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Interview with Andrei Borisov
By Yevgeny Zykov,
Ves' PROkat+ Magazine
(Issue No 9, October-November, 2005).
This movie is very important for me: it came into my life and is clearly playing some special role. It is like some sign of destiny. I will tell you why: during the shooting in Verkhoyanye the following event happened with me:
We were shooting in mountains. It was relatively warm: just about 30 degrees below zero. Our crew was climbing the highest peak of the mighty Verkhoyansk Ridge. At some places the snow was as hard as ice, though at some places crewmembers fell through the snow up to their chests.
The 1,300 metre high mountain seemed to be 20 km high. I could barely move my feet of exhaustion. I lay down resting because the cameraman and the crew were still far below climbing.
Three of us managed to reach the peak: it was me, our cameraman Yura Berzhnev and director Nikita Arzhakov. It was very warm up there. I felt tired and stayed, whereas Yura and Nikita went to survey the mountains. I lay down on a warm stone and I was overcome by sleep for almost an hour. Maybe it was due to oxygen deficiency.
I disappeared somewhere, got lost, flew away. I don't know whether it was a dream… It seemed somnambulistic… probably, heavenly powers coded the scenes of the future movie in my mind. “And the indifferent nature of eternal beauty” is looking at me. A lonely raven gliding above me, its voice seems to me as a sound of horse's neighing or Yakut woman singing.
A noise woke me up: indeed, a raven soaring above constantly croaking, and when that croaking became similar to Yakut national singing, I came to my senses.
The first thing that came into my sight shocked me: the mountains and the sky were trembling and vibrating like in a heat haze. Voices drove me out of this state. I sat and looked down – Efim Stepanov was climbing up to me.
Since then the “upper people”, that “took me away” then, begin to reveal the information they sent me. From my fainted dreams I remembered one word, long and stretched, which reminds of the Yakut word “eregei”. It means “triumph”.
The strangest thing is that two nights ago I heard that word again. It seems to me that it was the same dream I saw back then in Verkhoyanye, and now my memory is restoring it: long grey hair stretched apart of an old woman, and her face. The grey hair symbolises mountains.
By The Will Of Genghis Khan is my first movie. I am already more than fifty years old. I remember the first application in my life. It was an application to Young Communist League, but that was from dictation in my school. But the first personal application was to All-Union State Institute of Cinematography: “I request to admit me to the Faculty of Direction of All-Union State Institute of Culture…”
I was replied that first I need to become an actor.
Maybe, the upper gods, Tengri, the Eternal Blue Sky had turned off my first youthful dream from my mind. I became a theatre actor and director. But “movie shots – memories” flash by in my eyes. All those Soviet films that I watched in the village where I was born and grew up – “Peter the First” by Petrov, “Battleship Potemkin” by Eisenstein, “Chapayev” by the Vasiliev brothers, “Stalker” by Tarkovskiy.
Later it seemed like I myself became Stalker. During the most unfavourable moments in my life, when I was ill, I brought politicians and ordinary people up to Chochur-Myraan hill and for some reason I was always sure that on this hill people receive concealed information of the eternal blue sky.
The many performances that I staged for all the 25 years in the Sakha Theatre and other theatres dealt with the issues of personality, power, nation, state.
I was a people's delegate of the USSR , together with all the country I was “tearing down” “the great empire” – the Soviet Union . On one hand, each time opening the Kremlin doors I felt the greatness of our country, but on the other hand I saw acts and deeds of people removing the energy of beliefs, the basis of which were mainly Soviet films, which I grew and developed upon.
Then there were documentaries and movies about last emperors, about the death of the empire, about the collapse of the state, television programs aimed at washing away and eroding that energy of beliefs, those ideas and ideals that were the life and the soul of society.
At the same time I watched American movies, in which everyone, be it just an ordinary heroes or superheros, always win proving the firmness of the empire called the United States .
We started being ashamed of our flag and our history. Naturally, a question appeared in my mind: where is that basis – the spiritual and moral basis, which gives the eternal strength of mind? Where is it?
In the meantime I was working with the National writer of Yakutia Nikolai Luginov. He had been writing the novel called By The Will Of Genghis Khan for 13 years. To tell the truth, in the beginning I thought it was a futile idea, which did not have anything to do with reality, the reality of our living history. During sleepless nights I used to look at his windows (we are neighbours). His window lit up at 4 o'clock in the morning when he got down to writing.
But let's get back to Verkhoyansk Mountains . There the ordinary horse breeders and herders that participated in the Mountain Assault scene amazed me: despite the cold, tiredness, they strived hard to reach the top, implicitly fulfilling our needs. They were driven not by the interest of participating in a movie. In the depths of their slanting eyes I saw some sparkling strength. They moved on and found a basis for themselves, a new energy.
In their eyes I saw that energy of beliefs that pulsated from the depth of centuries. I thought: here they are, the Mongols, and our movie should touch the very depths, conscious and unconscious impulses still preserved from those centuries and millenniums.
Our movie is about the birth of the empire. Not about the death, but just about the birth.
Steppe is like a tambourine. When the sun heats it up to + 40C , it stretches and drones. When it rains – the tambourine goes limp. When we were filming in Tuva I understood that I will never change this steppe at any price for Paris , warm waves of the Black Sea and other delights of this life. The great steppe drones in me like a tambourine. My soul holds the passions of people with “slanting and greedy eyes” that crossed endless expanses, immense spaces.
This movie inseparably bonds our history, nature and geography of wandering. It is a peoples' movie.
The life, the love, and the death of a man – everything is predestined. My dream I had in Verkhoyanye proves that we are there in shooting not for the sake of salary, fame, not even for the sake of arts. We just cannot sit around not making movies. It is our mission. Inner responsibility. Duty. As if we are told from above: “Do it!” And we are doing it.
o wonder that our project has inspired a lot of people. From here we derive our strength and inspiration, the energy of mountains, steppes, skies and water. From here there is a hot, fervent desire to overturn the world's stereotypes on peoples of Asia and submerge into the holographic space of history and geography.
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