The Profession Is An Actor
While being young I liked very much to attend film festivals. The amount of movies in cinema theaters was very limited those days in the Soviet Union. One could watch only those movies that did not threat communism ideas to government's mind. Those film festivals were like a sip of fresh air. Frankly speaking, not all movies were good enough but you could broaden your knowledge of cinematography. I remember one movie about the war between the Americans and the Vietnamese. It was shot by the Vietnamese. At first I could not understand why did the Vietnamese fight with each other. Only a bit later I realized that the American solders were performed also by the Vietnamese actors.

Of course, one could have a laugh at an old Vietnamese movie, but I personally have these feeling of nostalgia every time I see "Russian villain terrorist" in yet another American action film. Quite often that "Russian" wears fur "ushanka" hat, drinks vodka, uses obscene words with American accent and has such a name and a last name that were hardly taken from the Russian language. It was not for any discussion that I'd like to have the American actors to play the roles of the American doctors, not English, not Scottish, not Australian, nor Russian actors speaking English by any chance. We went even further. When the script was translated we asked our foreign actors to adapt their words so they sounded like spoken American English - not to be like Hollywood script writers who seemed to make up some kind of their own Russia, not known to us yet.

I have to confess I've never worked with American actors before. I've heard a lot about them as from my colleagues as well as from mass media, but I was eager to learn by myself what kind of people they were. As I have mentioned already, the actors from the United States were first all the professionals. A good worker if you prefer, but in good sense of this word. That was my first impression. The same impression I had when I finished this project.

Understand me right - here in Russia there is a lot of the actors that I like, but in their case the defining word is talented, not professional. Only thanks to many years of experience such guru as Armen Dzigarkhanjan, Ljudmila Maksakova and Alexey Petrenko acquire the professionalism, which a starting American actor already has. This is not a criticism of our stars. This is just a statement that says that there is no good school for actors. If those five Americans that play in my movie Strangers know how to behave at the site, how to communicate and how to build relations with the director, how to move, how to work with a partner and how to play the role - why it is not taught in Russia? It is strange but it consider here to be a special chic if a actor add something from himself to the words of his character. And everybody admires him - here is a real creative person who is absorbed by the role. No. It is absolutely wrong. I believe, the script writer was thinking when he wrote the line. And then probably the director was thinking when he made some remarks and gave the text to the actors. Why then change and misinterpret the sense? The task of an actor is to assist the director in shooting the movie not to interfere. I think that my appreciation of the Americans has changes due to a certain contrast. You can judge by yourselves - before the shooting, when our camera was arrested by the custom, the Americans were the first (and the least) who came up to me and offer their help. They didn't change words in their texts, or misinterpret the sense of sentences; they hold the thought from the beginning to the end of the scene, remembered about the director's will. How could I not to respect them?

It is interesting, there are two opposite words in actors slang: "overact" and "underplay". The first one is to play the role over and the second - not to play the role in full volume if it is possible to say. At the site these two words were the most popular ones, but we used them not to criticize but to correct the performance of the Americans. Everything is simple - if you feel you need more courage or attitude from the actor you just say before the next take: "Overact, please". He answers: "Okay, fine, very well," That means: "Don't worry, I'll do it now". And he really does. We used to find the golden mean that way.

As for the common language, вопреки прогнозам, after several weeks of our work the Americans didn't start speak Russian. But they began to understand Russian. I am absolutely serious: after one months of shooting someone of the cameraman group could ask an American actor not move down his head, otherwise he was out of the light, and this actor nodded to him meaning that he had understand that and he did what he was asked to. Some requests were a bit shocking for the Americans though. One time the actor who played the lead role went out of the dressing room and came up to me chewing something. He couldn't understand why he was asked to put a thread into his mouth. We explained to him that there was a sign according to which if the button was cut off from the dress you were wearing at that time you had to put a thread in your mouth otherwise you would lose you memory. There is no wonder then, that one day the same actor asked me what there was in a small plastic bottle I had always with me during the shooting and drank from. "It's mineral water" - answered I simply. "A-ah" - he said slightly disappointed -"I thought it was vodka".

And one more thing, that I've understood while working with the Americans. I found it to be funny and frightful at the same time. They really consider themselves to be heroes saving the world. And this attitude toward themselves they have got somewhere on unconscious level of their minds. I don't know when and why that thought comes to their minds is it happen when they see the American movies or read the American literature or somehow else… Let the scientists find the answer for this question. But the fact is - somewhere deep inside every American is a superman, a batman, a spiderman and a catwoman. In other words - a super hero. This fact hasn't bother, me till one day the scene we were shooting was failed because of that self attitude. I needed the actor to perform an American doctor, who had been hit and who was crawling on the ground. According to the script this character should be humiliated. He must be hurt and offended. But the actor was crawling like wounded Rambo saving the world instead. We had shot the scene, finally. Thanks to professionalism.