Larisa Sadilova presented a film about the love of 70-year-olds at the MIFF

Larisa’s previous film “Once Upon a Time in Trubchevsk” participated in the Un Certain Regard competition at the Cannes Film Festival. The selectors were also interested in Ogorod, but this year the road to Europe was closed to him, and next year is far away. As the Romanian priest Ciprian Mega, whose film “The Voice of One Crying in the Wilderness” also participates in the main competition of the MIFF, said, how can you talk about plans if you don’t know what the world will be like in a year. In general, the film was shown in Moscow.

Zoya, performed by Valentina Telichkina, constantly travels to her garden to water the plants, covering forty kilometers back and forth. The filming location was found in the village of Rechitsa near Bryansk. They planted a garden there. Valentina Ivanovna was born in a village in the Gorky region, so this is her native element. In the sanatorium, her heroine meets Valery, played by Yuri Kutafin, an entertainer, an artist of the conversational genre of the Kursk Regional Philharmonic. He reads Russian classics from the stage, in children’s performances he even plays the old woman Shapoklyak. Garden is his film debut. And in the film, he also plays an entertainer. Zoya is from Bryansk, Valery is from Kursk. They meet in a sanatorium near Smolensk. At some point, it will seem to them that they are made for each other and can be close. Cameraman Anatoly Petriga romantically filmed the winter walks of middle-aged lovers in a sanatorium park with marble sculptures near Smolensk. By the way, the film “With Love and Fury” by the French director Claire Denis participates in the out-of-competition program of the festival, where there are also age-old lovers performed by 58-year-old Juliette Binoche and 63-year-old Vincent Landono – until recently the sex symbols of European cinema. They were not afraid to play explicit scenes.

The scenes in the sanatorium are not only beautiful, but also funny. The heroes undergo therapy in a salt cave, reminiscent of a galactic station from a homegrown space-themed movie. For filming, they chose a snow-covered nature. We came to shoot – it got warmer, melting began. Just resigned to the tricks of nature, as it began to snow. I had to order a tractor and clear technical paths for the group. Vacationers were played by residents of a neighboring village. Part of the filming was carried out in a reserved seat car, which had to be redeemed. The real conductor played a small role as a representative of her profession. The electric train on the Bryansk-Zhukovka section had to be put on the opposite track – it was better for the shot. The issue was resolved at the level of Moscow. The group was assigned a specialist and a separate electric train moving along an agreed path.

We are talking with Larisa Sadilova about her painting.

– Did your heroes and actors lead you in an unknown direction, as is sometimes the case in theater and cinema? There was no such thing that one thing was planned, but they came to another?

– Not. The script was filmed the way it was written. If you compare it with the movie, it’s almost the same thing. The difficulty was that we had a lot of objects that were constantly changing. Due to this, not only the dramaturgy is kept, but also the rhythm. Each next frame is a new object.

– It turned out to be a slightly funny story with visions of the heroine, which seemed not to be in those passages that happened to be seen when the film was being worked on. This is not a daily story, but something more.

– The viewer seems to be catching up: “Oh, there it is! It turns out that the heroine also has sons. And the hero is an entertainer. We gradually reveal the life of our characters.

– Did Valentina Telichkina turn out to be an obedient actress, exactly adhered to the script, not allowing even a step to the side?

“She trusted me. But at the level of creating the script, we talked about a lot, some scenes were abandoned, and not because she wanted it. We came to this decision together. The role is incorporeal as long as it exists on paper, and then it acquires a body, mass, soul, and from this it changes. Valentina Ivanovna is the author of her role. I can’t imagine who could have been in her place.

– Was the script written with Telichkin in mind?

“Yes, although she did not yet know about it and did not yet give her consent. Valentina Ivanovna is very similar to my aunt. You can’t say the movie is about her. There was no such love in my aunt Olga’s life. This is a collective image that has the features of my friend’s mother, my grandmother, mother and aunt, who travels 40 km back and forth to the country. The lines of Fyodor Tyutchev “These poor villages, / This meager nature – / The land of the native long-suffering, / The land of the Russian people!” became the epigraph to the “Ogorod” when we applied to the Ministry of Culture. And we filmed in Ovstuga near Bryansk, where Tyutchev was born. For me, Zoya is the embodiment of a Russian woman. I wanted to talk a little about the poverty in which people live. It didn’t work out very well.

– Your aunt will not be offended when she sees the film and, perhaps, recognizes herself?

She already looked. I watched her while watching. The smile never left her face. She recognized herself.

– Nothing offended?

– Not. Initially, according to the script, the wooden trailer in Zoya’s garden was supposed to burn down, but this idea had to be abandoned. It was important for me that my aunt Olya read the script. “There is no need for the trailer to burn down,” she said after reading. We saw such holiday villages when we chose nature! In one of them there were houses like brick coffins.

— How were other images born?

– Once upon a time, my mother and I were relaxing in a sanatorium, and a man from Perm was sitting at the table with us. He was the director of a small cultural center and came to the sanatorium with an accordion. All my characters are a little weirdo.

– The hero of Yuri Kutafin ended up with a fig in his pocket. I can’t figure out what he is. Their meeting with Zoya isn’t perfect.

I don’t see how they could live together either. But people often do not understand some obvious things.

– What the hero runs from, overtakes him with a new lady of the heart.

“That’s how it always happens. The wife is often like the mother. She rots her husband, as his mother once rotted him. The son, becoming an adult, found the same wife.

Do you feel sorry for your heroes? How do you feel about them?

For me, the most important thing is to love a person. (Larisa’s teacher, film director Sergei Gerasimov, had the film “To Love a Person.” – S.Kh.). Even if he’s not very good. When an actor plays not the most pleasant person, he still has to love him. If I don’t like an actor, I can’t shoot him. We won’t be able to do anything. Once Renata Litvinova interviewed Dunya Smirnova and Alexander Mindadze in one program. She asked them to name a director who makes social films, and she herself said that we don’t have such. I stopped at the TV, not realizing that it would be about me. Dunya Smirnova called my name, to which Renata replied: “Sadilova treats people like insects.” I was dumbfounded. But since you also ask how I feel about my heroes, then maybe people really think of me as Renata Litvinova. Our profession is, of course, a cynical one.

“People often live in ways that cannot be lived. And they can’t imagine any other life.

— I know people who never left Trubchevsk. Someone works at a poultry farm and lives in a house next to it. They go to work and home, they go nowhere else. Bryansk is far away – it makes no sense to go there. So many people live. Yes, almost the entire country.

– Someone from this is unhappy, and someone thinks that everything is fine with him.

– It takes a little to be happy. Happy is he who knows how to rejoice in the small, sunrise, for example. Therefore, people in Russia consider themselves happy. According to Andrei Konchalovsky’s research, which he conducted during the filming of his documentary, this is 81 percent of the country’s inhabitants. People are very unpretentious. The people have never seen anything good from any government, probably, except for the period of the Soviet Union. I’m talking about workers and peasants, teachers and doctors. Doctors in the provinces receive three kopecks.

– Yes, in some places there are no doctors anymore. Residents of the Kostroma region told me that they had no one left except for a dentist and a general practitioner. And to give birth from their not the smallest town is being taken tens of kilometers to Kostroma.

Yes, we have reached the end. When I looked at the heroes of Konchalovsky, I thought about how beautiful they are and how wretched they are around. Do you know that our picture does not have a distributor? And all because no one knows how to work with such a movie. We will show the film in Bryansk and Kursk, where the filming took place. A Bryansk group worked for us, and Bryansk actors played small roles.

– I already know someone from your previous films.

– There are many of them, and each has an episode. They are waiting for the premiere. Yuri Kutafin and Anna Sidorenko, who sang, Yuri Tkachev, who played the button accordion, are artists of the Kursk Philharmonic.

– Was it not tempting to cast a completely unfamiliar actress in the lead role?

– Not. A well-known actress was needed for this role. Valentina Telichkina is smart, subtle, sensual, talented. All this has to do with her psychophysics. The hero was supposed to be played by an unknown actor. If instead of Kutafin there was someone recognizable, it would have turned out to be vulgarity.

Do you yourself know how the love story of your heroes ends? As a viewer, I can only fantasize about this topic.

— We filmed several finals. The most optimistic was discarded even though it worked out so well. Let it be unclear how it will all end. We filmed the train, in which the final scene takes place, for the whole day, and before that we bought the train car. I had to finish everything in Bryansk and move to Smolensk, at six in the morning to board the train. To save time, they put on their makeup while it was dark. As soon as it dawned, we went and filmed for five hours non-stop. Approaching Smolensk, they played out the stage. And when they arrived at the station, they filmed the farewell of the main characters. Then we got on the bus and traveled 120 km to the sanatorium. Such was the difficult logistics.

— The resort turned out to be very cheerful.

– He’s unemployed. They heated it with wood.

– I just saw one near Kostroma: the territory is littered with firewood, since there is no gas in the area.

– And in ours it is not due to the fact that this is a conservation area. The cosmonauts and Zykina used to rest there.

Was it physically difficult to shoot?

– Difficult – 30-degree frost in winter, 35-degree heat in summer. On the bus during filming, the thermometer reached 52. It was hell. Due to a very modest budget, we had only 21 shooting days – in winter and summer.

– Yakut director Dmitry Davydov, who participates with you in the MIFF competition with the film “Youth”, shot at minus 57.

– In Yakutia, probably, they are used to it. I know that you will not surprise anyone with degrees. But it’s hard to work on the street for 12 hours in the cold, and even during the period when the coronavirus was rampant. But none of us got sick. If even one fell ill, the picture would close.

– Raisa Ryazanova played a small and funny role of a fortune teller for you. What is this heroine?

– There is a TV series “Blind”, where a grandmother in a headscarf with her eyes closed says something like this: “You will go there, no one knows where …” And so for four thousand episodes. My mom is watching it too, and I’m trying to fight her. We came up with a sighted soothsayer in defiance of the blind. Raisa Ryazanova was embarrassed to come to the premiere. She felt like they would laugh at her. But she’s really funny. For the first time in my life, a film was born like a river. It flows and flows, so that the most surprising.

– Didn’t you want to change everything abruptly, move away from yourself and do something unexpected?

– I tried to change the genre, filmed the horror “Nanny Wanted”. We have already prepared the script “With love, Lilya-2”. Twenty years have passed since the release of the first film. Marina Zubanova, Murad Ibragimbekov, Yulia Novikova will be filming again, even the sound engineer Kirill Vasilenko, who played the fool in the first film. Why did such an idea suddenly arise? Because it is generally not clear how to shoot modernity. We don’t know what will happen next. Everything changes so quickly and drastically.