The Andrei Tarkovsky movie they had to shoot twice
The works of the Russian film director and screenwriter Andrei Tarkovsky are some of the greatest to have come out of Eastern Europe, and he is rightfully considered one of the most influential artists to ever use the cinematic medium. Tarkovsky’s films toy with the nature of memory and nature, and though their pacing can tend to be on the slower side, they are simply one of a kind.
While 1966’s Andrei Rublev and 1972’s Solaris are both deserving of their claim to be Tarkovsky’s best film, it’s hard to look beyond his 1979 picture Stalker, the science fiction art movie written by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, based on their novel Roadside Picnic.
Stalker tells of a journey led by a strange figure known as the Stalker, who takes a depressed and creatively blocked writer in search of inspiration and a scientist seeking empirical truth through a dangerous wasteland to find a room that grants those who enter their secret desires.
The production of Stalker was nothing short of a nightmare, though, and Tarkovsky painstakingly spent an entire year shooting the outdoor scenes. However, all his hard work was initially for nothing, as when the crew returned to Moscow to develop the prints, they found that the developers had processed it incorrectly, and the resultant footage was rendered useless.
One possible reason for this was that Stalker had been shot on the new Kodak 5247 stock, but the Soviet development labs were not familiar with it. Naturally, Tarkovsky was beyond angry with the fact that a whole year had been wasted. There was also an ongoing issue with the film’s first cinematographer, Georgy Rerberg.
After the first film stock came back damaged, Tarkovsky fired Rerberg from the project. Around the same time, the director was told by the Soviet film board that his film was no longer viable. His compromise to get to finish Stalker was to make it into a two-part film and thereby get a longer deadline and more funding.
Alexander Knyazhinsky was brought on board as the new cinematographer, and the entire shoot began again. The version of Stalker that we see today is from a completely different film stock from the original shoot. There are other thoughts as to why Tarkovsky fired Rerberg, though, and they aren’t all to do with the original destroyed film stock.
According to the documentary filmmaker Igor Mayboroda, Rerberg felt that the Stalker script was beyond the capabilities of Tarkovsky and suggested that he alter it to make the shoot easier. However, Tarkovsky ignored the advice of his cinematographer and sacked him, as well as several other crew members.
Rerberg’s name was removed from the final credits of the film, although those who managed to see his original print say that it was nearly identical to the eventual one that Knyazinsky. Still, the production of Stalker sounded like an absolute nightmare, but thankfully the final product was a genuine cinematic masterpiece.
