Actor Sergey Makovetsky (left) shies away from the heat of Russian politics and a star director.
Photo: Dmitry Azarov
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The PM Takes Boats and Trains
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin visited Admiralty Wharves in St. Petersburg yesterday to check on how his instructions as president are being carried out there. He also expressed dissatisfaction that ship owners prefer to place their orders overseas. “Almost all of our money goes there,” he groused. Kommersant special correspondent Andrey Kolesnikov noted, however, that the prime minister displayed a unique ability to invest money “here” in his next meeting, with film director Nikita Mikhalkov.
A 70-ton oil tanker will come off the berths of Admiralty Wharves in a few months. They have not built tankers like this one here before. Admiralty Wharves products are in great demand now, especially on the world market. Two weeks ago, the icebreaking tugboat Switzer Korsakov was seized by pirates off the shore of Somalia. Several workers at the plant told me about it with undisguised pride. Not only that, right in front of the tanker being built an exhibit had been set up with a model of the Switzer Korsakov occupying a central place. (I’m afraid the original may never be seen again.) Deputy general director of Admiralty Wharves for production Andrey Bystrov off the tanker. He estimated that it was 51 percent ready.
I saw many ships moored nearby. There was some sort of feverish activity on them. They were throwing a net off of one of them and drawing it back in very quickly.
“What fell off The Phoenix?” I asked.
“The smelt are running,” Bystrov explained. “Everyone is fishing now. At night, with floodlights. You see, several nets are hanging on deck on each of them.”
“Do you fish?”
“Us? No,” Bystrov said firmly. “Putin is visiting us.”
Putin looked at the model of the ship with seemingly greater interest than he looked at the real things. I think the builders couldn’t contain themselves and bragged about the high demand for their output among pirates. While the prime minister was out in the fresh air, the participants in a meeting on the development of shipbuilding in Russia were waiting for him inside. Deputy Prime Minister Sergey Ivanov, who is responsible for the industry’s development, asked the journalists whether they had become too talkative and if it was time to stop inviting them. (Not long ago, Putin threatened not to invite back journalists who talked while he was talking.) They responded with silence.
“Here in the Northwest Federal District, we can build practically all classes of warship, and ships for the Arctic,” Putin said. He called Admiralty Wharves “probably the oldest of our enterprises.” “Peter the First was the general director here,” he noted.
He found a lot lacking in the way things are going in the United Shipbuilding Corp. Worst of all, “almost the entire order of domestic ship builders goes overseas.”
“Almost all our money goes there,” he said. He added determinedly that the enterprises of the united company will all issue stock by the end of 2009 (although the current management of the company seems to think that is impossible).
“I would like to hear about the reasons the task set were not completed,” Putin said, introducing Minister of Industry Viktor Khristenko.
Khristenko named some reasons. It turns out that far from all types of civilian ships can be built in Russian wharves, “only 28 percent, for technical reasons.” So it became a little clearer why the money of Russian ship owners goes “there.”
The money goes where they can build the ships.
Moreover, “three out of four ships are made to individual plans,” that is, they cannot be made more cheaply through mass production. Khristenko named several other reasons why the industry is still unable to pull itself out of crisis and suggest a few solutions. The first of those, strange as it may seem to some, was the human factor.
“We have to change workers’ psychology,” he said.
It looks as though all other ways to pull shipbuilding from the ruins have been exhausted.
Moreover, “a portfolio of orders has to be formed along with the Transportation Ministry” and “a conception for the development of the industry through 2020 has to be adopted.” Changes in the management of the United Shipbuilding Corp., which is currently headed by Yury Yarov, were not among the radical anticrisis measures suggested.
A cultural program was planned for the prime minister after the meeting. He went to the village of Shushary, where film director Nikita Mikhalkov is shooting Burnt by the Sun 2. (They have been talking about that film for so long that they could shoot a movie about Mikhalkov with the same name already.)
It wasn’t easy to get to the location of the shoot. Although they are filming just outside the city, the road had such potholes in it that it seemed that it hadn’t been fixed since the days of the war (which is what Burnt by the Sun 2 is about).
Putin reached the site without much trouble, however. His car pulled over just before the road that it would be better for him not to see (and which he is unlikely ever to see, I think) and he walked 100 meters through the forest to a railroad track that led directly to the shoot. They were shooting a scene with two trains. Putin rode one to where the director was.
It was an unusual entrance. Even when he was president, he had never ridden on a specially built train track in any of his meetings with intellectuals. But now he has.
“The most brilliant thing is that they laid the last rails only last night!” Mikhalkov enthused. “I said to the conductor, ‘Can you travel normally on the rails? They don’t shake?”
Before the prime minister got there, Mikhalkov shot a scene where civilians arrive on the front. The civilians leave the train and fall into the hands of soldiers led by an NKVD major played by Sergey Makovetsky.
“Frisk them harder!” Mikhalkov says into a microphone sitting under an awning in warm boots that say “Rock” on them wearing a baseball cap that says “Nikita Mekhalkov” on it. “Don’t just pat them! Frisk! Like this!”
He showed them so convincingly that there was no doubt he was a professional at it.
“You’re not Anna Karenina. Don’t stand on the track!” he called to the soldiers.
“Who are you playing?” the assistant director asked us.
“Journalists,” we confessed.
“Journalists?” He looked aghast. “I don’t think we have any journalists in this scene.”
The journalists were in a different scene, one that called for Vladimir Putin to appear on the set. But he wasn’t there.
“This is Hollywood scale!” Mikhalkov exclaimed to me, showing off his two trains moving toward the camera through puffs of artificial smoke. (The scale was in having two trains, rather than just one.) Maybe it was that scale and the puffs of smoke that kept Dmitry Medvedev’s inauguration from becoming a classic of world cinematography as well.
Makovetsky chain smoked and said that he has been shooting since last autumn.
“I started as a captain and now I am a major,” he boasted, showing his stripes.
“And that’s not the limit,” I suggested (since shooting was a long way from over, maybe a very long way).
“No,” he sighed, “the major’s fate is that it’s the limit.”
A horse neighed.
“Oh, a horse wants onto the set,” Mikhalkov said merrily. “Let’s put him by the train.”
They put the horse by the train. It made the train look better somehow.
Thus I became witness to one of the biggest secrets in the world. For the first time, I saw not a film, but how it was shot. It was fascinating and good for me. I watched as the civilians got off the train, all dressed differently and carrying different bags and cases, but they all had the same light brown shoes on.
Mikhalkov was shouting orders. He managed the chaos with assurance. The actors hung on his every word. He did not abuse that attention. He was clearly not a tyrant on the set. They loved him.
I heard one of the extras telling another an anecdote. Nikita Mikhalkov meets Vladimir Putin and tells him, “I’m making a movie about you.” (He made a documentary film, President, that was released four months ago at the time of the parliamentary elections.) “So go ahead,” Putin tells him. “There is only one problem. I have a moustache, and I am playing you.” “Yes, obviously you have to shave it off.” “No, obviously you, Vladimir Vladimirovich, have to grow one.” The extras laughed.
At that moment, Mikhalkov met the president, straight off the train, so to speak. They probably didn’t talk about that, or Putin wouldn’t have looked so cheerful. He sat with the director under his awning and they began a rehearsal of the same scene. People got off the train, they were frisked and went farther, asking each other, “Was that really necessary?”
It should be said that, when Putin arrived on the set, ironclad discipline took over. Some actors frisked others and it was their best performance. I thought that that would be the whole point of their meeting under the awning, but I was wrong. For Mikhalkov, the meeting was just starting. He called one of his colleagues over, then another, then another. I saw them show the prime minister an album with drawings of landscapes and buildings.
“You have to start small,” I overheard. “One pavilion, then another. It takes land…”
They were talking about a new film studio, which would be built on credit. The participants in that undertaking, it seems, hoped to receive the credit at a very favorable rate, and they were sharing that idea with the prime minister.
“The new Mikhalkovs have to be discovered,” I heard from under the awning. “That’s how Hollywood started.”
The next drawing in the album was called Hotel Kingstown.
Andrey Kolesnikov
All the Article in Russian as of May 14, 2008
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