Her voice, her face fascinated me when I was still was a boy
FROM AN INTERVIEW WITH ALEXANDER SOKUROV
I first heard her voice when I was a schoolboy. The voice was extraordinary. Later I glimpsed a clip of Dmitry Shostokovich’s opera “Katerina Izmailova”on the television, and I first saw her face then. And it was an extraordinary face. In Galina Vishnevskaya I found what I hadn’t found in others: a beautiful person, absolutely at one with herself, and with a unique voice. And when I was a student in the history department, I found out about the opposition by Mstislav Rostropovich and Galina Vishnevskaya to the Soviet government, which seemed to be so powerful and monolithic. I remembered and thought about her many times, but could never dream that fate would bring us together. Several times I was invited to direct an opera, but I always declined. One day I had a phone call, and a very familiar male voice said, “Hello, I’m Slava, I need to talk to you.” I immediately recognized the voice of Mstislav Rostropovich. He came to Petersburg, and proposed that we put on an opera together. And then Galina Pavlovna came in, and I saw her. From that moment I understood: that’s it, everything that I’ve got inside is going to come to life. One morning the details of the idea behind this picture started to find their way through. It had to be a picture with her and dedicated to her. I phoned her in Paris and told the story which had come to me. I remember her silence and then the first words: “Of course we are definitely going to work.” When she read the screenplay, she said only one thing: “Can I really do this?”
I came to see Vishnevskaya in Moscow, and we listened to recordings of Shalyapin, watched films with Anna Magnani, analyzed them. We tried to understand what an unbeautiful woman on the screen is, and how beautiful her non-beauty is. She worked intensely and very productively: I could feel how she was changing. No pride, no haughtiness. She understood perfectly that she had to go through an act of transformation which could only be achieved by one actor in a thousand. Vishnevskaya is an absolutely exceptional case. One or two takes were enough with her. She accepted what I asked of her almost before I had even said it. Her naturalness, her absolute concentration, her very accurate reactions to physical activity, her brilliant work with her partners. She is an artist of such skills that she is able to carry out not only her own task, but inspire her partners. I have never seen such concentration and integrity. If there was a pause during the shooting, she didn’t talk to anyone: she puts on her earphones and listens to music. She has a desire to maintain the character that she has developed, and the wish not to waste it. The scale of her personality is immense. It was a challenge for many of the others to get used to her, and to try and match up to her.
What we call contemporary is very relative. The time that we filmed is already the past in relation to today. We tried to formulate the clashes that were, are and will be. A sort of “present tense continued”. I am the son of a military man, I have lived in military barracks and for me there is no modernity there, and nothing exotic. Our film might seem modern to someone with a heightened sense of social feeling, but in “Aleksandra” there is no zeitgeist. There is not a single word there that couldn’t have been spoken forty years ago. And I am not sure that in the coming forty years anything will have changed. In this film we are talking about constants, and not only about Russian constants. The heroine could be an American woman who has come to see her grandson in Iraq, or an English woman who has gone to see her grandson in Afghanistan. I know about the terrible price the Chechen Republic paid for peace. I know about numerous crimes and that war hardens people. But the war is over and we must return to each other and mutually respect the sacrifices we made. Our film is a work of fiction, not a political act. In the film, we are looking for ways to bring people together, and we find them.