Athos in the water
23 August 2025 03:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeI have been reading Venjamin Smekhov's memoir When I was Athos (and have just skipped a section in Chapter 9, where he talks about location filming in the desert -- the Soviet Union was of course conveniently provided with those within its southern territories, as well as 17th-century street scenes in Lvov! -- because it looks as if it contains spoilers for the third film). And apparently they *did* insist on putting an aging and respectable actor into a struggle in the water when filming the small-boat scene where Mordaunt tries to drown him. It was, ironically, Mordaunt who was doubled for those shots! (Unfortunately I'm not clear quite what Smekhov means when he talks about wearing a "комбинезон для прогулки на дно" ("a suit for excursions into the depths") underneath his period costume -- did they have him in a wetsuit, or is he just being ironic about the intended purpose of a swimming-costume, which is what comes up on a image search for that phrase?)
He says that it was October, the Black Sea was absolutely freezing (he compares it to the Arctic, probably figuratively rather than literally) and they had a worried wardrobe assistant standing by in the transport coach with towels and dry underwear. [Why only underwear...? Because the rest of what they were wearing was costume rather than their own (dry) clothing, I suppose.] When the actor playing Mordaunt arrived ("flew in" at the airport -- presumably he wasn't free to come down to Odessa on the day that the rest of the cast were filming) they wanted Smekhov to repeat his icy excursion underwater, apparently because there was something wrong with the film that had been taken, and he put his foot down and simply refused to go through it all again.
Which might, I'm afraid, explain why there are no visible shots of the two of them struggling in the water, or indeed any clear shots of Athos in the water at all; they only had one take, and it was unusable :-(
It does seem a pity to have gone through all the discomfort for nothing...
(He also adds, in the context of shooting action scenes, that in the struggling Russian cinema of the 1990s -- a point at which opening up to Western imports had basically destroyed the native film industry -- film stock was so expensive that as a rule the procedure was to run rehearsals, then attempt to capture the scene in a single take. Which, he says ruefully, was naturally apparent in the quality of the finished movie -- it may well explain why so many of the action sequences are so confused and badly-lit, and yet the static dialogue confrontations are so powerful.)
He says that it was October, the Black Sea was absolutely freezing (he compares it to the Arctic, probably figuratively rather than literally) and they had a worried wardrobe assistant standing by in the transport coach with towels and dry underwear. [Why only underwear...? Because the rest of what they were wearing was costume rather than their own (dry) clothing, I suppose.] When the actor playing Mordaunt arrived ("flew in" at the airport -- presumably he wasn't free to come down to Odessa on the day that the rest of the cast were filming) they wanted Smekhov to repeat his icy excursion underwater, apparently because there was something wrong with the film that had been taken, and he put his foot down and simply refused to go through it all again.
Which might, I'm afraid, explain why there are no visible shots of the two of them struggling in the water, or indeed any clear shots of Athos in the water at all; they only had one take, and it was unusable :-(
It does seem a pity to have gone through all the discomfort for nothing...
(He also adds, in the context of shooting action scenes, that in the struggling Russian cinema of the 1990s -- a point at which opening up to Western imports had basically destroyed the native film industry -- film stock was so expensive that as a rule the procedure was to run rehearsals, then attempt to capture the scene in a single take. Which, he says ruefully, was naturally apparent in the quality of the finished movie -- it may well explain why so many of the action sequences are so confused and badly-lit, and yet the static dialogue confrontations are so powerful.)