Shooting on location

The scenery for the film version of Chekhov's "The Seagulls": detail poetry and nature poetry

Passing the gallery

Text: Julia Sakharova

A photo: Alexander Tyagny – Ryadno

Magazine: N11 (78) 2003

Margarita Terekhova makes a movie based on the famous play by Chekhov. The famous story unfolds in the museum interiors in Melikhova, but this does not make it too much of a textbook or too boring. The film version of "The Seagull" (in the opinion of the play's director, "About the Young and the Young") promises to be bright and reliable, piercing and fantastic. Production designer Valery Arkhipov talks about the process of creating the scenery for the film, which we will soon see "You imagine the horror of the servants of the museum when we took everything out of the rooms, put furniture bought in antique shops, and even ... lit the fireplace! Actually, you had to start the story by adding the second floor - the museum began to look A real noble house. Chekhov’s one-story house looked too modest. From the inside: isolated small rooms facing the corridor, a living room about twenty meters. It was not easy for the operator to work in small rooms, but he coped with the task brilliantly. One of the main goals in front of me, as a production designer, was the creation of authentic life, the feeling that people live here, the fishing rods in the hallway, the broken corner of the table, crumpled clothes ... Poetry details ... And the poetry of nature. parts: the first is where the heroes are full of hope, the second is where everything goes to the tragic finale. It was decided to shoot the first one in spring, in the impressionist spirit, the second - in the fall (in an artistic manner - Surikov, relatively speaking). Chekhov once did in one of the walls of the house have three huge windows to “let in” nature (he especially loved spring, melting snow, drops). We used his find and filmed some of the material in this room by opening the windows. In general, when shooting the first part, we used the language of artistic symbols denoting openness and hope (open doors, windows, open porch). Removing the second part (autumn), we closed the curtains, replaced the light wallpaper with dark ones with a fine pattern, accentuated the "autumn" colors in the interior. The space narrowed, became stuffy, adequate to the degree of despair of the heroes. There is no lake in Melikhovo, but there is one in the play. We found a suitable lake in the vicinity of Pereslavl (Plescheevo Lake). The director of the Slavutich base allowed us to build an exact copy of Chekhov’s house with a built-in second floor. In addition, our masters staged a replica of Melikhovo with outbuildings, etc., near the lake. The wattle fence was even woven - 400 meters. And seven people did it all in a month and a half. The house turned out real, not fake. Now this is the base of the Slavutich base, which has become a local landmark: people go to look at Chekhov's house, which turned out to be ... under Pereslavl. So the scenery is not always ephemeral art ... "

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