Andrei Rublev

It depicts...

the whole of Russian life during the period around the invasion of Napoleon in 1812 with a lot of different characters, but particularly one really main character, Pierre Bezahov, and also Prince Andrei Volkonsky and Natasha Rostov, who are kind of the main three characters in this film insofar as it was released in four parts, and three of the parts are named after characters, and those are the characters that they're named after.

So in 1959, King Vidor, a great Hollywood director, made this adaptation of War and Peace starring Audrey Hepburn.

And it was a huge hit in Russia, not because they thought it was accurate, but because they loved Audrey Hepburn.

I don't own any of his films on my Criterion Collection set.

Yeah, actually, I used to have Andrei Rublev, but I gave it away to someone who wanted to see it.

Do you watch it on a

computer, on TV, or okay? As God

it newly.

Not culturally new at all.

Yeah, because, you know, the – Andrei Rublev's paintings at the end, you know, an iconic painting in that way is not really – it's not directing too much.

There's a flatness to it.

Great movie.

No, so actually, because the reason I thought it was interesting, given we were talking about Stalker last time, Andrei Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev.

Oh,

yeah.

I've seen parts of lots of his stuff, but this, I believe, is the first time I've ever sat down and watched one of his movies, uh, from start to finish.

I know that, um, his second film, Andrei Rublev, about the seminal Russian painter, was another one that sort of broke containment.

But yeah, how, how familiar are you with his, with his work?

I have seen this, and I've seen, uh, Mirror.

Yeah.

Do you ever see Andrei Rublev? I don't think so.

It's black and white.

It's just, oh, wow.

He was a great director, Tarkovsky.

I'll have to look that up.

Yeah, yeah, Andrei Rublev.

He's a Russian icon painter in the Middle Ages.

Yeah, and so is the rest of his filmography, right? Tarkovsky, most famously known not only for Stalker, but also for...

Solaris, Andrei Rublev, and Mir are, I think, the ones he's most famous for.

And then he also did a couple of movies outside of the Soviet Union because after this movie, his friction with the Soviet Union kind of came to a head and he left the Soviet Union.

I can't imagine why.

But looking at Tarkovsky's quote in context of the rest of the interview, it becomes very clear that he was not making the film as an answer to Kubrick at all.

He wanted to adapt the source material, a 1961 novel by Polish science fiction author Stanislaw Lem, as a continuation of the themes Tarkovsky had explored in his first two movies, Ivan's Childhood in 1962 and Andrei Rublev in 1966.

Here he is laying out the connection.

Quote, I wanted to explain why I decided to adapt Lem's novel Solaris.

Yeah.

The great thing about art house films, and I love them, and I can talk about until the cows come home, they're my natural home, really, is when you watch an Alan Rene film like Hiroshima More or Last Year in My Own Bad, or if you look at Tarkovsky, like Andrei Rublev, which I talk a lot about in the book, they're lovely, they're brilliant, but they feel odd and strange and they don't do what you expect a story to do.

And that sentence is key because it suggests that we have an innate expectation that if a criminal commits a crime, they will be caught.

So we have an innate understanding of melody.