EXPLORE THE INSANE, LIFE-SIZED SET OF DAU: A RUSSIAN BIOPIC FILMING SINCE 2006!

This kind of needlessly obsessive overproduction makes me think of Olivier's "try acting". 

I love that projects like this exist.

This is the best thing I've read all year.

Ah this is brilliant. I admire the minds who conceived of this mad, vainglorious undertaking. It's the films like this, like LAWRENCE, or RUSSIAN ARK, or HBO'S ROME that truly impress me. The idea that an impeccably hand crafted reality in front of the camera can, through some alchemical magic, imbue the frames with something unique, something that could never be achieved in green screen, no matter how many millions you poured into the effects. It's how glory is won, and I must applaud the efforts currently underway in Russia

I've quite literally fantasized about just such a scenario myself. That were I a billionaire, I'd finance a production so ambitious that it would be counted along side the Apollo Program and Manhattan Project as one of the great undertakings of the modern age

These people are clearly thinking along those lines

Amazing. I fully support this!

Ooooooooooohwow.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Princess Kate 

Ah this is brilliant. I admire the minds who conceived of this mad, vainglorious undertaking. It's the films like this, like LAWRENCE, or RUSSIAN ARK, or HBO'S ROME that truly impress me. The idea that an impeccably hand crafted reality in front of the camera can, through some alchemical magic, imbue the frames with something unique, something that could never be achieved in green screen, no matter how many millions you poured into the effects. It's how glory is won, and I must applaud the efforts currently underway in Russia

 

I've quite literally fantasized about just such a scenario myself. That were I a billionaire, I'd finance a production so ambitious that it would be counted along side the Apollo Program and Manhattan Project as one of the great undertakings of the modern age

 

These people are clearly thinking along those lines

Uh, Kate? You should read the article.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gabe T 

Uh, Kate? You should read the article.

I did read it, and then showed it to someone else who read it over my shoulder. What did I miss?

Perhaps the emotional bullying the filmmaker is undertaking to get the results he wants? Maybe the cruel working conditions? The sadness in the actress trying to get the journalist to go to bed with him? The suggestion that the filmmaker had created a cult?

To think this is a "hooray for cinema" situation is to be pretty fucking dense.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gabe T 

Perhaps the emotional bullying the filmmaker is undertaking to get the results he wants? Maybe the cruel working conditions? The sadness in the actress trying to get the journalist to go to bed with him? The suggestion that the filmmaker had created a cult?

 

To think this is a "hooray for cinema" situation is to be pretty fucking dense.

It's more just "hooray for this mad cinematic vision and the zeal to realize it at all costs"

The human collateral doesn't much concern me

I just watched DANGEROUS DAYS, the BR doc, and Rutger Hauer is asked what he thought about on set conditions, and the grievances of the crew. He just sneers, and says something like "this was an important film. Yeah, making it was hard, but I don't have any time for people who whine about the difficulty"

A confession I will make.

Clearly she's had a hard life.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Chris Myers 

I love that projects like this exist.

I might add that my appreciation for a project like this excludes the part of 'being a dick to the crew'. No talent, no matter how experienced, successful or gifted should ever treat crew like shit. Unless there are stupid hecklers fully deserving the full Louie CK. Remember when Bale threw that hissy fit? You could hear his anger, but you could also hear that he really didn't mean to insult the guy to the bone, personally. Maybe he was even right to be angry, when the guy was a dick for hours. You could easily hear that they'd talking again just minutes after that, stuff just needed to be said. But there are directors who do treat people like shit, and meaning that. And that's not okay, not even when you're building fucking Rapture to create the most perfect awesome super movie ever.

To paraphrase Ridley Scott, the directors job is to DIRECT, not have a meeting with 12 people to argue for how he thinks things should be done on set

This idea you can't ever be mean in pursuit of your goals just strikes me as foolish, the product of a culture that has bought into its own feel good BS. Plenty of great directors terrorized their cast and crew on the sets films that went on to be classics. If they'd not fought for their vision with that passion, those films might never exist

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gabe T 

A confession I will make.

 

Clearly she's had a hard life.

What would that have to do with anything? How does it pertain to the discussion?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Princess Kate 

To paraphrase Ridley Scott, the directors job is to DIRECT, not have a meeting with 12 people to argue for how he thinks things should be done on set

 

This idea you can't ever be mean in pursuit of your goals just strikes me as foolish, the product of a culture that has bought into its own feel good BS. Plenty of great directors terrorized their cast and crew on the sets films that went on to be classics. If they'd not fought for their vision with that passion, those films might never exist

You are implying that some directors need to be mean to people in order to craft great movies. I'd say the 'being mean' isn't a necessary element. Maybe one that's just resulting from the producer and and schedule and budget pressure when it's hitting someone who's not good with stress, but it is not a needed aspect. I've worked with many and insulting, being mean, getting loud and overreacting doesn't really work better than being strict, focussed but friendly. Maybe a director faces many problems and can't do the movie he imagined it to be, but here is not reason at all to pick a single actor out and tell everyone what kind of cunt his mother is. No matter whether he did good work on his role or not. And some directors do that, every day, just to jiggle powerful balls in other people's faces. That doesn't improve work.

I WANT to approve of this, simply due to the almost maniacal excess of the whole thing, but the author makes some seriously disturbing implications in that article. The guy isn't just stopping at emotional bullying; possibly instructing at least partly brainwashed women to have sex with a foreign journalist? There's names for that kind of behaviour.

Most of all, I see no evidence that this whole thing is anything less than Khrzhanovsky creating his own little kingdom. Why do you need such an elaborate, improvisational environment to shoot a biopic (A genre which is by its own nature highly structured and tightly focussed upon specific events of a subject's life)? I can't remember a single mention of a script existing. This free-wheeling improvisational 'live in the time period' stuff demands a far more emergent style of narrative than what the biopic entails. This, added to the scattershot nature of the footage the writer describes, suggests that Khrzhanovsky doesn't have the interests of cinema in mind, as opposed to those of having licence to control people and get laid a lot. His reaction to the writer instinctively selling out the photographer is very telling, especially coming after the Olya incident and how quickly the writer saw through the mainipulation. he didn't seem to be able to keep that obvjectivity very long..

I'm all for directors being crazy and overreaching, but there's a lot about this Khrzhanovsky character that's just off.

I cannot WAIT to see the inevitable documentary that'll be made about this mess: Interviews with shaken survivors, scratchy audio recordings of the director as he sinks deeper into a cocaine/vodka laced madness, indecipherably dull & bizarre clips of the never-to-be-completed film. Herzog needs to grab a camera & get on a plane. Now.

Interesting article that sheds a little more light on Khrzhanovsky. http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2006/39/chetyre/

His wiki is interesting, as is this link to the Cannes festival description of the film which has this "Working budget: $3,800,000 - Acquired financing: 150,0000" which doesn't nearly seem enough...

Also the production company website has gone down. http://www.phenomenfilms.ru

So, whats going on here, has he gone rogue? Are people still financing this?

This is insane -- which is to say I love it!  I would give anything to go there and check it out.

Quote:

Originally Posted by SeanCE 

Interesting article that sheds a little more light on Khrzhanovsky. http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2006/39/chetyre/

 

Yeah, that's an interesting article. It at least shows that there's some kind of intellectual construct behind all this.

Had a long day at work, so hopefully my brain was able to soak up all this stuff correctly... But while the article goes some way to laying out Khrzhanovsky's philosophical stance (Which in and of itself, isn't all that original or profound) it's still hard to figure out what exactly he wants to achieve from all this. Is he trying to get his cast to completely adopt the identities of their characters so they give performances that are more genuine? If so, he has to have some sort of script or general plan going. How does he get actors to recreate a person's life in dramatic form without breaking the illusion utterly? He has to be giving them some kind of direction at some point.

Or is this all just an overblown ant farm which gives him carte blanche to put his beliefs into practice? His theories about pragmatic identities and environmental pressures have a distinct air of 'sink or swim' about them, and it's clear that anyone who seems incapable or unwilling to reshape their identity to the box his enclosed world demands (or at least doesn't agree with him) is instantly ejected; but then, that removes the potential for diversity that any serious experiment requires. Of course your 'experiment' is going to bear the results you want, if everyone in it conforms to the optimal parameters you need. Interesting how in the GQ article, Khrzhanovsky complains about social 'cloning' yet seems to be imposing that same state on the people who're working for him now. Is this a commentary on this phenomenon? If so, it's not like this is some mystical phenomenon he's only just revealing to the world; history is full of leaders who have imposed mass identities on their people. I'm sure Khrzhanovsky knows his country's own history. There are ways of talking about such things that don't involve massively expensive social experiments that look like a Lawsuit Tsunami waiting to break.

It's obvious he's a very intelligent and manipulative man, but more the latter than the former. I guess that's what seems iffy about the whole thing.