Died director Igor Maslennikov: his best film “Sherlock Holmes” did not consider

Much more talked about the “Queen of Spades”

Film director Igor Maslennikov died on September 17. On October 26, he would have turned 91 years old. He was always perceived as a Leningrad intellectual, although he was born in Nizhny Novgorod in the proletarian district of Sormovo. There, his grandfather and father worked at the Krasnoe Sormovo plant. If you dive deeper into the pedigree, then the roots can be found both noble and peasant. His second grandfather was a blacksmith.

Later, the Maslennikov family moved from Nizhny Novgorod to Kolpino, Leningrad Region, where his father worked at the Izhora plant, and then evacuated to Chelyabinsk.

Igor Maslennikov graduated from the philological faculty of Leningrad University, worked for a student newspaper, and started as a journalist. Then he got on the Leningrad television, where he began to shoot. Then, already in 1967, he graduated from the Higher Directing Courses at Lenfilm. At the entrance exam, which was taken by the famous director Grigory Kozintsev, Igor Maslennikov presented a sketch in which he involved Sergei Yursky and Oleg Basilashvili. Igor Fedorovich worked as a stage designer both on television and with Georgy Tovstonogov at the BDT. And he made his film debut maturely and brightly with the picture “The Personal Life of Valentin Kuzyaev”, which is now often considered an underestimated and undeservedly forgotten movie .. In his filmography – “Racers” with Oleg Yankovsky, “Sentimental Romance” based on the novel by Vera Panova with Elena Proklova in the main role (the picture participated in the Berlin Film Festival, and Igor Maslennikov wrote in detail about how it was in his book”, “Yaroslavna, Queen of France” with Elena Koreneva, “The Queen of Spades” with Alla Demidova, “Letters to Elsa” – one from Maslennikov’s favorite paintings.

Many happy years of his directorial activity are connected with television. There he filmed The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, the famous Winter Cherry, What the Dead Man Said. In 2001, Maslennikov was awarded the State Prize of the Russian Federation for his personal contribution to the development of Russian cinema. Until the last days, he was pestered with questions about the continuation of “Winter Cherry”, and he did not refute the very possibility of its appearance, saying that someday it would appear. But the project was frozen.

In recent years, Igor Fedorovich did not appear anywhere. He seemed to be quiet. And it happened a long time ago, immediately after leaving the Union of Cinematographers of the Russian Federation, where he worked actively for a long time, he was the first secretary of the Union of Cinematographers, that is, the deputy of Nikita Mikhalkov. But the five years that were associated with this and fell on the end of the 1990s – the beginning of the 2000s, unsettled him. Colleagues then said that threats rained down on Maslennikov and he preferred to leave quietly. After that, nowhere did he say a word about what actually happened. His last film was “Bankrupt”, filmed in 2009 based on the play by Ostrovsky and the script of the late Vladimir Valutsky. The film starred Liya Akhedzhakova, Viktor Bychkov, Yuri Galtsev, Leonid Kulagin.

Once, in our conversation, Igor Fedorovich said: “That’s it! Enough! I won’t shoot anymore. I don’t understand anything nowadays. Why lie?” He felt like a man of a different time, worried that his proposals to film Ostrovsky, whom he loved very much, did not find a response from the producers. In general, he did not accept the age of producer cinema, he considered its representatives an indifferent tribe, incapable of appreciating directors, destroyers of cinema.

Journalists overwhelmed him with talk about Sherlock Holmes, and in response he compared himself to Conan Doyle, who also fought off attacks and reminded that he had written other books. Maslennikov was worried that the audience only remembered his series, Winter Cherry, and he shot many other good films. For example, “The Queen of Spades” with Alla Demidova in the title role. But who saw her?

Igor Maslennikov was an intelligent interlocutor, a delicate and talented person. He treated his students when he began teaching at the University of Film and Television in St. Petersburg, as piece people, respected someone else’s talent. He lived with dignity and left nobly.