When Tarkovsky, the cinematographer Yusov and I had only just begun work on the film "Solaris", we managed to see a new film: Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey"

When Tarkovsky, the cinematographer Yusov and I had only just begun work on the film "Solaris", we managed to see a new film: Stanley Kubrick's "A Space Odyssey". We wanted to do something directly opposite.

Recalled by Mikhail Nikolayevich Romadin (1940–2012), production designer of the film "Solaris".

Every frame of "Odyssey" is an illustration from a popular-science magazine, that is, the same pictorial art transferred straight to the cinema, and of no great quality at that. Tarkovsky looked for connections between painting and cinema that were not direct but more remote. For "Solaris" he proposed creating an atmosphere akin to a painting by the early Italian Renaissance artist Vittore Carpaccio. The picture shows a Venetian quayside, ships, and a crowd of people in the foreground. But the most important thing is that all the figures are turned inward upon themselves: they look neither at one another nor at the landscape, and do not interact in any way. A strange "metaphysical" atmosphere of incommunicability arises. To create an equivalent of it, the film uses the device of estrangement. In the course of the action the cosmonaut takes leave of the Earth: rain falls on him, and he is not, in the director's conception, to react to it in any way. But Banionis shivered. "The shot is ruined, what a pity!" said Andrei. This is only one small example of the influence of painting on Tarkovsky's cinematic language. An image born in painting had to undergo powerful metamorphoses before it became an image of the film.

What helped us in our work on the film? First, several years of friendship, of almost daily contact in the years preceding our joint work. (Later our paths diverged.) We understood each other at half a word and had no need to waste time on lengthy explanations.

Second, we were united by a dislike of science fiction in general. Why, then, did Andrei undertake to adapt "Solaris", a science-fiction novel by Stanisław Lem?

Tarkovsky was full of ideas; he dreamed of filming Dostoevsky's "The Adolescent", and of a film about a deserter. But his visits to Goskino with these proposals met with no support whatever. So all our notions of our future films poured out in conversations in an empty Moscow flat. Tarkovsky's ideas were rejected one after another, and only science fiction was regarded as a not very serious genre, intended rather for the young.

This one, it was felt, could be entrusted even to Tarkovsky.

There was a second reason for choosing "Solaris" for adaptation: the theme of nostalgia that is present in the novel.

All our work on the film turned into a struggle with the genre, an attempt to bring the novel down to earth.

The theme of nostalgia always interested Andrei, and it runs through almost all his films. In one case it is nostalgia for home, in another for the homeland, and in "Solaris" for earthly civilisation as a whole.

In Lem's novel the heroes arrive at the planet Solaris, which is nothing other than an enormous living being, the Ocean. The Ocean itself seeks contact with the visiting cosmonauts. To this end it materialises the cosmonauts' subconscious, producing doubles, phantoms of their dreams and delirious ideas.

Tarkovsky finds a solution for nostalgia for the Earth in the Ocean's materialisation of objects of earthly culture: a long, soulless iron corridor on the station, in whose depths appears the figure of Saint Sebastian from the painting by Antonello da Messina; carpets are hung in the background, as in the painting, arrows fly, and the image collapses.

To my regret, Andrei himself later abandoned this episode "quoting" painting, since it contradicted his conception of the problem of "film language". The language of the "living picture" was unacceptable to him. But understanding that painting could not be dispensed with here, he shot the episode in the library with a painting, as if actually existing on the station, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, "The Hunters in the Snow" ("Winter"): the episode of nostalgia now exists within the framework of the director's aesthetics.