Shooting of a film about a communication failure between close people ended in Yekaterinburg

The original title of the film was With Noise and Fury. Immediately there were associations with William Faulkner’s novel “The Sound and the Fury”, I recalled the philological past of Svetlana, who graduated from the corresponding faculty of the Kazakh University in Alma-Ata. Only then did she come to Moscow, entered the Higher Courses for Scriptwriters and Directors, studied with Khitruk, Norshtein, Nazarov, Khrzhanovsky.

Now the editing of her film is underway, work on sound and music with composer Andrei Karasev, who previously worked on Ovsyanki, Revolution Angels, Alexei Fedorchenko’s Last Sweet Bulgaria. Svetlana Filippova told MK about how the idea of ​​her film was born and about the name change.

“It all started about seven years ago. The story was collected gradually from notes, impressions, some fragmentary thoughts. When I was thinking of the title, I remembered a quote from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, quoted by Faulkner: “Life is a story told by an idiot, full of noise and fury, but devoid of any meaning.”

One of the main characters is leaving for Lisbon, but we will not see him. It’s like a dream. Our story is about important events happening in people’s lives, but they pretend that nothing happened. This is due to the failure of communication and the ensuing consequences. Everything is told calmly, without accents, as if the one who says it also does not understand what is happening. The heroes broke up a week ago, they are afraid to talk about it and they cannot explain anything to their adult children.

– When a debut is filmed, despite the fact that you are already an experienced animator, the author puts a lot of personal into it …

– It was not without personal experience, but this is not what happened to me, not my story. Something from personal experience, something invented or happened to friends. The story is typical for people of our age. They break up, new connections appear. I can’t imagine how it is possible to tell a story in cinema and literature that would not be connected at all with personal experience. It doesn’t matter if it’s a debut or not. It’s always the same with animation. Otherwise I won’t be able to connect.

– Will the picture be black and white, and the main character’s dreams will be animated?

– We refused animated dreams. The animation didn’t fit the picture. The film will be in black and white. The cameraman Andrey Naydenov, who worked on Dear Comrades with Andrey Konchalovsky, shot it, there was also a black-and-white image. Andrei is a subtle and understanding person.

Was the transition to feature films difficult, where not everything depends on you?

– It was an interesting experience, a jump into a completely unknown area, although I have always loved feature films more, I dreamed of making them. But it was scary, it seemed that working with actors was not for me. But when I started working with them on dubbing cartoons, I realized that there was nothing to worry about. I’m lucky. I worked with Nina Ruslanova, Svetlana Kryuchkova, Alexei Vertkov, Evgeny Tkachuk. In animation, you create and control your own universe. This is both good and bad. You can only bring in what you have. And then a new person comes, for example an actor, and adds his own.

When I was on the set in a new capacity, it turned out that I could not control the whole process. My attempt to make it completely storyboard like in animation was correct, but sometimes I had to change my mind in an instant. The first few days I did not keep up with the desired speed. It was necessary to keep within 25 shifts. I kept saying, “Wait, wait. I can not so fast”.

Did you have to show character?

– Sometimes it was necessary to firmly insist on one’s own, to speak tough, although we had a very good atmosphere on the site. But when you have a huge team, you have to be decisive.

The protagonist of the film is a 17-year-old teenager who is going through a divorce of his parents. Svetlana was looking for an actor for this role for a long time – they looked at students of theater universities in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg. Someone sent a video, someone came to audition. But there was no result.

“We advertised in Yekaterinburg,” says Svetlana Filippova. – 15-year-old Stepan Kharchenko came from the theater for teenagers “Game” and fit us perfectly. The time was covid. He was sitting at home, saw an ad on social networks and out of curiosity decided to try. It has purity and immediacy. He did not play – he believed in circumstances and lived in them. Everything happens at the moment when our hero Ivan needs to enter the camera department, and events in the family ruin all plans.

We started looking for actors a year and a half ago. actors. It was immediately clear that Maria Smolnikova and Oleg Yagodin would play the main couple. What they do is both sad and funny. Both have a comedic gift. Masha can cry as many times as needed. While we are running around, screaming, looking for chairs, she settles on the sofa and plunges into her world, and then instantly turns on. We rehearsed with her for a long time back in Moscow, in my studio, read the script, changed something in it in the course of the discussion.

The picture was shot in Yekaterinburg, and this was the condition of the producers Alexei Fedorchenko and Dmitry Vorobyov. They immediately said that they could not pull Moscow with a debut budget, but in Yekaterinburg it would be easier. In addition, constructivist architecture was needed, and there is a lot of it in Yekaterinburg.

“Yekaterinburg is very cinematic,” says Svetlana Filippova. – I hope that the next film, and I have already written the script, will also shoot there. This is a city with energy. I first came to Yekaterinburg before filming to see if it would be suitable instead of Moscow. We were not personally acquainted with Alexei Fedorchenko: I knew his films, and he saw my animation. I showed the script to my friend Lida Kanashova, his co-author. And Alexei and producer Dmitry Vorobyov responded. In their group, everyone has their place, a good team.

– And yet, about the most important thing: what made you go from animation to feature films?

– Something I can not express in animation, although it allows you to freely dispose of space. But psychological subtle things, dialogues are difficult to do in it. I know few examples when an animated feature film is able to hold attention, to capture like a feature film. It seemed to me that everything I wanted to do in animation, I did. Suddenly, another vision came on. I always go with notebooks, in which I used to make sketches, drawings, and then it became interesting to listen to what was around. I began to see some situations as a movie. Everything happened by itself. Some of my principles – intra-frame editing, frame construction – spilled over into feature films. Andrey Naydenov, after watching my cartoons, offered to shoot with a 360-degree camera, but we quickly abandoned this idea. I wanted a static frame, asceticism in the choice of means. What happened, in my opinion, does not look like anything. But at the beginning of my work, I reviewed the films “There Lived a Song Thrush” and “Falling Leaves” by Otar Ioseliani, “Short Meetings” and “Long Farewells” by Kira Muratova.