Russian producer Andrei Konchalovsky tells GEOFFREY MACNABabout making films that are fun rather than worthy
ANDREI KONCHALOVSKY is an appropriate person to be executive producer of The Last Station, the new biopic of Tolstoy, given that his background would not be atypical of a character in one of the great author’s novels. Not only is he distantly descended from Tolstoy (one of his great-aunts was married to Tolstoy’s son), but Konchalovsky was born into Russian aristocracy.
Born Andron Sergeyevich Mikhalkov, he is an offspring of a famous clan. His great-grandfather was an imperial governor of the city of Yaroslavl. His father, Sergei, who died last summer aged 96, wrote the lyrics to the Russian national anthem.
His uncle, Mikhail, was a war hero who wrote a book about his wartime espionage operations. Konchalovsky's brother, Nikita Mikhalkov, is a major film director, who won the grand prix at Cannes and best foreign film Oscar in 1994 for Burnt by the Sun. And Konchalovsky took his nom de plume from his maternal grandfather, the avant-garde artist Pyotr Konchalovsky. The Mikhalkovs were part of the elite in the tsarist era, stayed part of that elite during the Stalin era, and are still part of the elite today.
How did they manage it? “Pure luck,” he says. “My family was related to one of the greatest Russian painters of the 19th century, Vasily Surikov. This name was untouchable to the Bolsheviks. They understood they couldn’t destroy everything. It was pure luck that the Bolsheviks decided Surikov is one of the greatest Russian artists. That made us, in a sense, untouchable, as offspring. It wasn’t because we were negotiating and being very flexible. Flexibility didn’t help.”
But Konchalovsky is surely the only living film-maker to have worked with both Andrei Tarkovsky and Sylvester Stallone. For the former, he co-scripted Andrei Rublev, a beautiful and austere three-and-a-half-hour Soviet-era epic about a medieval icon painter. With the latter, he directed Tango and Cash, also starring Kurt Russell. Surely the same man can't have done both films? Konchalovsky ponders the question. "When I was working on Rublev," he says, "I was much more responsible and I was much more thrilled by the idea of serious philosophical messages that can be conveyed to the audience. With age, I became more lightheaded. In a sense, I thought it was not necessary to have a message. Sometimes, it is wonderful to have fun."
Those who recall his films of the 1960s – Asya's Happiness, set in a peasant collective, and his Turgenev adaptation, A Nest of Gentlefolk– have often expressed disappointment that Konchalovsky is making such mainstream fare after leaving the Soviet Union for Hollywood in 1980.
How would a film-maker like Tarkovsky fare today? “That’s a very difficult question,” Konchalovsky says, a little forlornly. “Today, most of the filmgoers are teenagers. It’s a different market. I don’t think that films like Tarkovsky’s can be as popular or as meaningful as they were in those times.” He points out that there are film-makers such as Alexander Sokurov who still make “highly personal and, let’s say, difficult films” – albeit with great hardship. “Tarkovsky had problems ideologically, but not financially.” However, the Russian director suggests it is even harder for such film-makers in the west. When he was a young director in the Soviet Union, Konchalovsky used to tell himself that if only he had freedom, he could make a masterpiece. “It’s not true,” he says, sighing. “I don’t think that freedom is a precursor for a masterpiece. That’s a big, western, liberal cliché – that freedom of expression creates a masterpiece. I think it’s quite the opposite.”
The Last Stationis released on Friday
