Boris Strugatsky describes the difficult process of writing the script for Andrei Tarkovsky's film Stalker. Strugatsky and his brother worked with Tarkovsky for over two years, producing nearly a dozen drafts as Tarkovsky struggled to convey his vision. Communication was challenging as Tarkovsky thought visually rather than through words. The last script was written in two days after Tarkovsky rejected the previous version. Strugatsky notes that the director's vision often differed from the writers' and the process involved endless discussions and revisions as they tried to satisfy Tarkovsky's demands.
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Article by Boris Natanovich Strugatsky and Erik Simon. Working for Tarkovsky
Boris Strugatsky describes the difficult process of writing the script for Andrei Tarkovsky's film Stalker. Strugatsky and his brother worked with Tarkovsky for over two years, producing nearly a dozen drafts as Tarkovsky struggled to convey his vision. Communication was challenging as Tarkovsky thought visually rather than through words. The last script was written in two days after Tarkovsky rejected the previous version. Strugatsky notes that the director's vision often differed from the writers' and the process involved endless discussions and revisions as they tried to satisfy Tarkovsky's demands.
Boris Strugatsky describes the difficult process of writing the script for Andrei Tarkovsky's film Stalker. Strugatsky and his brother worked with Tarkovsky for over two years, producing nearly a dozen drafts as Tarkovsky struggled to convey his vision. Communication was challenging as Tarkovsky thought visually rather than through words. The last script was written in two days after Tarkovsky rejected the previous version. Strugatsky notes that the director's vision often differed from the writers' and the process involved endless discussions and revisions as they tried to satisfy Tarkovsky's demands.
Author(s): Boris Natanovich Strugatsky and Erik Simon Reviewed work(s): Source: Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 31, No. 3, Soviet Science Fiction: The Thaw and After (Nov., 2004), pp. 418-420 Published by: SF-TH Inc Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4241287 . Accessed: 06/01/2013 15:04 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. . SF-TH Inc is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Science Fiction Studies. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded on Sun, 6 Jan 2013 15:04:03 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 418 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 31 (2004) Boris Natanovich Strugatsky Working for Tarkovsky Translated by Erik Simon. Nearly all versions of the various scripts for the film Stalker have been lost. We began our collaboration with Tarkovsky in mid-1975, and from the beginning struggled to define our circle of duties, our place in this joint project of many months. "We are lucky to work with a genius," we told ourselves. "This means we must engage all our strength and talent to create a script to satisfy our genius as completely as possible." As I have said and written before, working on the Stalker script was unbelievably difficult. The main problem was that Tarkovsky, being a film director (more than this: a genius of a film director), saw the world differently from us, constructed his imaginary future world in the film differently from us, and usually was unable to make us understand his own unique, fundamentally individual view. Such matters cannot be transmitted verbally: there are no words for them, and it seems to be impossible to invent such words. Maybe there is no need to invent them. Words are, after all, a property of literature, a highly symbolized reality, a very peculiar system of associations, addressing certain senses. Cinema derives from visual art and music, and it is an entirely real, I'd even say a mercilessly real world, whose basic unit is not words but sound-images. This is all theory and philosophy, however. In practice, the work came down to endless, taxing discussions, sometimes leading to impotent despair. The film director took pains to explain what he wanted from the writers, and the writers struggled to get meaning out of a mixture of gestures, words, ideas, and images, and finally to formulate for themselves how to express (in ordinary Russian words, on an empty sheet of ordinary paper) the single, unusual, necessary, and yet entirely incommunicable thing that they wanted to make clear to the director. In such a situation there is only one possible working approach: trial and error. Discussion led to development of an approximate plan for the script. A text would be written, evaluated, and revised. A new discussion, new plan, new version would follow-and again it would be wrong. Again it would be impossible to express in words what nonetheless must be written in words in the subsequent version of the script. Alas, we did not make minutes of these conversations, and neither in memory nor on paper is there anything more than a few memoranda such as: "Dec. 19, 77 Tarkovsky. Man = instinct + reason. There's something more: soul, spirit (moral, ethics). The real Great may be senseless and absurd-Christ." I have no recollection at all of the sense in which we talked about these most essential problems, or of why we talked about them at all at that time. This content downloaded on Sun, 6 Jan 2013 15:04:03 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions WORKING FOR TARKOVSKY 419 There were seven or eight, perhaps even nine, versions of the script. The last was written in a fit of despair, after Tarkovsky had declared decisively and definitely of the penultimate version: "This is it. With this Stalker I am not going to make the film any more." This happened during the summer of 1977. Tarkovsky had just finished the shoot for the first version of the film, in which [Alexander] Kaidanovsky played the tough guy Alan (the former Redrick Shuchart). The film was damaged while it was being developed, however, and Tarkovsky decided to use this mishap to start all over again. My brother Arkady Natanovich was with him on location in Estonia. Suddenly, without warning, he appeared in Leningrad and declared: "Tarkovsky demands another Stalker. "- "What kind of another one?"- "I don't know. And he doesn't know. Another one. Different from this one. "-"But which one, tram-tararam? "- "Don't know, tram-tram-and-tararam!!! An-oth-er one!" This was an hour of despair, a day of despair, two days of despair. On the third day, we invented the Stalker-as-Fool. Tarkovsky was satisfied and the film was shot again. This final script was written in two days, and Arkady Natanovich hastened back to Tallinn. Besides this final version, the third (or fourth?) version of the script survived as well; it was published in SF Anthology #25 in 1981 as "The Desire Machine. "' By some miracle, the first version of the script also survived, to be published in 1993 also as "The Desire Machine," although it seems to me that our original working title was "The Golden Sphere." Generally speaking, the history of writing a film script is the history of a difficult interaction between writer and director-a mighty struggle of opinions and ideas that are often incompatible. In this collision of creative approaches, the scriptwriter, I think, must make concessions, for the film is the director's domain, his child, his territory. The writer, however creative, is just a hired hand. In thirty years my brother and I met every variant and version of film director. The most common type among them is the sparkling, eloquent, absolutely self-confident enthusiast. He is fast. Like lightning in an empty sky, he suddenly appears out of nowhere and showers the author with tempting offers and witty ideas that flatter the author's imagination. Then, again like lightning, he disappears into his nowhere, forever and without a trace. We met a lot of those. But to speak of serious directors, all were very different from each other-as different as their films. Andrei Tarkovsky was cruel to us, uncompromising and damned rigid. All our modest attempts at creative mutiny were mercilessly suppressed. Only once, I think, did we succeed in changing his mind. He agreed to delete from the film the "time loop" we had invented for him-a monotonous repetition of a tank column that had perished in the Zone; it repeatedly crossed a little, half- destroyed bridge. For some reason this trick fascinated him: he clung to it to the last, and only with a strong joint effort could we convince him that this plot device was trivial and had been done a thousand times before. Finally he agreed, but I think only because he liked our general idea that there was to be as little as possible of the "fantastic" in the Zone, only a permanent expectation of This content downloaded on Sun, 6 Jan 2013 15:04:03 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 420 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 31 (2004) something supernatural, a maximum of suspense fueled by this expectation, and ... nothing more. Green plants, wind, and water. NOTES This essay was excerpted from the chapter "Film Scripts" in Boris Strugatsky's Comments on the Way Gone, and it is reprinted here by kind permission of the author. Comments was first published in the Collected Works of the Strugatskys (third edition, in 11 volumes, 2000-01). In 2003, a slightly shorter version appeared. 1. SF Anthology #25 was part of a series of sf anthologies of the Znanie publishing house. This content downloaded on Sun, 6 Jan 2013 15:04:03 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions