Igenlode Wordsmith’s Reviews > Когда я был Атосом > Status Update

It turns out the allusion to Strizhonova was nothing to do with Musketeer hairstyles, but simply the fact that Oleg Strizhonov played Athos in Smekhov's previous film of "20 Years After".
It seems odd that in his introduction of Igor Starygin he never mentions that it was not only not the first time they had worked together, but not the first time they had acted together *in Dumas* - Starygin was Raoul to his Aramis!

The pure hell of trying to shoot the sequels as 'commercial' films in the 1990s compared to the state-funded production (however low-budget) they had been used to :-(
Sponsors, racketeering, endorsements, co-production, constant negotiation with the 'generous and hand-shaking' manufacturers from Budapest or Berlin... the costumes made in Moscow were all stolen in Tallin, and had to be sewn again in the hotel.

Unexpected appearance of Vysotsky as a family friend!

He describes the film as a cross between a musical and a Western, where instead of singing cowboys there were singing musketeers ;-)

(The phrase "s vesternom" - "with a Western" - had me puzzled for some time as I had assumed it was a piece of Russian vocabulary! )

They shot five hours of reunion dinner-party footage, but the vast majority of it was unusable because everybody was talking at once with their mouths full, teasing one another like schoolboys, or reminiscing about in-jokes...
I did think when I watched the programme that I'd never seen so much enthusiastic eating going on in the background of a documentary before - apparently in the foreground as well!

I probably shouldn't read any of this camel stuff (and discussions of how the director wanted to change Dumas' ending) as it is spoilers for the final film that I haven't seen yet and want to watch...

Ah, he does explicitly talk about the filming of "20 Years After" - that's what you get for reading chapters out of order!

The horses hired at Tallinn were so unmanageable that he suspected them of being part of a general sullen conspiracy against the incoming film unit, who had been "numbered among the enemies of the Estonian nation" - the latter may well have been true :-(

The nornally bumptious Mikhail Boyarsky was overcome by a sudden inferiority complex in the presence of his elder brother, who had arrived on tour with his theatre company and whom he felt to be far more Smekhov's intellectual and cultural equal than his own plebian self :(

Apparently the make-up department were under orders to 'fix' his unsuitable nose before he could be allowed to audition for his first attenpt at a screen role; he refused and went off to a provincial theatre assignment instead. (He notes that he wouldn't have succeeded in getting the role agaibst the eventual candidate anyway ...)
One suspects they may have thought it 'too Jewish' :(