Video: Behind the scenes of the film "Sisters": What happened on the set of the only directorial work of Sergei Bodrov Jr
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
18 years ago, on September 20, 2002, the life of 30-year-old actor and director Sergei Bodrov Jr. ended. He was working on his film The Messenger in the mountains of North Ossetia, when the Kolka glacier descended in the Karmadon Gorge, killing more than 100 people. A year before that, Bodrov made his directorial debut in the film "Sisters", which remained his only directorial work. How "brother" Danila Bagrov became Oksana Akinshina's godfather in the cinema and why the youngest actress disappeared from the screens - further in the review.
Sergei Bodrov Jr. never considered himself an actor. By his first education, he was an art historian, after filming in "Brother" he defended his Ph. D. thesis on "Architecture in Venetian Renaissance Painting". But the director's activity fascinated him much more than the acting. The idea of the film "Sisters" was suggested to him by his father, director Sergei Bodrov. Once he told him a story about two Kazakh girls, which inspired Bodrov Jr. to create a script about three days in the life of two sisters, eight and thirteen years old, born from different fathers. The script was written in just 2 weeks, and the debutant director named his father as a co-writer.
"", - Bodrov Jr. said later. This film was his first brainchild, his first attempt at writing and directing, and he took the process seriously. The biggest challenge was that the main roles were to be played by children. The director said about this: "".
The search for the two main characters continued for a long time. Lenfilm had a huge queue of applicants, Sergei Bodrov looked through 300 applicants per day. In order to choose not only a suitable type, but also a character corresponding to the image, he often asked unexpected questions for children, for example: ""
Many girls, putting on the most elegant dresses, tried very hard to please the director or immediately asked for an autograph - after "Brother" and "Brother-2" Sergei Bodrov became one of the most popular young actors. Against their background, Oksana Akinshina and Ekaterina Gorina were very different - they came to audition without enthusiasm: the first appeared there at the request of the director of the modeling agency in which she then worked, and the second at the insistence of her family, who lived next to Lenfilm. Gorina came in what she was wearing - an old sweater, in which she had just returned from the dacha, and behaved very naturally. Her fantasy was very rich, and the girl said that she was 11 years old, not 8, introduced herself by a different name - Rita, and said that she lived in a large country house and had 15 dogs. As a result, those girls who really wanted to be liked did not fit, and Oksana and Katya got the main roles, although in the script their heroines were not very similar to them.
Later Oksana Akinshina recalled filming in "Sisters": "".
After the release of the film "Sisters", many compared it to "Brother" and "Brother-2" - it became a reflection of the same era in the 1990s, besides, Bodrov Jr. played here in one of the episodes as well. Bodrov himself did not deny that his directorial work really had something in common with his famous acting works: "". The common thing was that on the advice of his friend, the director of "Brother" Alexei Balabanov, Bodrov chose rock music as a soundtrack - songs of the legendary Viktor Tsoi and the group "Agatha Christie".
At first, Bodrov himself did not plan to act in his film, but since the actor for this episodic role was never found, the director himself played a guy who comes to shoot at the shooting range and talks to the heroine Akinshina. His appearance in the frame was perceived by many as “hello to Balabanov” - when he appeared, the song “Nobody writes to the Colonel” from “Brother-2” sounded, as if Danila Bagrov himself had appeared on the screens again.
And for 13-year-old Oksana Akinshina, and for 8-year-old Katya Gorina, these roles were their debut in the cinema. But if the first, with the light hand of Sergei Bodrov, subsequently became one of the most popular and successful Russian actresses, the second did not want to associate her life with cinema in the future. She starred in three more films, graduated from high school with an in-depth study of the German language, then received a philological education. Ekaterina Gorina is convinced that she has no acting talent, so she does not want to waste time on shooting, even with proposals from directors. The girl writes stories and novels and sees herself in the future as a writer.
The directorial debut of Sergei Bodrov Jr. was very successful. In 2001, Sisters was ranked 3rd among the 50 best-selling films. In the same year, at Kinotavr, the film received the Grand Prix For Best Debut, and Oksana Akinshina and Ekaterina Gorina - the prize For Best Acting Duet.
Unfortunately, the second directorial work of Sergei Bodrov Jr. was never destined to appear on the screens: Tragedy in the Karmadon Gorge.
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