I spent a week in Germany during the filming of The Last Station, which is based on my 1990 novel of the same title. It’s about the final year in the life of Leo Tolstoy — a time of turmoil, when the Russian author was torn between Sofya, his wife of 48 years, and his chief disciple, Vladimir Chertkov, who represented his spiritual and ascetic side. Tolstoy had, by 1910, become something of a prophet, surrounded by acolytes, many of whom lived in a nearby commune and devoted themselves to Tolstoyan ideals, which included chastity and poverty — not ideals the master himself embodied with any constancy, as he well understood.
In a fit of anger with his wife and frustration with himself and his life of “luxury,” as he saw it, he abandoned Sofya and their estate, taking to the road with Chertkov and his personal doctor. Not far away, at a railway station called Astapovo, he fell ill and died, with Chertkov and his favorite daughter, Sasha, at his side. Sofya was there, too, having hired a first-class train to chase her husband down, but she was never allowed into the room where he lay dying.
Let’s just say that, for me, it has been a long journey to this particular station.
The story of the film began 18 years ago, when I got a call out of the blue from Anthony Quinn, of Zorba fame. He had just read my novel and wanted to play Tolstoy, and he asked me to write a script with him based on the book. I adored Quinn as an actor, and he was charming when we met to discuss the project. I found him a plausible version of Tolstoy, as charismatic as the various parts he had played in countless films.
We sat across a table (off and on) for well over a year, in his apartment on East End Avenue in New York and my home in Vermont, working on the script, acting out the parts. (I once complained he always played Tolstoy, while I was always Sofya.) It proved difficult to translate a novel told from six first-person points of view into the linear mode of a film, and we struggled with dozens of versions. Tony kept saying: “Remember, these are moving pictures. Make them move!”
We departed wildly from the book, and I found that disconcerting. I thought I had nailed it in the novel, so it was upsetting to invent new scenes from whole cloth, often diverging from the historical facts — as when we created a secondary plot based on a bastard son of Tolstoy (who did exist, but about whom very little is known). Being an actor, Tony also wanted more of Tolstoy in the script than Sofya — rather the reverse of my version of the story, where she is a featured narrator. The way I conceived of it, Tolstoy would remain the quiet center around whom the other characters dance, in cubist fashion. Nevertheless, we finished the script after an improbably long time and did a little Zorba-like dance around Tony’s apartment.
Financing problems (always the bane of filmmakers) mounted, and ultimately Tony’s death in 2001 brought the project to a sad halt. He had become a close friend by then, and I couldn’t imagine the film without him. For several years, the project languished, pushed to a back burner in my mind. Intermittently, I met with a producer from Hollywood, Bonnie Arnold (Dances With Wolves), who believed strongly in the story. She had known Tony toward the end of his life and had already worked with us on the production. She vowed to make this thing happen. Many years later, it has.
A breakthrough came with the director and screenwriter Michael Hoffman, a former Rhodes scholar who likes intellectually rich material (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Emperor’s Club, and Restoration). He, too, had read my novel when it first appeared, and he now embarked on his own version of the screenplay, working closely with me and the book. It was exhilarating, and I learned a good deal about the process of adaptation from him. I remember suggesting an opening that seemed quite brilliant to me: A number of students in Moscow would be debating Tolstoy’s death in a university room, giving a sense of Tolstoy’s relevance in Russia at the time. Michael said, “It’s important at the beginning to let the audience know exactly what kind of film they are in for. You don’t want to build false expectation or confuse them.” My idea had done both.
Financing, again, was the issue, but Michael had good contacts among European film companies. He took the project to Zephyr Films, in London, which teamed up with the German production company Egoli-Tossell. The cash materialized, summoned from the air by Chris Curling and Jens Meurer (who joined hands with Arnold as producers), and the project was shot last spring, in Saxon-Anhalt, in what was once East Germany.
Saxon-Anhalt is a serenely rural place, with birch forests, open fields, and small villages: surprisingly like the Tula region of Russia, where Tolstoy lived. A location was found that resembled the Tolstoy estate, with its rustic manor house surrounded by rolling fields and woodland. The director and his colleagues also found a nearby railway station much like the one where Tolstoy died. It was dressed up with Russian lettering and furniture and populated with travelers in Russian clothes from the period. Authentic steam trains were brought in and adorned with Russian imperial images. (On the set, I talked at some length with the production designer — Patrizia von Brandenstein, who had won an Academy Award for designing Amadeus — and was deeply impressed by the level of attention to detail. Every object was not just period perfect but also chosen for its particular effect.)
When I arrived in Berlin, I went immediately to the studio to watch the rushes — that is, to see what had been accomplished in a month of shooting. I saw only some select scenes, of course. About three minutes of the actual film was shot in a 10-hour day of work on the set; the process involved endless takes and retakes, with looking at the same scene from many angles, close up and reverse, with one or more actors in the shot. As anybody would be, I was eager to see the “look” of the film: the colors, the actors bringing the novel to life, the overall tone. I was pleased by what I saw, to put it mildly. It was extremely moving to see the embodiment of what I had for so long envisaged in the very private theater of my mind. It’s not that everything was as I had imagined it; rather, a plausible version of what I’d imagined appeared before me. I could believe this version.
Christopher Plummer, now 79, plays Tolstoy at 82. He doesn’t need much make-up to look old, and he’s perfect for the part. Helen Mirren plays Sofya Tolstoy. She, herself, comes from an upper-class family of White Russians who immigrated to England, and so the part means a great deal to her. James McAvoy is Tolstoy’s young secretary, Valentin Bulgakov, who arrives on the scene at the outset of my book and the film. In a sense, he represents the audience, and we learn about the situation in the Tolstoy household from his viewpoint. Watching the rushes, I was interested to see how McAvoy used his face: It was always reacting with a kinetic energy that made every scene that includes him quiver with intensity. Paul Giamatti plays Vladimir Chertkov, Tolstoy’s chief disciple, and he brought his trademark energy (and comic sense) to the role, which in lesser hands could have been monochromatic, as in real life Chertkov was a certifiable prig. In fact, Giamatti’s Chertkov is, I suspect, more nuanced than mine, and I prefer his version.
I left Berlin for the film set with a sense of nervous anticipation. It’s one thing to look at rushes, another to be on the set itself, seeing a long-imagined vision translated into reality. The days I spent on the set were focused on the dying Tolstoy at the actual station. (The timing of that was accidental: I went when I could manage to get away from my classes.) When I first arrived, late at night, they were shooting a scene with Mirren gazing from her first-class carriage, looking at the darkened station where her husband lay dying with others by his side. The beastly Chertkov had refused to allow Sofya to see Tolstoy: He thought it would upset Tolstoy, but he probably had private, less noble motives as well. Certainly the writer believed he was dying alone, with just Sasha and two close friends at his side. But word of his whereabouts and condition had leaked out, and a circus tent full of journalists from around the world had gathered. Tolstoy’s doctor gave hourly briefings on the great man’s decline, reporting on his pulse, his temperature, and the condition of his bowels.
I watched from behind the camera as Sofya’s face was framed in one of those old-fashioned square windows of a late-19th-century train. She looked so sad, even despairing. Between takes, the director led me into the carriage to greet Mirren. It was a little freaky, as if I were meeting Sofya herself. But the actress was friendly and straightforward, and I had a lengthy, affable conversation with her (all of this, somewhat disconcertingly, recorded on camera by Tolstoy’s great-grandson, Maxim Tolstoy, who is making a documentary about the making of the film. “Just pretend I am not here,” he said to me).
In the course of a week on the set, I got to know the actors reasonably well, often over meals or between takes. I worked with the director on his script, throwing in my two cents — although it was humbling to realize what a little part I now had in the production. I sat up late at night with various members of the cast, chatting about their roles. Before the shooting itself began each day, I talked with journalists who had been sent from London and elsewhere to cover the film, and I did further video interviews, as with the production company itself, which plans to release a video press kit. In a peculiar way, I felt back in my usual métier: the classroom.
When the shooting began, I usually sat with the director, looking hard at the monitors, trying not to make a sound. (“Remember that these microphones are especially sensitive,” Michael cautioned me, after I accidentally sneezed during one take, rendering it useless.)
One character from the novel I was especially eager to meet was a young woman (a figment of my imagination) called Masha. I had modeled her on my wife, and she is described in my book as tall and thin, a feisty blonde girl of 20 or so. Valentin, Tolstoy’s secretary, falls in love with her, and they eventually consummate their affair — very much a forbidden act in the world of the rather puritanical Tolstoyans. (Leo Tolstoy himself was perhaps the least Tolstoyan of all in that regard, having had quite a number of sexual escapades over many years.)
Masha is played by a beautiful young Irish woman named Kerry Condon. I found her one morning as she sat alone on the terrace of my hotel in Wittenberg. I recognized her at once as a version of my own wife, 30 years earlier. It was somewhat unsettling, especially in this instance, to see a figure from my novel so completely and weirdly as I had imagined her. Somewhat brazenly I sat down at her table, and said, “You’re Masha.” In the helter-skelter way films are shot, out of sequence, she had yet to begin her work. All scenes involving Masha would occur in the next three weeks.
At the end of my visit, I left the set with real sadness. I had developed a fondness for these actors, who had obviously leaned with considerable force into these imagined characters. I wished I could have stayed right to the end of filming and heard those magical words: “It’s a wrap.” But I had commitments back home, and it’s not, after all, my film. It’s theirs.
That’s the hard part. A writer envisions a story: the setting, the characters and plot, the dynamics that unfold among the various characters. A novel is all about the language — a purely linguistic medium. But film is another thing, and it’s not especially my thing. A movie runs for roughly two hours; a novel runs in the head, on the page, in a timeless zone. Fiction is rarely linear; my novel certainly isn’t. Yet a film is by definition tied to frames that flicker in time, from beginning to end. The process of adaptation involves endless (and ruthless) selection. You take out everything you can, trying to film just those pieces of the story that seem essential, that cannot be removed without doing severe damage to the story itself.
And, of course, there are those moving pictures. I learned that firsthand, spending a whole day with Michael and a secondary crew just filming trains in motion. We hovered all morning on a bridge, shooting the vintage locomotive as it approached through a forest, blowing steam, roaring and chuffing. The scene was shot from a crane above the bridge, from below, at the level of the tracks. That took at least three hours. We then rode alongside the train in an open car designed for tracking shots. At the end of the day, a camera was mounted on a diesel engine to acquire a shot of the train coming right at the camera, full blast. Each shot was done over and over, so that Michael and the film’s editor (who would sit all summer and into the winter in a studio in London) have many choices before, at the end of this month, they will say, “It’s a lock.”
Jay Parini is a novelist, poet, and professor of English at Middlebury College. His latest book, Why Poetry Matters, was published last year by Yale University Press.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 55, Issue 24, Page B17