The only American movie Andrei Tarkovsky actually liked, despite the “low acting skills”
Andrei Tarkovsky grew up with a poet for a father, so it’s no surprise, really, that he came to make such poetic works of cinema, approaching the medium as something to intricately weave philosophical and metaphysical ideas into.
Cinema was something deeply sacred to the director, who made his debut in 1962 with Ivan’s Childhood after a string of student films. He didn’t want to make the kinds of movies that were merely accessible and commercially-friendly – that just wouldn’t do… Tarkovsky needed to create films that came deep from within, which might be impenetrable to some; he wasn’t bothered if audiences understood the meaning of his art; what mattered was making it.
Unsurprisingly, then, he was pretty out of touch with Hollywood, his films a world apart from blockbuster entertainment – he knew a mainstream American audience would likely never sit down for a slow and meditative exploration into human life, told through ambiguous and non-linear storytelling, and he separated himself from that arena of cinema. He hardly saw it as art.
Perhaps you’re thinking he sounds a bit snobbish, but you have to consider that Tarkovsky was making films under a ‘60s Soviet climate; his concerns weren’t exactly light. He saw filmmaking as the ultimate tool to convey the depths of human emotion, to animate poetry and visualise truth. Tarkovsky thus saw big Hollywood movies designed to generate as many ticket sales as possible as an insult to the medium, although when he visited England, he decided that he’d see what the fuss was all about.
Layla Alexander Garrett, who worked on Tarkovsky’s last film, The Sacrifice, as a translator, told Talking Pictures that the filmmaker had a surprising interest in watching Hollywood movies, even though he hardly liked any of them. Elaborating, “He wanted to see those films, not so much for the directors, but more to see the development of the technical side. He didn’t [have] much chance to see them in Russia. Once he recommended my husband to see Terminator, he was very surprised. Tarkovsky was interested in the theme of the film: travelling in time and space.”
Who would have thought that out of all the great American movies that were made in Tarkovsky’s lifetime, he would pick The Terminator as his favourite? Interestingly, the filmmaker once declared James Cameron’s film as one featuring bad performances. Clearly, he wasn’t a fan of Arnold Schwarzenegger.
“The brutality and low acting skills are unfortunate, but as a vision of the future and the relation between man and his destiny, the film is pushing the frontier of cinema as an art,” he once said (via Andrei Tarkovsky’s World and Films).
Tarkovsky didn’t like films that were designed to be spectacles, but somehow, he made an exception for Cameron’s movie, which has since become a classic, yet he knew that it was the kind of movie he just didn’t have it in him to make.
Clearly, The Terminator’s vision of the world struck a chord with Tarkovsky, but that was his limit when it came to watching Hollywood movies: “I can’t, like [Steven] Spielberg, say, make a film for the general public.”
Concluding, “I’d be mortified if I discovered I could. If you want to reach a general audience, you have to make films like Star Wars and Superman, which have nothing to do with art. This doesn’t mean I treat the public like idiots, but I certainly don’t take pains to please them.”
