eyed off

All right, let’s use this Tumblr for its intended purpose. Here are some additional details from The Movie Set That Ate Itself that didn’t make it into GQ (and perhaps shouldn’t have, given that the first draft was over 7,000 words).

KHRZHANOVSKY FINDS DAU

Ilya’s first cinematic idée fixe, says a friend, was organizational: he wanted to create a “Center for Young Cinema.” After taking a workshop at VGIK, the Russian state film school, however, he wrote a script that would soon become his first film, 4 – an abstract meditation on storytelling and ritual that culminates in a scene of village crones dancing topless around a suckling pig. It got great reviews. As he was finishing 4, he discovered Lev Landau.

Khrzhanovsky didn’t know anything about physics, but the story, with its rich currents of sex, genius and doom, mesmerized him. He promptly optioned the scientist’s life rights and formed a production company, Phenomenon Films. And then something amazing happened: in the February of 2005, 4 took first prize at the Rotterdam Film Festival. All of a sudden, European producers were asking what’s next.

Khrzhanovsky began by commissioning famous novelist Vladimir Sorokin, with whom he had worked on 4, to write the script. Sorokin is a provocateur whose fiction periodically features people eating excrement and/or each other, so no one expected a straight-up Hollywood biopic - yet the first draft of his script still managed to shock nearly everyone who read it. The main character spent half the film masturbating; a later scene showed the comatose physicist, dribbling spittle and all, being molested by hospital nurses. The team tried a couple of rewrites. Finally, Sorokin amicably handed the reins over to Khrzhanovsky, saying, the director recalls, “I gave you clay. You mold whatever you want.” From here on out, Dau would be one man’s vision. And it would only get weirder.

Read More →

The set is roughly the size of two football fields, surrounded by a five-story fantasia of oppressive architecture. One edifice, a woozy take on Lenin’s tomb, has an irregular ziggurat leading up to it. A coliseum-like stadium looms over two drab residential buildings. Atonal cello music squalls across the city, issuing from pole-mounted loudspeakers. The sole purpose of it seems to be to make one tense, uncomfortable, on edge.

“Are you going to augment the city with CGI later?” I ask, just to ask something.

Khrzhanovsky jumps in place and winces. “See, if one of the guards heard you, he would fine me a thousand hryvnias [about $125],” he says. “Because you’re my guest. It doesn’t matter that I am the boss. I get frisked like everyone else. You can’t use words that have no meaning in this world.”

“Like CGI?”

“Now he would fine me twice.”

Read More at GQ

In the works for 14 months, this is probably my favorite thing I’ve ever written. In the next post, I’ll put up a few photos from the set.

As a journalist, I find it easy to interview Republicans. They tend to adore me because I’m their idea of a palatable immigrant: came in legally, “escaped communism” (in fact, my family ran away from Latvian nationalism, but why split hairs), learned enough English to write in it, etc etc. I’m basically Ayn Rand! So a week or so ago, when I first ran across that now-famous Elizabeth Warren quote - that “no one in this country got rich on his own” - I admit to experiencing a twinge of protest. Not that I’m rich in Warren’s, or OWS’s, definition. But I had almost begun to believe the hype about my proud self-sufficiency. It took me a few minutes to remember how I actually got here: one, the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, which first allowed Soviet Jews to emigrate to the U.S. en masse (both Jackson and Vanik were Democrats); two, a year and a half in Cleveland spent on full-on welfare, food stamps and all, that allowed my family to learn English in relative peace; and three, the Clinton-era Pell grants that financed my first years of college. In short, my American self is entirely a creation of federal social programs. The very programs routinely attacked by the same people championing the likes of me in contrast to, say, an illegal Mexican immigrant. Who, ironically, is much more self-sufficient.