Trivia / Stalker (1979)

• Defictionalization: The Chernobyl disaster and its subsequent "Exclusion Zone", which occurred 7 years after this film's release, have been seen by many as life imitating art. Those employed to monitor the zone often refer to themselves as "stalkers", as do the guides who help tourists trespass into the zone.
• Production Posse: Anatoly Solonitsyn, one of Tarkovsky's frequent collaborators, appeared as the writer.
• Troubled Production: Working on the film wound up literally killing many of the people involved, including the director himself. How so?
  • Andrei Tarkovsky shot the film in Soviet Estonia with cinematographer Georgy Rerberg. Despite past collaborations, the pair's working relationship wasn't smooth. Tarkovsky continuously resisted Rerberg's pushes to rewrite the script. He also asked Rerberg to do a special effect that he had seen in an Ingmar Bergman film, going so far as to build a special studio for the task, only to erupt when Rerberg didn't nail the effect. Accounts vary as to whether Rerberg was fired, or just walked out of the production.
  • Tarkovsky's wife Larisa convinced him to cast her as the wife of the protagonist. However, she turned out to be so difficult on set that the crew derisively nicknamed her "the empress." Rerberg eventually persuaded Tarkovsky to recast the role with Alisa Freindlich, which angered Larisa and caused her to hold a grudge against Rerberg.
  • When the footage was sent back to Moscow for processing, the film laboratory — unfamiliar with the experimental Kodak 5427 film stock that Tarkovsky had flown in from America — botched the job, resulting in the footage having a darkened green tint. Tarkovsky managed to convince Mosfilm to let him completely reshoot the film from scratch, with the aim of releasing it in two parts.
  • Tarkovsky hired a new cinematographer named Leonid Kalashnikov for the reshoot, and moved to a new shooting location after the original had been damaged by an earthquake. Unsatisfied with Kalashnikov's performance, Tarkovsky replaced him with yet another cinematographer, Alexander Knyazhinsky, and completely reshot the film for a third time. This version became the final product, which reportedly bears little resemblance to what Tarkovsky shot with Rerberg.
  • The new location, an abandoned hydroelectric power station, sat near a chemical factory; the "snow" in one scene is actually airborne pollutants from said factory, which caused female crew-members to break out in allergic rashes. The cast and crew were in close contact with (and in some cases were literally knee-deep in) a miasma of toxic chemicals, and many of them — including Tarkovsky, Larisa, and actor Anatoly Solonitsyn — later contracted fatal illnesses as a result.

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