The film is based very loosely on the novel Roadside Picnic by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky.
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Tarkovsky had been assigned a large budget for Stalker, in order to match the success with his previous science fiction movie, Solaris. The idea was that the Soviet Union should show that what Hollywood could do, the russians could also do. The Strugatsky brothers had written an extensive script with several special effects based on their novel Roadside Picnic.
Tarkovsky responded by immediately removing all the sideline stories, and all special effects from the script. He thus restructured the whole story to be about one single philosophical subject from the original story: if you could have your innermost wish fulfilled, would you actually want to? The story was also rewritten into a very intense drama involving only three people.
The central part of the film was filmed in a few days at a closed and deserted water power plant at the river Piliteh in Tallinn. When the team got back to Moscow, they found that all the film had been improperly developed, probably because of problems at the laboratory. The photographer, Georgi Rerberg left the first screening session and never came back. Thus they had to go back and film the whole thing once again, now with Aleksandr Knyazhinsky as principal photographer. The weather was considerably colder by then, and the pain and frustration displayed by the actors is sometimes not a case of acting. According to sound engineer Vladimir Ivanovich Sharun these conditions might have even contributed to the early deaths of many of the people involved in the production.
About the Production
The Crew
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