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Working for Tarkovsky

Author(s): Boris Natanovich Strugatsky and Erik Simon
Reviewed work(s):
Source: Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 31, No. 3, Soviet Science Fiction: The Thaw and After
(Nov., 2004), pp. 418-420
Published by: SF-TH Inc
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4241287 .
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418 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 31 (2004)
Boris Natanovich Strugatsky
Working for Tarkovsky
Translated by Erik Simon.
Nearly all versions of the various scripts for the film Stalker have been lost. We
began our collaboration with Tarkovsky in mid-1975, and from the beginning
struggled to define our circle of duties, our place in this joint project of many
months. "We are lucky to work with a genius," we told ourselves. "This means
we must engage all our strength and talent to create a script to satisfy our genius
as completely as possible."
As I have said and written before, working on the Stalker script was
unbelievably difficult. The main problem was that Tarkovsky, being a film
director (more than this: a genius of a film director), saw the world differently
from us, constructed his imaginary future world in the film differently from us,
and usually was unable to make us understand his own unique, fundamentally
individual view. Such matters cannot be transmitted verbally: there are no words
for them, and it seems to be impossible to invent such words.
Maybe there is no need to invent them. Words are, after all, a property of
literature, a highly symbolized reality, a very peculiar system of associations,
addressing certain senses. Cinema derives from visual art and music, and it is
an entirely real, I'd even say a mercilessly real world, whose basic unit is not
words but sound-images. This is all theory and philosophy, however. In
practice, the work came down to endless, taxing discussions, sometimes leading
to impotent despair. The film director took pains to explain what he wanted from
the writers, and the writers struggled to get meaning out of a mixture of
gestures, words, ideas, and images, and finally to formulate for themselves how
to express (in ordinary Russian words, on an empty sheet of ordinary paper) the
single, unusual, necessary, and yet entirely incommunicable thing that they
wanted to make clear to the director.
In such a situation there is only one possible working approach: trial and
error. Discussion led to development of an approximate plan for the script. A
text would be written, evaluated, and revised. A new discussion, new plan, new
version would follow-and again it would be wrong. Again it would be
impossible to express in words what nonetheless must be written in words in the
subsequent version of the script.
Alas, we did not make minutes of these conversations, and neither in
memory nor on paper is there anything more than a few memoranda such as:
"Dec. 19, 77 Tarkovsky. Man
=
instinct + reason. There's something more:
soul, spirit (moral, ethics). The real Great may be senseless and
absurd-Christ." I have no recollection at all of the sense in which we talked
about these most essential problems, or of why we talked about them at all at
that time.
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WORKING FOR TARKOVSKY 419
There were seven or eight, perhaps even nine, versions of the script. The last
was written in a fit of despair, after Tarkovsky had declared decisively and
definitely of the penultimate version: "This is it. With this Stalker I am not
going to make the film any more." This happened during the summer of 1977.
Tarkovsky had just finished the shoot for the first version of the film, in which
[Alexander] Kaidanovsky played the tough guy Alan (the former Redrick
Shuchart). The film was damaged while it was being developed, however, and
Tarkovsky decided to use this mishap to start all over again.
My brother Arkady Natanovich was with him on location in Estonia.
Suddenly, without warning, he appeared in Leningrad and declared: "Tarkovsky
demands another Stalker. "- "What kind of another one?"- "I don't know. And
he doesn't know. Another one. Different from this one. "-"But which one,
tram-tararam? "- "Don't know, tram-tram-and-tararam!!! An-oth-er one!" This
was an hour of despair, a day of despair, two days of despair. On the third day,
we invented the Stalker-as-Fool. Tarkovsky was satisfied and the film was shot
again. This final script was written in two days, and Arkady Natanovich
hastened back to Tallinn.
Besides this final version, the third (or fourth?) version of the script survived
as well; it was published in SF Anthology #25 in 1981 as "The Desire
Machine. "'
By some miracle, the first version of the script also survived, to be
published in 1993 also as "The Desire Machine," although it seems to me that
our original working title was "The Golden Sphere."
Generally speaking, the history of writing a film script is the history of a
difficult interaction between writer and director-a mighty struggle of opinions
and ideas that are often incompatible. In this collision of creative approaches,
the scriptwriter, I think, must make concessions, for the film is the director's
domain, his child, his territory. The writer, however creative, is just a hired
hand.
In thirty years my brother and I met every variant and version of film
director. The most common type among them is the sparkling, eloquent,
absolutely self-confident enthusiast. He is fast. Like lightning in an empty sky,
he suddenly appears out of nowhere and showers the author with tempting offers
and witty ideas that flatter the author's imagination. Then, again like lightning,
he disappears into his nowhere, forever and without a trace. We met a lot of
those. But to speak of serious directors, all were very different from each
other-as different as their films.
Andrei Tarkovsky was cruel to us, uncompromising and damned rigid. All
our modest attempts at creative mutiny were mercilessly suppressed. Only once,
I think, did we succeed in changing his mind. He agreed to delete from the film
the "time loop" we had invented for him-a monotonous repetition of a tank
column that had perished in the Zone; it repeatedly crossed a little, half-
destroyed bridge. For some reason this trick fascinated him: he clung to it to the
last, and only with a strong joint effort could we convince him that this plot
device was trivial and had been done a thousand times before. Finally he agreed,
but I think only because he liked our general idea that there was to be as little
as possible of the "fantastic" in the Zone, only a permanent expectation of
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420 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 31 (2004)
something supernatural, a maximum of suspense fueled by this expectation, and
... nothing more. Green plants, wind, and water.
NOTES
This essay was excerpted from the chapter "Film Scripts" in Boris Strugatsky's
Comments on the Way Gone, and it is reprinted here by kind permission of the author.
Comments was first published in the Collected Works of the Strugatskys (third edition,
in 11 volumes, 2000-01). In 2003, a slightly shorter version appeared.
1. SF Anthology #25 was part of a series of sf anthologies of the Znanie publishing
house.
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