Director's opinion of the film
Yuri Grymov: "This is going to be a modern film. By the word "modern" I mean that it is honest and that we see in it the present day.

I would define it's genre as drama with elements of action movie. In comparison with my previous films in The Strangers there will be much more action however for me the most thrilling special effect is human emotions and mutual relations. In each of my films I speak about what worries me. And if in my previous work The Kukotsky's Сasus I spoke about gene pool and crossing the borders of permissibility in The Strangers I wished to recreate the modern society. Before us appear people of different nationalities who live, love and carry war according to their own rules, and they also make terrible mistakes being confident of their infallibility. We become witnesses to the influence of opposite cultures upon each other. And we already know what happens when one culture changes another.

We see typical representatives of relatively young American nation that puts itself above all the rest nations of the world. They forcibly try to instill in people their morals, their rules of behavior. And the most frightening is the fact that they sincerely believe they are doing the good thing. This is how one of the mightiest powers of the world behaves - the United States of America.

We have to treat traditions and customs of other nations carefully and respect them. I wanted very much to make this film maximally realistic and maximally honest. When you'll see on the screen a desolate Arabian village you should know that these are not plain plywood facades but real houses that can be used for living and they have been built over a year by the film crew. When action will be unfolding in the desert you should remember that we shot those scenes not in some cool film studio setting where the sand had been scattered in front of a big poster of the blue skies but in the real desert where temperatures exceeded 40 degrees Celsius. Dirt, soot, sweat on the actors' faces are all real. And there was no acting as such since the performers of roles were living and not acting.

By the way it fell not only to actors' share but to the whole film crew including me. But perhaps without those sleepless nights, without seven-day work week, without sun-burnt skin we wouldn't have managed to deliver that exertion which we all experienced. That shooting was a lesson to us. In the process we learnt and understood a lot about ourselves, about Americans, about Arabs … I hope you, viewers, will learn the same."