Inspiration The idea of a film about Stalin occurred during an
American Broadcasting Company (ABC) broadcast of the TV film
Disaster at Silo 7 produced by Mark Carliner, which was seen by a member of an official Russian delegation during their stay in the United States. Enthusiastic about the anti-nuclear topic, she invited Carliner to Russia for several seminars and demonstrations. When Carliner visited the country, the film was broadcast on Russian television and well received. This later enabled Carliner to obtain filming permits for original locations. Carliner had studied Russian history at
Princeton University, and credits his Russian heritage for his motivation to film the movie. He presented the project to ABC and was rejected on the grounds that it was "too expensive and too risky". Only the chairman of the cable channel
Home Box Office (HBO)
Michael J. Fuchs, who had considered making a film about Stalin, agreed to take on the project. It took two more years of research with the assistance of Soviet officials specialising in Stalin's era to access to archives and historical recordings, to write the script. Carliner emphasized that it would not only be a historical biography, but also a
gangster film. According to various sources, a production budget of between 9.5 million and 10 million US dollars was allocated for the film.
Casting and director According to Carliner,
Al Pacino was among several actors who expressed an interest in the lead, which eventually went to
Robert Duvall. Duvall had turned down the offer to play Stalin in
Andrei Konchalovsky's feature film
The Inner Circle three months earlier, which is said to have been due to different salary expectations. When Duvall was offered the lead by Carliner, he agreed to take up the role. false eyebrows and moustache, he eventually accomplished the task. They stayed at the
Oktyabrskaya Hotel, which turned out to be the main headquarters of the opposition that initiated the
August coup in Moscow the next morning. When the military took up positions around the Kremlin, they immediately fled Russia for Hungary, the filmmakers were promised all support and invited back to Moscow three days after the attempted coup was over. Carliner hoped that Jarrico would have a "unique connection to the material" and "benefit the project from his revisions". Jarrico cut 26 pages from Monash's script, which was about four hours long. He rewrote the beginning and fundamentally changed the scenes in which fears of
Sergei Kirov's assassination are expressed.
Nikolai Bukharin's role was expanded and his speech against
forced collectivization extended, in addition to a call for a return to
Leninism. He also added two scenes where Stalin discusses the usefulness of a treaty with Germany with his diplomat
Maxim Litvinov, refusing to believe that Germany would attack the Soviet Union. Monash disliked the changes, and after several meetings in September 1991, HBO opt not to request for a final review and declined payment. Having worked three days past the deadline and feeling cheated out of $13,000, Jarrico contacted the
Writers Guild of America's legal department to arbitrate the dispute. After turning down $5,000 and $7,000, he accepted the third offer of $8,000, along with additional payments into his pension and health plans. Most of Jarrico's scenes were removed from the script. Duvall surmises that to portray the dictator accurately, he had to consider the role from Stalin's point of view, in that he was nothing more than a normal person who "gets up in the morning, puts on his socks and shoes, brushes his teeth, and goes to work". As Stalin did not "see himself as evil," Duvall "couldn't see him as evil either". He did not know his "dark, deep secrets and what propelled him to power", As a result, Ormond played, according to critics, "perhaps the most tragic victim in history". Her "gentle, innocent, and loving" performance was later praised, as was Duvall's.
Maximilian Schell as Lenin The role of Lenin was not particularly extensive, as he dies after only 35 minutes into the movie. Maximilian Schell took advantage of the little time he was on screen. Before each scene, he had a tape recorder with him to listen to the recordings with Lenin's voice. He was less concerned with "imitating than with feeling him". This was not easy for Schell, since he felt a certain dislike for Lenin, "because he allowed many people to kill because he believed that power cannot be achieved without Terror could have". Schell tried to convey some contrast in body language. At the beginning of the film, for example, he concentrated on using his right hand vigorously more often.
Filming Filming began in October 1991 and was shot exclusively in the
Soviet Union at several original locations, including in Stalin's
Kuntsevo Dacha, prisons, the
Kyiv railway station and for the first time ever, the
Kremlin. During the filming in the
Russian White House, the film crew worked while
Mikhail Gorbachev engaged in government affairs one floor below. Friends of Carliner, who had filmed in Russia before, warned him about difficult and sometimes unusual challenges. Several minor problems occurred during the estimated seven-week shooting period. Extras went on strike to demand higher pay. Engine drivers were already drunk by 8 a.m., so they couldn't keep their signals. Even simple scenes, like chasing the rabbit in Siberia, had to be interrupted when it was pointed out that they were shooting in a national park where it was forbidden. The head of Lenin's mausoleum at the time, Alexander Schefov, was a conservative hardliner who criticized the production and delayed it. The
KGB also showed little cooperation; for example, the film crew, consisting of 25 members and their equipment, had to wait more than seven hours before clearing security to enter the Kremlin. The Kremlin's power supply could not be used for lighting because the KGB felt that this would disrupt the technology of their own equipment, and it took four to five hours to figure out how not to overload the Kremlin's power supply. There was a power outage at Stalin's dacha just after the final death scene was filmed. Sometimes, a whole day of shooting was lost because extras weren't there. Stalin's victory speech in the Kremlin hall originally involved a meal. The shooting schedule was set at eight in the morning, but the extras were missing because they were still ten kilometers away at the make-up area. After more than eight hours, shuttle buses brought the 500 extras in. But as they were hungry, the extras ignored the director's instructions and ate the whole buffet before the shooting started. Ormond, who was mistakened for a prostitute at the hotel, said they were "starting to think that this couldn't be coincidences and was a deliberate attempt" to sabotage the film. Duvall, who lived the whole time in
Savoy Hotel, had to spend more than four hours a day being "transformed" into Stalin by two make-up specialists. However, the procedure was reduced to around 75 minutes during the course of filming. Overall, the film was shot in nine six-day weeks. On December 21, 1991, four hours after the
Soviet Union had dissolved with the signing of the
Alma-Ata Protocol, the final scene was shot at Stalin's dacha. To test the effect of their masks, Schell and Duvall went out among the people in their respective personas as Lenin and Stalin. Schell was often ignored while Duvall experienced rejection and contempt. ==Reception==