One of Russia's most renowned movie directors, Sergei Solovyov, has 15 films to his credit, including the cult classic "ASSA," which introduced the late Viktor Tsoi to the screen. Eight years after his last film, Solovyov released his latest, "A Tender Age," [Nezhny Vozrast] last week.
Solovyov recently spoke with The Moscow Times about his new film, Russia's lost generation and his refusal to go West.
Q:
Your 25-year-old son, Dmitry, who plays the main hero in your latest film, was the inspiration for the movie. Without him, would there have been a movie at all?
A:
Could this movie have been made without my son's real-life story? Certainly not. But if his life had taken a different course, I would have been happier. The plot of this film is certainly a long way off from the family ideal. It is the dramatic, even tragic story about my son's generation and the times they are living in.
My generation and I are partly responsible for the folly into which we have plunged an entire generation. We are responsible for allowing it, for creating it with our own hands. We never thought about the consequences of our deeds. We started out ?€” with Gorbachev and perestroika ?€” with hope for the future and the best intentions. Suddenly, we had become the most popular country in the world.
But we never really thought about all the consequences of changing from a fascist, totalitarian state to a folly of oligarchic capitalism. We called it freedom, democracy, but in reality we just exchanged one social evil for another. Those who had a privileged life in Soviet times just created a new, more comfortable social system for themselves. And as a result, just as it always has been in Russia, we lost an entire generation. First in 1937. Then the war. And now, again, my son's generation is paying for the change. They are perishing in Chechnya, dying from drugs, struggling with unemployment. "A Tender Age" is about all this and the younger generation's will to survive. How they save themselves through their ability to love, to feel compassion and to raise new families. This phenomenon of survival gives me hope for the future.
Q:
What, in particular, do you find interesting about the course of your son's generation?
A:
They started school in 1982, first becoming young pioneers and swearing an oath of loyalty to the Communist Party. Then they reached the sixth grade, when perestroika and a market economy were in vogue, and it was considered shameful to be a pioneer. By the time they were in the eighth grade, they were wondering whether or not to earn money or further their education. That is when the youth gangs, drug addiction and prostitution started.
Q:
Generations are often given nicknames, from Generation X to the Doomed Generation. How would you describe your son's generation in Russia?
A:
"How the Steel Was Tempered" [a sequel to Nikolai Ostrovsky's book about the young people raised just after World War I and the Civil War]. They are the same human stumps who were promised that if they survived just two difficult years then everything would be fine. But [they] were deceived. Nobody tried to help them understand this period of change ?€” but not because we were bad parents. We were romantic fools with our eyes wide open, watching all that rot on television and believing it. We didn't understand they were creating a new state, more ruthless, impudent and depraved than before.
Q:
How are you able to relate to younger people well enough to tell their story?
A:
I am 56 years old. I have my own circle of friends. I drive everywhere by car ?€” the metro is exotic for me. I attend the Bolshoi and Maly theaters, I visit international film festivals. My life may seem like a surreal illusion with almost nothing in common with reality. Yet, I have always been interested in young people, and that is why I have worked as a teacher at VGIK [the Russian Institute of Cinematography] for 25 years. Every five years I meet a new vibrant group of people who tell me astonishing stories. Once, for example, one of my students came to me and told me about some cool Korean guy he knew working in a boiler room in St. Petersburg [then Leningrad]. I asked him to bring him to my studio, and that is how I met Viktor Tsoi [the late leader of the musical group Kino]. Tsoi, in turn, told me about some Dr. Kinchev from Moscow [leader of another popular group, Alisa], and they went on to acquaint me with B.G. [Boris Grebenshchikov, the leader of Akvarium]. That is how my film "ASSA" was born.
Q:
"ASSA" ended with Kino's hopeful song "We Are Waiting for Change." But in the 15 years since the film came out, the changes were not exactly what you expected them to be.
A:
I, along with the rest of the world, believed that the appearance of Gorbachev would change things. He broke the Soviet power machine, achieving what the CIA and the Cold War could not. I may criticize our present times, but I never want to go back to the Soviet era. During our 70-year struggle with the Soviet disease, we may have created many positive things, but we eliminated them all and left the Soviet muck.
As a result, peoples' lives have not really changed for the better. People are dying from cruelty. The day after "A Tender Age" opened, for example, one of my son's friends was beaten to death on the street. That is a tragic, real-life epilogue to my film.
Q:
You started your career at the "tender age" of 14, when you organized a youth film studio at Lenfilm in St. Petersburg. How did this come about?
A:
During physics class I wrote my proposal to set up a film studio for young people, and I took it to the studio's director. He didn't really understand what to do with me, but I persevered and in the end got my own office at the studio. On the door it read: "Solovyov. Youth Film Studio."
I gathered a number of my contemporaries there, including [theater director] Lev Dodin and [renowned photographer] Valery Plotnikov. Even Joseph Brodsky, who was a bit older, visited us sometimes. We worked together for three years, from 1958 to 1960, but none of our projects ever saw the screen.
Q:
Looking back on your past achievements, how would you describe your career today?
A:
I am idling, resting on the ruins of my earlier ideas. I have only achieved a third of what I would have liked to have done. For example, since I was a student at VGIK I wanted to adapt Nikolai Gogol's story "The Nose" for the screen. But the censors would not give me a license to shoot the classics.
Q:
Have you ever thought about working in the West?
A:
I did have some proposals to work there. They first started coming in 1974 after my "One Hundred Days after Childhood" was shown at a San Francisco film festival. Even [Francis Ford] Coppola told me I was crazy not to stay there. But every time I seriously considered an outside proposal, I understood that to work in the West meant to stay there forever. In order to do that I would have to change my skin, eyes, ears, legs, hands and finally my head, instilling it with a Western mentality. This is what [Milos] Forman did. He is no longer a Czech director, but a bright American director of Czech origin. But I don't want to make a movie about American problems.
There is another reason for my refusal to work abroad. I find foreign languages strangely dull. Whenever I hear people speaking English I think to myself, why can't they learn to speak Russian?
Q:
But you did plan to do one project with your friend, actor Richard Gere?
A:
But we wanted to shoot a film about Pushkin in Russia, not in the West. This was long before "Pretty Woman" appeared here, and Gere was unknown in Russia. He was dying to play Pushkin, and I was happy for an unknown actor to play the part. It would have been difficult to cast a Russian star. Everyone is intimidated about playing Pushkin ?€” assuming the role of the great poet. I made the mistake of mentioning this to Gere, and after that he backed out, too.
Q:
I heard you shot a commercial [for Picnic chocolate bars] a few years ago. Was this for money or to fill the professional gap between movies?
A:
It was just an interesting experience for me, but one video was enough to satisfy my curiosity. It really can bring big money, but in order to treat this job seriously you have to restructure your own professional parameters, thinking in terms of 30-second stretches. If my only wish was to make money, I would do it. But it is naive to think you can do both: advertising and movie-making. I choose the movies.
Q:
What about your theater projects?
A:
Movies are my business, but theater and photography are my hobbies. Four years ago, for example, I had a photo exhibit displaying nearly 300 of my works. After seeing my photos, [Quentin] Tarantino [who saw a catalog of my works] asked if I was interested in being the director of photography for one of his films. I turned him down, of course, because I do not do this professionally. How could I take responsibility for an entire picture?
Now I am preparing photo album of portraits of Russian women. The genetic pool in our country is colossal. The women are fantastically beautiful.
Solovyov recently spoke with The Moscow Times about his new film, Russia's lost generation and his refusal to go West.
Q:
Your 25-year-old son, Dmitry, who plays the main hero in your latest film, was the inspiration for the movie. Without him, would there have been a movie at all?
A:
Could this movie have been made without my son's real-life story? Certainly not. But if his life had taken a different course, I would have been happier. The plot of this film is certainly a long way off from the family ideal. It is the dramatic, even tragic story about my son's generation and the times they are living in.
My generation and I are partly responsible for the folly into which we have plunged an entire generation. We are responsible for allowing it, for creating it with our own hands. We never thought about the consequences of our deeds. We started out ?€” with Gorbachev and perestroika ?€” with hope for the future and the best intentions. Suddenly, we had become the most popular country in the world.
But we never really thought about all the consequences of changing from a fascist, totalitarian state to a folly of oligarchic capitalism. We called it freedom, democracy, but in reality we just exchanged one social evil for another. Those who had a privileged life in Soviet times just created a new, more comfortable social system for themselves. And as a result, just as it always has been in Russia, we lost an entire generation. First in 1937. Then the war. And now, again, my son's generation is paying for the change. They are perishing in Chechnya, dying from drugs, struggling with unemployment. "A Tender Age" is about all this and the younger generation's will to survive. How they save themselves through their ability to love, to feel compassion and to raise new families. This phenomenon of survival gives me hope for the future.
Q:
What, in particular, do you find interesting about the course of your son's generation?
A:
They started school in 1982, first becoming young pioneers and swearing an oath of loyalty to the Communist Party. Then they reached the sixth grade, when perestroika and a market economy were in vogue, and it was considered shameful to be a pioneer. By the time they were in the eighth grade, they were wondering whether or not to earn money or further their education. That is when the youth gangs, drug addiction and prostitution started.
Q:
Generations are often given nicknames, from Generation X to the Doomed Generation. How would you describe your son's generation in Russia?
A:
"How the Steel Was Tempered" [a sequel to Nikolai Ostrovsky's book about the young people raised just after World War I and the Civil War]. They are the same human stumps who were promised that if they survived just two difficult years then everything would be fine. But [they] were deceived. Nobody tried to help them understand this period of change ?€” but not because we were bad parents. We were romantic fools with our eyes wide open, watching all that rot on television and believing it. We didn't understand they were creating a new state, more ruthless, impudent and depraved than before.
Q:
How are you able to relate to younger people well enough to tell their story?
A:
I am 56 years old. I have my own circle of friends. I drive everywhere by car ?€” the metro is exotic for me. I attend the Bolshoi and Maly theaters, I visit international film festivals. My life may seem like a surreal illusion with almost nothing in common with reality. Yet, I have always been interested in young people, and that is why I have worked as a teacher at VGIK [the Russian Institute of Cinematography] for 25 years. Every five years I meet a new vibrant group of people who tell me astonishing stories. Once, for example, one of my students came to me and told me about some cool Korean guy he knew working in a boiler room in St. Petersburg [then Leningrad]. I asked him to bring him to my studio, and that is how I met Viktor Tsoi [the late leader of the musical group Kino]. Tsoi, in turn, told me about some Dr. Kinchev from Moscow [leader of another popular group, Alisa], and they went on to acquaint me with B.G. [Boris Grebenshchikov, the leader of Akvarium]. That is how my film "ASSA" was born.
Q:
"ASSA" ended with Kino's hopeful song "We Are Waiting for Change." But in the 15 years since the film came out, the changes were not exactly what you expected them to be.
A:
I, along with the rest of the world, believed that the appearance of Gorbachev would change things. He broke the Soviet power machine, achieving what the CIA and the Cold War could not. I may criticize our present times, but I never want to go back to the Soviet era. During our 70-year struggle with the Soviet disease, we may have created many positive things, but we eliminated them all and left the Soviet muck.
As a result, peoples' lives have not really changed for the better. People are dying from cruelty. The day after "A Tender Age" opened, for example, one of my son's friends was beaten to death on the street. That is a tragic, real-life epilogue to my film.
Q:
You started your career at the "tender age" of 14, when you organized a youth film studio at Lenfilm in St. Petersburg. How did this come about?
A:
During physics class I wrote my proposal to set up a film studio for young people, and I took it to the studio's director. He didn't really understand what to do with me, but I persevered and in the end got my own office at the studio. On the door it read: "Solovyov. Youth Film Studio."
I gathered a number of my contemporaries there, including [theater director] Lev Dodin and [renowned photographer] Valery Plotnikov. Even Joseph Brodsky, who was a bit older, visited us sometimes. We worked together for three years, from 1958 to 1960, but none of our projects ever saw the screen.
Q:
Looking back on your past achievements, how would you describe your career today?
A:
I am idling, resting on the ruins of my earlier ideas. I have only achieved a third of what I would have liked to have done. For example, since I was a student at VGIK I wanted to adapt Nikolai Gogol's story "The Nose" for the screen. But the censors would not give me a license to shoot the classics.
Q:
Have you ever thought about working in the West?
A:
I did have some proposals to work there. They first started coming in 1974 after my "One Hundred Days after Childhood" was shown at a San Francisco film festival. Even [Francis Ford] Coppola told me I was crazy not to stay there. But every time I seriously considered an outside proposal, I understood that to work in the West meant to stay there forever. In order to do that I would have to change my skin, eyes, ears, legs, hands and finally my head, instilling it with a Western mentality. This is what [Milos] Forman did. He is no longer a Czech director, but a bright American director of Czech origin. But I don't want to make a movie about American problems.
There is another reason for my refusal to work abroad. I find foreign languages strangely dull. Whenever I hear people speaking English I think to myself, why can't they learn to speak Russian?
Q:
But you did plan to do one project with your friend, actor Richard Gere?
A:
But we wanted to shoot a film about Pushkin in Russia, not in the West. This was long before "Pretty Woman" appeared here, and Gere was unknown in Russia. He was dying to play Pushkin, and I was happy for an unknown actor to play the part. It would have been difficult to cast a Russian star. Everyone is intimidated about playing Pushkin ?€” assuming the role of the great poet. I made the mistake of mentioning this to Gere, and after that he backed out, too.
Q:
I heard you shot a commercial [for Picnic chocolate bars] a few years ago. Was this for money or to fill the professional gap between movies?
A:
It was just an interesting experience for me, but one video was enough to satisfy my curiosity. It really can bring big money, but in order to treat this job seriously you have to restructure your own professional parameters, thinking in terms of 30-second stretches. If my only wish was to make money, I would do it. But it is naive to think you can do both: advertising and movie-making. I choose the movies.
Q:
What about your theater projects?
A:
Movies are my business, but theater and photography are my hobbies. Four years ago, for example, I had a photo exhibit displaying nearly 300 of my works. After seeing my photos, [Quentin] Tarantino [who saw a catalog of my works] asked if I was interested in being the director of photography for one of his films. I turned him down, of course, because I do not do this professionally. How could I take responsibility for an entire picture?
Now I am preparing photo album of portraits of Russian women. The genetic pool in our country is colossal. The women are fantastically beautiful.
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