glass on his desktop, this flying sack." "That was my contribution to Rublev." "He also invited me often on location." "I traveled to Zvenigorod, just to get together and have a little wine." "We didn't drink much or often then, just occasionally." "Around that time, or perhaps in that narrow room, or maybe around the time when I suggested the idea of the flying sack, he said, and I remember the exact words he used:" ""I am offiicially inviting you to work on Solaris, which I will start soon."" "We began working on Solaris." "At first we didn't know how it was going to look." "They even got me a subscription to an American science magazine." "But science was not for me." "I am an artist." "I proceed from aesthetics." "I think of something..." "let's say a mobile." "Then it's the scientists'job to make it work." "And that is how we proceeded." "Many fiind signifiicance in the fact that his fiilms are mostly black-and-white, but often it was just out of desperation:" "There was a shortage of color fiilm." "They gave him only black-and-white film, and he tried tojustify it in his film." "It wasn't his own idea, except in Andrei Rublev." "There the scenes in color were filmed on purpose, to show the paintings, while the rest of the film was in black-and-white." "There was a journalist then by the name of Stevens." "He worked for some English newspaper." "He invited us to the embassy to see Stanley Kubrick's fiilm, 2001:" "A Space Odyssey, which had just been released." "To tell you the truth, Andrei had a strong negative reaction." "He felt it was exactly how one should not fiilm science fiiction." "When you fiilm science fiiction, it should be extremely down-to-earth visually." "It must rigorously avoid the "fantastic" in order to be believable." "He said, "Let's do it the way we agreed on before." "Let's make our space station look like a broken-down old bus and not like some futuristic space utopia. "" "In our work on the fillm, we were united by one absurd thing:" "Neither of us liked science fiiction." "We never read science fiiction and didn't like it." "It was just fate that he fiirst fiilmed Lem and later Stalker." "I think he liked Stalker a little more than Lem." "We got together with Andrei and Vadim Yusov and brainstormed about what to do to avoid the fantastic as much as possible and keep the fillm closer to Earth." "Andrei and Gorenshtein even wrote a new version of the script where two thirds of the events took place on Earth and only one third in space." "But Lem was adamantly against it." "He said, "I forbid you to make this filim with such an interpretation of my Solaris. "" "It was either abandon the idea of this filim altogether or adhere more closely to the novel." "It was a real dilemma, because everything was at stake." "A budget had already been approved and the fiirst stage had been completed." "That's why, though I think" "Solaris is an outstanding fiilm, even for Andrei, he was not entirely satisfiied, because from the beginning he had envisioned the fillm differently." "Lem sent a furious letter, basically saying "my way or no way," and Andrei had to oblige." "Then I said, "Then let's do something else." "Let's turn this cosmos into Earth."" "He said, "But what about the space station and everything you've designed?"" "I said, "Let's forget about it." "Let's make this space station look like a three-room apartment with square windows, the type you can open, and icicles hanging outside."" "Otar Ioseliani just loved this idea." "He was ecstatic about it." "But Andrei at fiirst guffawed and then said no, because it wasn't his style." "It would become comic, and Andrei claimed that he had no sense of humor." "That was completely untrue." "In fact he had a great sense of humor." "But he believed that he had a different mission in life, that he was meant to make a different kind of fiilm." "In his aesthetics he was opposed to Fellini and Pasolini." "His fiilms were completely different." "He was searching for a language that could exist only in cinema." "Fellini, he said, tried to imitate painting." "He tried to create a "painting" inside of a still frame, which on the screen results not in a painting but in "live pictures."" "And he had a fundamental disagreement with Pasolini because he felt Pasolini identifiied cinema with literature, that Pasolini employed syntax, punctuation, montage, etc." "I can't analyze it now in detail, but the fact remains that for Andrei the only montage that existed was the montage of time." "That's why there were many ideas he fiirst liked and then rejected." "The fiilm is interpreted as nostalgia, but it's not nostalgia for any country." "Perhaps that's why Solaris continues to be the most popular of his fiilms in the West." "Because it's not directly connected with Russia." "It's a nostalgia for the whole Earth, for earthly civilization." "That's what makes it so international, more so than any ofhis other films." "It is not directly tied to Russia, and in the few instances where it is, it makes it even better, because when he shows a small creek somewhere in Russia, he connects it even more strongly with Earth." "While we were designing the sets for the film, we had a remarkable neighbor, a friend of Andrei's by the name of Lev Lupichev." "He now directs the space program "Progress."" "He's a great authority, and he is also a very kind and intelligent person." "He was our consultant on the fillm." "He loaned us a "thinking machine."" "At that time these machines looked like huge armoires, not like these tiny computers today that can do all sorts of things." "We used it in our sets." "He was supposed to tell us if such a machine looked realistic in a space setting." "He said a wonderful thing:" ""This entire place looks like we could launch it into space right now." "This here looks like a solar cell, this could be an electric battery. "" "But, in fact, I had used only my aesthetic and artistic intuition." "I threw away all the magazines and started designing the moving objects." "We decided there could be a threshold they cross during the flight, at the point when weightlessness sets in in the station, and all the characters are floating in midair, and the books..." "it was my own copy of Don Quixote and my copy of The Animal World." "Books I had from my childhood." "Everything was floating in midair, even a burning candle." "I didn't expect it to come out looking the way it did, the way they fiilmed my sets." "There was this corridor with yawning windows... it almost didn't fiit in the picture." "There on the second level" "I piled up sand and made this uneven floor." "It made a very interesting, uneven surface." "It looked extremely avant-garde." "No one had seen that before." "The most amazing thing was a mirrored room." "I got this idea..." "In the script there was supposed to be a city of the future, when they step out of the station." "I had this idea to cover the ceiling, the floor and all the walls with mirrors." "The effect would be multiple reflections, compounded a million times." "The cameraman, Vadim Yusov, would be hidden inside a mirrored sphere suspended by a crane, with only a narrow opening for the camera." "Inside the room we would place a neon mobile, and we would have people in neon costumes walk through." "Two or three people would be enough to create an image of a never-ending crowd, like on Broadway." "When Akira Kurosawa came to visit, he was greatly impressed by the fact we were able to build such a space station and by how we had gone about it." "It made a strong impression." "And that was natural, because besides Mosfiilm, the plant which produced light alloys for the real "moonwalker" was involved too." "They worked in earnest, as if for a real space project." "Kurosawa asked if he could spend one hour alone inside the station." "He walked around and around and came out an hour later with some notes he had taken in Japanese." "He then announced he would like to film Dersu Uzala there, at Mosfilm." "In each fiilm Tarkovsky has a quintessential visual idea." "He creates "paintings,"" "but they are not like Fellini's "live pictures."" "He simply fiilms art in its natural form." "In Ivan's Childhood it's based on an etching by Durer." "In Andrei Rublev it's the icons." "In Nostalgia it's Piero della Francesca." "And in Solaris it's Brueghel." "He never wavered from this." "He chose the painting to serve as the quintessence of Earth." "It conjures up associations of childhood, snow, dogs." "He borrowed from Brueghel to create this connection between space and Earth." "Or, in other fiilms, between war and Earth, or other events." "In each instance he establishes connections through a painting or poetry, or both." "He loved the poetry ofTzvetayeva and Mandelshtam, but most of all he used the poetry of his father, Arseni Tarkovsky." "I would not call Andrei Tarkovsky a man of strong will." "On the contrary..." "he was a very sensitive, subtle person." "On everything that did not involve film, he could compromise or drift with the stream." "It's not that he was strong-willed when it came to film." "He simply couldn't help it, because an artist always remains an artist, and Tarkovsky was always true to himself." "I met Tarkovsky in 1970 at the home of my friend Mikhail Romadin." "By that time he had already made his fiilm Rublev and was quite famous." "But I didn't know that and had not seen Rublev." "There sat a nervous-looking man, effusive, with a keen response." "We were drinking and talking." "It came up in the conversation that I composed electronic music." "At that time few people did that." "It was a very novel thing." "Our electronic music studio was on Arbat Street, in the Scriabin Museum." "It was not far from Romadin's home." "One day Andrei called casually and said," ""I'll stop by to see what you do."" "A day or two later he came by, along with Yusov." "He looked around, but didn't say much, and then they left." "I almost forgot about his visit, and the summer passed by." "About two months later..." "I didn't have a telephone, so he sent me a telegram, inviting me to his studio at Mosfiilm" "to talk about writing music for Solaris." "We met, and straightaway he said several things which took me by surprise." "He said, "I don't need music in my fiilm." "I need a person to orchestrate the sounds of nature." "I need a composer's ear and a composer's hand to organize the sounds surrounding us according to the laws of music."" "We talked a little more, and I left quite perplexed." "I grew up in a family where everybody except my parents were either musicians or actors." "My father was an engineer and my mother was a housewife." "They were from Moscow, but they moved around the country a lot." "I was born in Novosibirsk, when they lived there briefly." "When I turned seven, they sent me to live with my uncle in Moscow, where I was raised and where I went to school." "I graduated from a choral school, and then from the Moscow Conservatory as a composer." "I studied under the late Yuri Alexandrovich Shaporin." "My main teacher was the late Nikolai Sedelnikov." "I owe everything to him." "My discovery of electronic music was not accidental." "I was always interested in the nature of sound." "I believed that sound had its own value." "I loved Debussy and avant-garde composers, especially in the 60's." "At that time I met Murzin, who built one of the fiirst electronic synthesizers." "After I graduated from the conservatory, he invited me to his lab." "Anyway, I started working on Solaris." "Over a period of time we had several conversations, and I began reviewing the footage he showed me..." "He asked me to review all the material they had fiilmed, and I started getting into the rhythm of the fillm." "I didn't yet know what to do with all that material." "I watched the footage where he fiilmed nature, all the numerous takes..." "I was gradually getting some idea." "At some point I told him, "You can't do it without any music at all." "If you want to use only background noise, it will all be dead." "You need to somehow liven it up."" "And then it occurred to me that we could introduce orchestral sounds, voices, tapping of the strings light as the rustle of grass, very subtle." "He liked this idea very much." "And that's how we slowly created a special musical language." "The surrounding world, with the help of the orchestra..." "The clusters of soft sounds emerge, almost inaudible, sometimes overlapping." "The viewer may not even notice them." "It's all in the context." "It started working." "I remember Andrei had a special love for Bach." "He believed Bach was the greatest composer, beyond comparison." "He used to say, "There are composers and then there's Bach."" "He had a complete collection of Bach's music." "Even in the Soviet era..." "Everybody knew about his passion for Bach." "Anyone who traveled abroad brought back Bach recordings for him." "He accumulated an enormous collection of Bach." "We created a theme." "It was the theme for the Earth." "He decided we would use Bach's music as the theme for the Earth." "He also wanted there to be only one central theme, to avoid confusion." "Bach's music and the surrounding sounds to support it." "That was a good decision." "I had no idea how to approach the theme for the world of Solaris." "I don't remember how I finally developed the idea for the Ocean." "One thing that was easy for us to do in the Soviet era was to book an orchestra." "The cost was just on paper." "You could book any orchestra for as long as you needed it." "Sometimes they'd ask, "How come it's so much?"" "But they'd give it to us anyway." "I fiinally realized that I needed to combine the electronic music with an orchestra and a chorus." "I recorded numerous mixes." "Andrei set an objective for me that there be no special music as such, just a mass of sound coming from nowhere and disappearing into nowhere." "It had to be fluid and diverse, like nature itself." "I asked him once, "Don't you trust me?" "Of course I'm not Bach, but I can write the specifiic kind of music you want for your fiilm."" "Then he said something amazing to me." "He said, "I need old masters for one thing." "Cinema is a very young art."" "At the time of that conversation, cinema was not even a hundred years old." "He said, "I need to create in the viewers' subconscious a historic perspective into the depth of the centuries through the music and painting of the old masters so that they think of cinema as an old art" "that is 300 or 400 years old, not 90."" "This was an amazing concept." "It was purposeful, and he carried it through consistently." "In fact, in all his films you find an old painting, a Rafael or a Brueghel, and old music by Handel or Bach." "I kept insisting, though, that we needed an additional subtheme." "I said, "There are so many events in Solaris but only one recurring theme." "Let me make a different instrumentation of the Bach."" "He said, "I don't think we need it, but go ahead." "Especially because we still have this orchestra booked."" "I came up with this idea, which he approved and which was used in the fillm." "Bach used a technique from liturgical music of the Middle Ages called cantus firmus." "It's a technique used in religious music..." "Catholic and Protestant music... which uses a one-part Gregorian chorale as a foundation." "Each of Bach's famous organ preludes has this cantus firmus, a theme from a Gregorian chorale, and on top of it he wrote his music." "The theme served as an anchor to the new feeling added on top of it." "What I did was I used Bach's music as cantus firmus and on top of it I wrote mine." "I not only used the same technique as Bach, but also the same "technology."" "Andrei liked this idea, and this music was used in two episodes, in the chorus during the scene of Hari's death, and in the finale." "In the final scene he actually cut it down to a minimum, but it is included in full on the sound track." "I tried bringing together different electronic recordings, superimposing orchestras and choruses, then mixing it all together." "I was searching for solutions, fumbling my way through." "It didn't come together all at once." "It took many recording sessions." "It was especially diffiicult because Andrei didn't come to the recording sessions." "It felt like he threw me in the water." "I asked him, "How come you don't come to the recording sessions?"" "He'd say, "What for?" "It's not a concert." "We'll see later what you came up with."" "So he left me hanging until the very end." "I recorded tons of music, not knowing whether he would use it or not." "It was strange." "But gradually I felt more and more confiident that it was working." "I felt that it was close to what we had discussed, that I had guessed right." "I kept on bringing him pieces of recorded music to listen to, but he'd say, "We'll see." He wasn't making any decisions." "I remember our music editor, the late Raisa Lukina, fiinally lost patience." ""Do you give your approval on the music or not?" "I need to document it."" "He answered, "I give my approval." "But I'll make my decision later."" "As a result of this work, a musical language was born that was used only by Andrei Tarkovsky." "His three fiilms were made in this manner, and it was never used again." "It was as if I created this special musical language just for Andrei, for his method, his images, his vision of the role of music in cinema." "This all kept dragging on and on." "I felt like I'd been thrown in the ocean and was floundering in the water." "He periodically told me what he needed, but he didn't come to the sessions." "I had no idea whether I was going in the right direction." "That was the challenge of working with Andrei." "When he spoke to me at all, he didn't tell me what kind of music to create, only what kind of fiilm he wanted to make." "It was only by accident that I found out, as I said before, why he was using Bach." "I made these discoveries during our conversations." "I remember how he'd sometimes say," ""I need an accent here."" " "What kind of accent?" - "It's up to you to think of something."" "And that's all." "He never gave me concrete tasks." "It was very important to him not to thrust his advice on anybody." "He wanted to extract the best out of you this way, something you might not even expect from yourself." "Film is not created just by the director alone." "He's the only one who knows the whole plan and leads the team." "But sometimes an original suggestion from a team member could result in his making substantial changes to a particular scene." "He appreciated our input and encouraged us to express our opinions." "Once we were talking about the painting by Brueghel." "He said he was going to film it using only ambient sounds." "He said, "But if you can think of something else, let me know. "" "He planted this idea in me, and I proceeded to give it some thought." "It's easier for me to work with material that's already been shot." "When you read a script, you see one thing." "But on the screen you may see something else altogether." "So I waited until he finished filming the scene." "He didn't want any music in the scene, only sounds ofbirds, dogs barking, indistinct voices." "I added some background to it, all kinds of things that we generally hear around us, and also, and especially, the sound of distant bells, very quiet, in the background." "I also included the far-off singing of a Russian folk choir, just one line vaguely registering in our consciousness." "Nothing concrete." "It came and disappeared." "And the sudden cry of a bird." "To that I added some electronic noises." "Andrei adjusted it just a little, made suggestions here and there, and then said, "Okay, it'll work."" "The music during the film's finale is a purely orchestral piece." "The scene shows the return of a prodigal son." "I wrote this piece in four-part..." "I wrote it at the same time that the finale was being shot." "It's "cluster music," musical spots that come together in no particular pattern." "Just various masses of sound." "I later wrote a concert piece based on this called "Solaris" " Ocean."" "I remember him saying," ""My dream is to make a fiilm entirely without music." "I need music only when I fail technically and don't have enough resources using only the language of fiilm to express what I need." "Then I need the crutches."" "He believed that fiilm, like any other art, should be able to use its own language." "As an exception, they may sometimes use music in theater or insert a musical quote in literature." "These days fiilm fully incorporates musical elements such as operatic themes." "He believed that it was possible to make a fiilm..." "By the way, Sokurov, who considers himself a student ofTarkovsky, managed to complete a project that Tarkovsky dreamed of:" "To shoot a whole fiilm as one continuous piece." "He wanted to fiilm a war story this way." "He thought of shooting it on location in his home village, a battle scene using only one camera." "He never got to do it, but he used to say," ""That would be cinema."" "He thought that editing also was a forced decision and should be used sparingly." "To make a fiilm as one piece..." "he believed that was real art." "Getting back to music, he wanted to do without it." "Tarkovsky took only a small portion of the novel." "He was interested in only one story line." "He used to say..." "Lem didn't say it directly, but it followed from the novel, that the life we have lived," "if we had another chance, we would live it under different circumstances, but in a similar way." "In short, it's karma." "Kris was given another chance, but he still did the same thing, subconsciously." "He meets his wife again in space." "It was his karma." "In general, Tarkovsky was most interested in the human soul." "The soul, and what man is and what he's capable of." "I remember he would quote Dostoyevsky:" ""There is no horror which man is not capable of."" "I don't know if we can say that he hated the Soviet system, but he absolutely did not accept anything Soviet." "He was forced to play along, but he categorically rejected it." "He absolutely couldn't stand their faces." "He believed that it would all end up in a horrible catastrophe." "And that's what happened, as if he had predicted it." "He said that with the kind of people who were ruling the country, it would lead to catastrophe." "But since fiilm production depends on money, he had to work with them." "One thing everybody saw in Andrei was that he was a man with raw nerves." "He was extremely sensitive." "He took everything to heart." "In addition, he was an original thinker." "It was hard to predict what he would say." "Sometimes you'd tell or show him something, and his reaction would take you completely by surprise." "It would either paralyze you or force you to regroup quickly." "He had a different kind of associative thinking process." "He made deep associations and had enormous knowledge of spiritual literature." "He studied the Bible." "He took a lot of his thinking from there." "I think all his fiilms originated from his associations with biblical stories." "Take the famous scene in Stalker, where Stalker falls asleep on the water, where the fiish is a symbol of Christ." "Each of his fiilms is full of symbols and mythology." "It's like a charade that can be fiigured out only by those in the know." "There is nothing accidental in his fiilms, not even a pebble." "SOLARIS Part One" "Answer:" "No, ever since man destroyed social inequality and did away with war, science has achieved tremendous success." "Nevertheless, you are mistaken in thinking that science is all-powerful." "Question:" "Is human knowledge really limited?" "Answer:" "I see you're desperate for me to tell you what you should have learned in school." "I will give you this comfort:" "Human knowledge is infiinite and boundless." "But that doesn't mean that the problem we are struggling with will be solved this year, this decade, or this century." "Question:" "But experience of studying the Universe offers evidence..." "Answer:" "It seems you know too much about the Universe." "(Laughter in the auditorium.)" "If we knew so much, we wouldn't have anything to do in space." "Question:" "You mean, in space you're attracted to the Unknown?" "Answer:" "Again, you haven't understood me:" "I am interested in m-a-n-k-i-n-d." "(From an interview with psychologist Dr. K. Kelvin for the magazine "Our Time.")" "You can see for yourselves." "I used a camera from time to time." "Everything I saw before and after should be on fiilm, although I haven't seen it myself." "Then I propose we interrupt these discussions and see everything with our own eyes." "Any objections?" "All right, show us your fiilm." "This is very interesting." "We can start now." "Everything's ready." "Is that it?" "That's all of your fiilm?" "Yes, that's everything." " Ready, Kelvin?" " Ready, Moddard." "Don't worry about a thing." "If you lose stability during the landing, or if communication goes down, the station will take over automatically." "Have a great trip." "Send our regards." " When is liftoff?" " You're already flying, Kris!" "Take care." "Solaris station!" "Do something!" "I'm losing stability." "This is Kelvin, over." "I can't understand it." "Do you love me?" "Don't be silly, Hari." "As if you didn't know." "I'm going out for a moment." "Wait for me, okay?" " Maybe you'd like something to eat?" " Eat..." "Will you be gone long?" "Maybe an hour." "We'll see how it goes." "Get some sleep." "Sleep..." "I'll go with you, then." "No, Hari." "I'll be back soon." "No." "What's with you?" "Why?" "I don't know." "I can't." "You can't what?" "It feels like I..." "I have to see you... all the time." "What are you, a child?" "I have work to do, Hari." "Kris, how do you zip this up?" "Wait." "Let's go." "Kris, don't run away from me." "Where could I run?" "What's with you?" "Pass me the bread, please." "You act as if I'm guilty of something." "Let's not flight." "You know... ever since I've been without you..." "I mean, ever since I learned to live without you," "I've become a worse person." "Then again, I think you really are guilty." "After all, you don't love me as much as you pity me." "You want to forget what happened with you... and the other one." "You don't think you're an egotist, eh?" "I forgive you only because you don't understand." "You'll understand someday." "Did you get married right after I died?" "You never did die." "What an amazing ability to ruin everything..." "I didn't get married at all." "Forgive me." "Forgive me." "Tell me you love me." "I love you." "Only me?" "My God." "I love you." "Maybe we're here in order to experience people as a reason for love," "and not simply for the sake of scientifiic study." "He seems to have a fever." "How did Gibarian die?" "You still haven't told me." "I'll tell you later." "Gibarian didn't die of fear." "He died of shame." "Shame... the feeling that will save mankind." "My friends, what's so terrible here?" "Man carries out great and diffiicult things in order to attain freedom." "Fine." "Remember I told you I wouldn't return to Earth, that we would live here?" "It was all a lie." "It's all my fault." "Do something." "He's going to die." "Where did you go last night?" "Nowhere." "But you did." "Are you cheating on me with Sartorius?" " Have a seat." " Thank you." "So, how are you doing?" "Fine." "I was a little sick, but I'm fline." "Well, I'd better get going." "Are you in a hurry?" "Sit a while." "Forgive me." "Why are you asking for forgiveness?" "It's really embarrassing, but for some reason I don't feel like you're my mother." "And I don't feel like you're my son." "You don't look well." "Are you happy?" "Somehow that concept seems irrelevant here." "That's awful." "Why?" "You're losing the ability to appreciate the simplest things, and that's the most important thing." " For whom?" " What do you mean, for whom?" "For everyone." "For you." "I'm very lonesome now." "That's what you were aiming for, as far I can tell." "What are you doing here?" "Why have you come?" " What's your purpose?" " Not you, too." "You're leading some sort of strange life." "You're fiilthy and unkempt." "How did you make such a mess of yourself?" "What's this?" "Wait here." "I'll be right back." "Mama, come here." "To think about it is to know the day of one's death." "Not knowing that day makes us practically immortal." "We have to." "We're human." "Satisfaction and gratifiication, happiness and loss await us here." "That's why Hari left." "Forever this time." "Stop." "Are you tired?" "No." "I feel great." "You should rest." "Go back to Earth." "You think so?" "A man who deals professionally with such fantasies lives quietly, one could even say prosaically, in Borek Walencki, in the suburbs of Krakow." "From the outside, it's a single-family home set in a landscape typical of 1966." "t's only inside that we come face-to-face with fantasy and the future." "A little fellow from another planet walks by the typewriter on which a new novel comes to life." "The author has fans and friends all over the world." "A group of Russian cosmonauts sent an autographed photo, and Yegorov sent a picture from space as well." "The fiirst book to achieve truly great success was Solaris." "The novel Solaris has indeed found its place on best-seller lists." "In any reference work to sci-fii literature published anywhere in the world," "Solaris becomes the focus of an entire chapter." "This is something that has never happened to any other Polish book in history." "I know of no other great Polish writer whose works would be described as obligatory reading by these reference sources." "Where are my shoes?" "No." "They're not there." "Who's this?" "It's me." "t's a very good, very moving novel." "It moved me very much and had a great impact on me." "As far as I know, no such concept had ever been used before in novels of this kind." "The whole planet is a brain that creates very real images." "These are no mere fantasies but real people, real situations." "The main character encounters a girl who has committed suicide." "And here we have Hari, identical to that girl, created by the planet's brain." "Because this novel moved me so," "I went to see the fillm directed by Tarkovsky, also entitled Solaris and based on the book." "Of course, Tarkovsky's fiilm and Lem's novel are two totally different things." "For Tarkovsky, the most important thing is the Earth, returning to Earth." "And the rain, with its obvious religious symbolism." "Rain representing the Holy Spirit, the water washing down over the characters." "He wouldn't be Russian if he didn't imbue it with some kind of religious, mystical meaning." "He sees space as something terrible and thinks that one has to cherish time spent on Earth, and that the whole issue of the Solaris Ocean is an annoyance, one could say." "My take is that it is an interesting challenge confronting man, though it can, naturally, cause tragic conflicts and suffering." "We used to discuss it, and finally / said, "You idiots!"" "I had been sitting in Moscow for three weeks, trying to soften him up a little." "But he was stubborn, and so was I." "So I ended up returning to Warsaw."