![]() ![]() It sort of reminded me of the creatures in James Cameron's The Abyss - not in the design, but in the way that it breaks with the purely rapacious alien that just eats you we'd got used to after Alien. Here in Russia we have a lot of movies about World War II, and the sixties and seventies, but we thought it would be bold and brash to make an authentic, conventional, time period movie and bring a science fiction element there - which is the alien.ĪC: A great science fiction movie needs a great alien, and yours is very unique. We quickly put that idea away, and decided that the USSR would be a great environment for our story, because that's the texture, that's the setting that Russian audiences are familiar with. Was that always the plan, or was it ever more contemporary?ĮA: At one point we were thinking of doing a contemporary story, but it was always tightly connected with this space program in the Soviet period. So we took this path to tell the audience this alternative Soviet history of exploring space, because I could see that people like this existed and we didn't know about them.ĪC: So many of the themes are so strong because this is set during the Soviet era. That was one of the questions we asked ourselves, when we started to develop the script: Everybody knows Gagarin, everybody knows the famous cosmonauts, but nobody knows Veshnyakov. The government was covering up all the details and keeping them secret. It wasn't like Apollo, where you were told everything and so ringside when anything went wrong.ĮA: That's true. But what really lies inside him? What kind of person is he? We decided to go on this journey with him of how this person, this cosmonaut, becomes a real hero.ĪC: Part of the history of the Russian space program was that they'd only announce there had been a flight once it had landed, and the cosmonauts were back home. The government was creating these heroes, and at one point we just asked ourselves the question - what is it really like to be a real hero? What would it take? And we thought it would be a really entertaining journey to go through the character's journey, to go from the point where he's a hero in a global venue because the TV news tells us he's a hero. ![]() īroken hero: Pyotr Fyodorov as Cosmonaut Konstantin Veshnyakov, who comes back to Earth with more than a bump in Sputnik (Image Courtesy of IFC Midnight)Īustin Chronicle: So much of the story is about the concept of the hero, and what it takes to preserve the myth of the hero.Įgor Abramenko: The definition of the hero was very important for the Soviet mindstate, but it was a myth. A doctor, Tatyana Klimova (Oksana Akinshina) is dispatched to discover what ails him, only to find that he may have been the only human to arrive, but that doesn't mean he was the only living creature to come back. Yet rather than being returned to Moscow as a hero and survivor of a tragic event, he's secreted away in a research facility by the powers that be. In his debut feature, which hurtles into American cinemas today, Pyotr Fyodorov plays Konstantin Veshnyakov, the sole survivor of a two-man space mission in the early 1980s. It's a beautiful genre that allows you to tell amazing stories, tell universal stories, but with terrific tools.Įven though Russia has an incredible legacy of science fiction authors and filmmakers, Abramenko was most influenced by the American cinematic masters of the genre ("Steven Spielberg, John Carpenter, James Cameron"), and now the director channeled their impact into his period sci-fi horror, Sputnik. This world of dinosaurs came to live, and it just grabbed me. May dad got home from a business trip to Moscow, and he brought home a VHS tape - it was Jurassic Park." He said, "It was 1996, and I was a small kid, living in the south of Russia. Oksana Akinshina as Tatyana Klimova and director Egor Abramenko on the set of Russian sci-fi horror Sputnik (Image Courtesy of IFC Midnight)Įgor Abramenko can remember exactly when he fell in love with science fiction.
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