Journalist: It seems you were making Assassin of the Tsar without any sympathy for communists.
Shakhnazarov: At that time we didn't know much about the death of the Tsar's family. When the nineties came, we began to get some information, and I was very excited about the idea of a movie. There are some very dramatic moments in world history, and it is one of them, the moment that will always agitate the artists' souls. But we were the first who've done something of it.
J: Was it difficult to work with the foreign star Malcolm McDowell?
S: It is always easy to work with great actors. Only the mediocrity is hard to deal with, they are pretentious, too self-absorbed and unskillful. And Malcolm McDowell is a great actor. We are still staying friends. I've recently been to London at the screen premiere of A Clockwork Orange, formerly forbidden in that country. McDowell has come to the premiere and we met each other. He said he still considered Assassin of the Tsar as one of his best work, though he has such a big list of magnificent works, take for example, Caligula!
J: Was it Caligula that inspired you to invite M. M. in your film?
S: Of course, I've known him before Caligula. But you probably can call Caligula the trigger. Yes, it is pornography, but it is also the high art. By the way, McDowell himself told me that during the making of Caligula he had absolutely no idea about the special character of the film. All the "dirty" scenes had been filmed without his participation; and when he finally saw the whole film it was a kind of a shock. Malcolm even tried to protest, but then he calmed down. This film was engraved in my memory. And when you are writing a script it is very important to be able to imagine some specific faces on the places of your main characters. And I saw nobody, but McDowell as Yurovsky. Of course, I even couldn't dream of him playing the leading role.
J: So how were you able to get him?
S: We had our English producer Ben Brams. He talked to Malcolm's agents, and at first our negotiations seemed not very enthusiastic. But then suddenly the meeting was appointed - like in old spy movies, I had to go from London to Geneva just for one day, book a room in one mysterious hotel and wait for McDowell in the hotel lobby at five o'clock sharp. It looked just like one of those secret spy rendezvous. I was terrified with the thought that he probably wouldn't come. But he came at five pm sharp, and we spent forty minutes talking. At the end of our conversation I was confident that he would be in my film. As we found out later, he'd had the same feeling. He agreed to work for a tiny fee - by his standards, of course.
© 1990 Pravda
Archived 2001-08 Alex D. Thrawn for www.MalcolmMcDowell.net