Stalker (1979): The Sci-Fi Masterpiece That Killed Its Director

What you are looking at is legendary director, Andrei Tarkovsky’s response to one of the worst things that can happen to a filmmaker— while filming the most expensive shot of his movie The Sacrifice, involving a man burning his house down in one long take, the camera jammed during the take and the house burned down... without being filmed. Jammed! They scraped together some money and rebuilt the house over two weeks to film it again. This wonderful edit at the end is actually just the end of the

take because they used up the entire reel on the one shot (Wiki). Reportedly, the cinematographer had advised Tarkovsky to use more than one camera for the shot the first time around, but the director decided against it (stopsmilingonline). I mean, at least he didn’t choose to bring zero cameras… although he might as well have. I bet you’re thinking, ’that’s some bad luck right there' well, that’s nothing. Seven years before filming The Sacrifice, Tarkovsky sacrificed his sanity to make this mo

vie: Stalker. Stalker had one of the most difficult productions in cinema history and possibly even caused Tarkovsky’s death. You don’t have to have seen the movie to watch this video, but it’s very possible you already have — it’s currently the most streamed movie on The Criterion Channel streaming service. So let’s see why one crew member described the production of Stalker as “a mirror of a hellish trip” (Cohn). This is CinemaTyler Show. If you are unfamiliar with Andrei Tarkovsky, here is a

mini-bio: Andrei Tarkovsky was a Russian film director who’s main work was between 1962 and 1986. His style was slow, methodical, and atmospheric— often involving really beautiful shots of nature. His father was a poet and you could say that Andrei was a poetic filmmaker. He’s most similar to directors like Ingmar Bergman or Robert Bresson. And you most likely have seen his influence even recently. Much like Christopher Nolan today, Tarkovsky's main interests in the art of filmmaking revolved ar

ound time. He thought of filmmaking as “sculpting in time” and he is known for lingering on a shot for long periods for the purpose of, as Roger Ebert put it, “absorbing” you rather than entertaining you. My favorite movie of his is ’The Mirror,’ but I would start with Ivan’s Childhood (about a child army scout during World War Two), which is more traditional, or Solaris (about a space station orbiting a mysterious planet that creates perfect copies of people from your memory), which is his movi

e that seems to have caught on the most in the mainstream. And it’s a direct answer to the cleanliness of Stanley Kubrick’s future in 2001: A Space Odyssey— Tarkovsky was quoted saying, “Let’s make OUR space station like a broken down bus." He hated 2001: A Space Odyssey, by the way, but he hated it in a motivating way. It’s very likely that we got Solaris because of 2001. It makes sense— Kubrick is one side of the brain and Tarkovsky is the other. There is a fascinating video showing the simila

rity in style and imagery between the two directors, which I'll put a link to down in the description. Out of the seven features Tarkovsky directed, only Solaris and Stalker were really science fiction movies. It is really interesting seeing Tarkovsky apply his craft to science fiction. Personally, I would have loved to have seen a Tarkovsky horror movie or even a screwball comedy or something. Apparently he didn’t consider himself a sci-fi fan, calling the genre full of “comic book” elements an

d “vulgar commercialism,” so I guess he wouldn’t like some of these 'sci-fi' movies coming out now (BFI). But I’m sure there are many he would like and many that were influenced by him. That said, shortly before his death, he saw James Cameron’s The Terminator and said its “as a vision of the future and the relation between man and his destiny, the film is pushing the frontier fo cinema as an art” (Wiki). Stalker takes place after a mysterious object from space crashes into a fictitious country.

Troops were sent in, but never returned. The government put walls up around this ‘Zone’ to keep people away from its strange effect on reality. Imagine if you can, a forbidden Zone of unimaginable mystery and one unauthorized guide to the Zone known as a Stalker, hired to sneak a Writer and a Professor into the heart of the Zone’s magic— a room that grants the deepest desires of anyone who enters it. And it stars Natalie Portman… just kidding. The film was based on a novella named ‘Roadside Pic

nic’ by the Strugatsky brothers (Wiki). The film is extremely slow moving, but that’s the point. It envelops you. You feel like you are there instead of watching the story happen to other people. I almost feel like some of these really long takes allow your mind to wander as if you were the character— you are intrigued by the nature of the Zone and what will happen next, but you are given space to contemplate the concept as the character would without being told what to think at any given moment

. And the movie seamlessly transitions into these contemplative segments. Tarkovsky hired Georgy Rerberg as cinematographer. Rerberg had shot Tarkovsky’s previous film, The Mirror, in 1975. They wanted to use the “expressive texture” of the abandoned power plants in Estonia and Tallinn, which as strangely beautiful as it was, caused lots of logistical problems. The crew often had to work in some very uncomfortable situations for hours on end, but we’ll get more into that later (Cinephilia & Beyo

nd). One of the earlier issues involved Tarkovsky’s wife Larisa— who demanded to play the role of the Stalker’s wife in the film (The Guardian). She was very difficult on the set, earning the nickname: “the Empress” (The Guardian). Rerberg asked Tarkovsky if he wanted Larisa or the actual actress, which was apparently enough to get Tarkovsky to come to his senses and hire Alisa...ummm… Alisa (The Guardian). Larisa, his wife, was piiissssed. She hated Rerberg. The real problems would begin once t

hey got the footage back. The footage had been brought to a lab in Moscow to be developed, but when it was done, they noticed that “the image looked dark and greenish” (Cinephilia & Beyond). I’m not sure why they were just starting to see footage after several months of shooting, but nevertheless, the film was ruined. Months and months  of extremely stressful hectic work was destroyed (Le Fanu). Can you imagine looking back on all the issues on the set and all of the problems and realizing that

you might as well have not had film in the camera at all? The problem was twofold— a mistake in the development along with a defective batch of film (Cinephilia & Beyond). Here are somestills from the ruined film, so you can see what it looked like. They had been shooting on an, at the time, experimental— Kodak 5247 (actually one of the more famous film stocks) and the Soviet film labs were not yet experienced in how to develop it (Safiullin, Wiki). Alien, The Shining, Star Wars, and Blade Runne

r were also shot on that film stock (shotonwhat). What happened next, as you can imagine, was a nightmare of determining who was to blame and the decision about whether or not to go on. They fired the second cameraman who was apparently [quote] “responsible for exposure,” but it probably wasn’t his fault (Cinephilia & Beyond). The next to go was the production designer and so on down the line (Cinephilia & Beyond). Tarkovsky had already been having problems with Rerberg, his cinematographer, bef

ore the film stock was ruined (Wiki). Rerberg had said that he was trying to make his own film simultaneously (Cohn). He even said that when he worked on The Mirror with Tarkovsky, which was Tarkovsky’s auto-biography, that [quote] “Andrei made a film about himself, and I, about myself. Luckily, it was the same film” (Cohn). That's kind of messed up, right? Isn’t that like hiring a stalker to take you into the Zone, but instead he just takes you over to his house so he can show you his Blu-ray c

ollection. And you’re like, “What’s so special magical this place?” And he says, “Oh man, you just have to believe. You just have to belieeeeve, man.” Rerberg was born into a highly intellectual family in 1937— during the height of Stalin’s repression of poets and artists who were often arrested for their work (Cohn). The thing you must realize is that Stalker is about a an artist-- a writer-- who lives under a repressive government. Of course Rerberg is going to want to tell the story. His pare

nts drilled into his mind the importance of authority in your artistic voice (Cohn). So, Tarkovsky and Rerberg would often butt heads on the set. One time Tarkovsky asked Rerberg to do an effect that he saw in an Ingmar Bergman film. They even had a “special studio” made to get the effect, but Rerberg couldn’t do it the way Tarkovsky wanted and Tarkovsky flipped out on him (The Guardian). I wish I knew what the effect was. If you have an idea, let me know in the comments. So when he found out th

e film stock was ruined, Tarkovsky immediately fired Rerberg. Hasta la vista, baby. This was a whole thing and there was even a documentary made in 2009 detailing Rerberg’s side called “Rerberg and Tarkovsky: The Reverse Side of “Stalker." In 1993, Tarkovsky’s diaries were published and not only did he write that Rerberg was a terrible cinematographer, but that he sucked as a person, too (The Guardian). But… this disdain might not be as intense as it seemed-- apparently Tarkovsky would dictate h

is diary for various people for write down including his wife, who you’ll remember, hated Rerberg’s guts (Cohn). According to his diaries, the 70s were particularly tough for Tarkovsky (Le Fanu). At one point, he considered quitting cinema entirely and directing theater productions (Le Fanu). I mean, the film can’t get ruined if there is no camera, right? Stalker was actually the climax of Tarkovsky’s decade of anguish (Le Fanu). His film Andrei Rublev from 1966 “bad been denied a domestic relea

se” and the script he wanted to make next was denied because it was too personal— this would later become The Mirror (BFI). The studio was ready to pull the plug on the whole thing (Wiki). They were losing money, but instead of scrapping the production entirely, they decided to let Tarkovsky try again (Safiullin). Tarkovsky had "proposed a two-part film,” and used the leftover money to reshoot, but they only had enough money to shoot one of the two parts (Safiullin). With Rerberg gone, Tarkovsky

had to find a new DP to shoot his film. He hired Leonid Kalashnikov and, the following autumn, they reshot for months at “an abandoned hydroelectric power station in Estonia” because the original location they wanted had an earthquake (Dyer). Tarkovsky saw what he had shot and… it sucked. It had no magic. Tarkovsky was like, “This is bullshit, man! This isn’t the way I wanted it, damnit!” So, yeah, he fired Leonid. So, Tarkovsky decided to shoot Stalker for a THIRD TIME! This time with a new ci

nematographer named Alexander Knyazhinsky and Tarkovsky changed the script around and apparently, the version shot by Alexander is very different from what was shot the previous year (Wiki). The version shot by Alexander is the one that we know (Le Fanu). This final version of the film was shot using a KSN camera, which is the Soviet version of the Mitchell NC (Cinephilia & Beyond). Nearly every shot in The Zone that isn’t a close-up, was shot using a Cooke Varotal 20-100mm T3.1 zoom lens (Cinep

hilia & Beyond). This lens was [quote] “as big as an artillery shell and it cost the same as a passenger car” (Cinephilia & Beyond). The first shot of the new production was the one where the handcar finally stops in The Zone (Cinephilia & Beyond). The production designer, Rashid Safiullin, said that the shots leading up to the men’s entry into The Zone required a large fence with barbed wire, but the production didn’t give him any materials this second time around (Safiullin). Although, when th

ey were ready to shoot, he saw that the fence had been set up— could it be the zone???? But really, he was implying that there was something going on in the background whether that be stealing, finding, swapping, or you know, buying materials somehow (Safiullin). Another shot affected by the diminished budget was the shot of the tanks “lurking in the mist.” In an interview, Safiullin said, "The first year we had had seven or eight tanks and five armored troop-carriers. It was all brought from Mo

scow and placed around. The next year there was no money. The limit was three tanks and two armored troop-carriers. All right, we took it. Andrei said, “Can you draw a sketch of it?” I worked for two or three days drawing the storyboard. Because he needed a full-blooded picture, didn’t he? With him there had to be not a single unmotivated flower in the frame, let alone the tanks. We needed an illusion, a great number of tanks being there and like something had happened to them. Like they had mel

ted or gone to pieces, people in there disappearing somewhere. The whole scene had to breathe a drama. He had two, three scattered points in his mind. I knew the situation and I said, “I’ll do this.” But they brought the tanks and gave us 1.5 hours instead of the two or three days that we really needed, so that they could be seen from several angles. And they had to be placed at the very entrance. But a tank passing the marshland destroys it for five to ten years. And there had to be no trace th

at they had just been brought there. We needed an illusion they had been there for about 20 years… overgrown with moss. So it was a predicament” (Safiullin). That said, Safiullin noted that, as much as Stalker was altered over the course of its productionS, “not a single alteration was accidental. It was a result of complex creative work” (Safiullin). Apparently the alterations were so frequent that they were doing reshoots way back during the first version with Rerberg because they had changed

something in the script and had the reshoot the scene (Cinephilia & Beyond). Tarkovsky is so good at making the setting look stunning that you don’t really realize how miserable it was to actually be there. One scene had the crew standing for hours [quote] “up to their knees in stinking puddles of oil, while effluent discharged, upriver, from a paper processing plant enveloped the set in a fetid miasma. This went for months on end (Le Fanu). In fact, one of the only two shots from the original v

ersion of the film that made it into the final cut involved a “river covered in reddish foam” (Cinephilia & Beyond). This was [quote] “the waste of pulp and paper [that] was dumped into [the] river from an industrial complex" (Cinephilia & Beyond). The other shot from the first version was the one where the camera floats over the mirror (Cinephilia & Beyond). The main part of the movie where the three men journey through the zone was shot at “two hydro power plants on the Jägala river near Talli

nn, Estonia” as well as in "Maardu, next to the Iru power plant" and some of the scenes before the scenes in the Zone were shot at “an old Flora chemical factory, in the center of Tallinn, next to the old Rotermann salt storage and the electric plant (Wiki). So, you can probably tell where this is headed… many of the crew members would later pass away from illnesses likely related to their time working near hazardous chemicals and radiation (Dyer). Three of these deaths would be Anatoly Solonits

yn the fantastic actor who played the writer— definitely check him out in Andrei Rublev and The Ascent— Tarkovsky’s wife, and Tarkovsky himself (Dyer). Tarkovsky was only 54 when he died— he could be alive right now. He’d be around 87 years old. Just think of all the masterpieces we missed out on. The sound designer, Vladimir Sharun is convinced that it was the chemicals they were working around that killed them. He said that this shot here of what looks like "snow falling in the summer and whit

e foam floating down the river” was, in fact, “some horrible poison” and many of the female crew members got “allergic reactions on their faces” from it (Wiki). This kind of makes the film feel similar to the that picture of the core leaking out after the Chernobyl disaster. You shouldn’t be able to see this and survive, and yet, you’re looking at it right now. And this picture was taken a decade after the disaster when the radiation died down to one-tenth of what it had been (Rare Historical Ph

otos). In fact, the Chernobyl disaster, involving a catastrophic explosion at the power plant, made the surrounding area uninhabitable and the area was referred to as the “Zone of alienation,” and some of the people who make trips into the Zone to care for the Chernobyl power plant call themselves “stalkers” (Wiki). So, what happened to the first version of Stalker— it was a little greenish, right? We might be able to use color correction software to fix that. Well, sadly, the film was destroyed

in a fire in 1988 (Le Fanu). The people who had seen the first version said that, even though the film was damaged, it was still “extraordinarily beautiful” (Le Fanu). Rerberg may have also been one of the victims of Stalker’s hazardous chemicals having died at only 61 years old. Nearly all of the dreams Tarkovsky wrote in his diary between 1974 and 1977 involved being in prison— and one dream had Tarkovsky escape from prison only to want to go back. Tarkovsky wrote: "At last, to my joy, I saw

the entrance to the prison, which I recognized by the bas-relief emblem of the USSR. I was worried about how I was going to be received, but that was as nothing compared with the horror of being out of prison” (Le Fanu). In an essay by Mark Le Fanu for Criterion, he argues that Stalker is a fantasy wish to leave Russia, but knowing that it would be either impossible or wrong to (Le Fanu). In 1976, Tarkovsky had bought a new house “about two hundred miles southeast of Moscow,” but in 1979, shortl

y after Stalker, Tarkovsky started traveling to Italy, ultimately deciding in 1982 never to return to Russia (Wiki). Over the three versions of Stalker, 16,000 feet of film was shot and yet some who have seen the both first version and the version we’ve seen claim that the two versions“ are almost identical (Wiki). So, who knows what’s going on. They’re identical; they’re extremely different. I don’t know. Maybe the first one and the third one are similar and the second one was different— who kn

ows, but I’ll leave you with a quote from an interview with Tarkovsky that I really think sums up this story. He said, "To make a film you need money. To write a poem all you need is pen and paper. This puts cinema at a disadvantage. But I think cinema is invincible, and I bow down to all the directors who try to realize their own films despite everything” (Cinephilia & Beyond). Thank you, Andrei. And thank YOU for watching! Let me know in the comments if you want more videos on Stalker— I have

plenty of information. Don’t forget to exit through the gift shop! Head on over to Patreon to get bonus content for just a buck. My patrons actually chose Stalker as this video topic and you can vote on topics, too! Just one buck gets you in and helps to keep this channel going. Thanks again for watching!