The Orchard

based on the story by Anton Chekhov "The Cherry Orchard"

Sergey Ovcharov
screenwriter, film director

"As Anton Chekhov was dying in agonies he left us his spiritual will and testament; the comedy The Cherry Orchard. The most extraordinary thing, however, is that this will is written not only with a clairvoyant, apocalyptic intonation, but also with mischief, humor, optimism and hope.
Chekhov had reason to call his play a comedy. The Cherry Orchard really is a comedy — a high, philosophical, psychological, and in places farcical and "low" comedy with pratfalls and slapstick; just remember how Petya Trofimov falls off the porch and Varya hits Lopakhin with a billiard cue.
I will make the point that our film is not a screen version. The Orchard is created with motifs from Chekhov's play. Our principal objective was to focus on what makes this piece relevant in our own time. After all, we live in an era when Godlessness and Spirituality have clashed. And the former is vigorously squeezing out the latter. Nowadays, and this is no secret for anyone, money for many takes the place of conscience; greed of generosity; aggression of kindness; cruelty of sensitivity; love has been replaced by calculation; slobbery replaces upbringing; and compassion has given way to egocentricity. Nietzsche the philosopher once exclaimed, "All this compassion! Brotherly love! Egotism and pride — those are the masters of the world." But his exclamation held irony. We live in a time when the principles of humanity and humanism that have been maintained with such difficulty for centuries are now subject to ridicule as old-fashioned and even shameful. Shame and conscience are not in favor. Demagogy and hypocrisy rush to replace them.
The battle is on in Chekhov's play also. Although in the text of The Cherry Orchard there is no conflict between the characters in a form that we are used to. Here it is not they who "clash" but their character traits. Conscience clashes with self-interest and stirs up old feelings; unrequited love and empathy momentarily ennoble the heart. Agitation gives rise to fascination. However, kindness, infatuation and spirituality on the part of the heroes are incapable of resisting the world of money. The orchard will be sold, the house will be demolished, the heroes will be torn asunder and "scattered over the face of the earth". It is not enough to be "good"; one must fight for one's orchard, house, family and loved ones. The heroes of The Cherry Orchard are unable to do this. That is why even the dreams of Petya and Anya, directed towards the future, are also infertile, as they are indifferent to the orchard here and now. They "will not build new orchards". And if they do succeed in doing so, they will lose them just as surely as Ranevskaya has lost her orchard.
The past century in the history of our country is a bitter chain of losses of small and great "orchards". What we have we cannot keep, and once we've lost it, we weep. If we had the possibility of restoring everything that was built on our land and then wiped from existence, that was grown and then mercilessly chopped down… I think that there are few people who could see a picture such as that and not experience a severe culture shock. If there had not been so many sacrifices, think how many billions of people would now populate our shared home. Alas. With paranoid determination, the orchard is chopped down, the house is demolished and the inhabitants wander off in different directions.
We hope that our film will be that little brick, created with love and craftsmanship, which will be added to the fabric of the never-completed building of humanity.»

Did you decide on a new reading of this play?

«This is not a new interpretation , but a Chekhovian reading, I would dare to hope. I think that I understand Chekhov pretty well because we have a lot in common — we both issued forth from the masses. He was a raznochinets, an intellectual with no noble background, and so am I. Chekhov came from the South, and so do I. He was granted nobility through his literature, and I have achieved status through my work in the arts. I look on The Cherry Orchard with humor — it is not a tragedy at all, but a real human comedy. Why does everyone turn it into some pompous tragic story? Chekhov himself was very displeased with the way his play was made excessively dramatic. He was even offended with Stanislavsky for this very reason. While Stanislavsky wept when he read The Cherry Orchard because he saw in it the tragedy of Gayev and Ranevskaya essentially as his own tragedy — he was from the master caste himself. But I'm a modern man, and my forebears were certainly not Gayev's, so I am interested in all the characters. My servants suffer no less, and possibly even more, than their masters; it was an even greater drama for them than it was for the gentlefolk. Ranevskaya will leave for Paris, Gayev will get a job in the bank, but where will those old servants go to, onto the streets to beg?»

How liberal were you with the text?

«When I was filming I didn't use the screenplay — the whole time I had the text of the play in my hand, and built the film around that. I took nothing out, but added some. There are two characters, the revolutionary Petya Trofimov and the Nietzsche-ite Epikhodov, who were both too dangerous for the Chekhov's times, and who could not be developed as they deserved. Chekhov allowed himself no more than hints: Epikhodov was not allowed to quote anything at all, and Petya could shout no revolutionary slogans. So what Chekhov was unable to say, I have. They might not actually shout and speak, but the subtext, which is much more ruthless, is plain to see. It is possible that it also works because we know how it all ended, this Nietzsche-ism that defined the 20th century, and the revolution of 1905-1907, with the appalling terror that followed it.»

It sounds thoroughly modern. Why did you not decide to dress your characters in modern costumes, transpose the action to our own times?

«I know it's the trendy thing to do nowadays, but I think it's rather clumsy. With The Orchard I needed costumes specifically from that era, it was essential to highlight it, because that period was the last before the precipice from which Russia set off in an entirely new direction. If we hadn't taken that direction, it is possible that we would all be living entirely different lives right now. In the film's finale I talk about this quite unambiguously: everyone is off to chop down the trees, but there's the impression that as they arm themselves with saws and axes it isn't just an orchard that they intend to chop down, it's their country they want to destroy, their fate.»

Andrey Sigle on Sergey Ovcharov:

"Sergey is a truly unique film director, and I'm delighted to have had the chance of working with him. He is so painstaking with his actors! Six weeks of daily rehearsals in costume, 10-12 hours a day. Nobody allows themselves such a luxury nowadays, nobody. We gave ourselves the luxury, understanding that it would be absolutely essential if we were to bring this remarkable work to life in film."

Andrey Sigle
musician, composer, film producer

«The decision to film The Orchard was taken literally in one evening. Initially, Sergei Ovcharov and I had been intending to make an animated film called Treasure, but when he suddenly suggested a screen version of Chekhov, and told me how exactly he saw the story, I realized that it could turn out to be a truly unique film. As well as that, not long previously, Dmitry Svetozarov and I had finished making Crime and Punishment and I felt that there would be a certain logic to make the transition from one classical work to another. In my opinion, a screen adaptation of the classic was exactly the direction we should take now, as a literary screenplay is the fundamental bedrock. If the screenplay is bad, no amount of work by the director or the actors' performances can correct that.

The screenplay for The Orchard was created by Sergei Ovcharov. It wouldn't be possible just to open the play and start filming. Our picture is not an exact screen version, it is rather an interpretation. It is based on motifs from The Cherry Orchard. We were making a comedy, and an eccentric comedy at that. The choice of this genre, incidentally, made it possible literally to cram the film with music. It is the most musical film I have worked on recently. There is absolute polyphony here, a kaleidoscope of musical genres and, of course, instruments. When writing the score for The Orchard I used the most unexpected voices: from the duduk to the accordion. The music was performed by a major academic orchestra, combining about 80 musicians.

It was no accident that we chose specifically a comedy interpretation of The Cherry Orchard. Stanislavsky once staged The Cherry Orchard as a social drama, and in his letters, Chekhov expressed regret about that particular view of the play. We read all of Chekhov's stage directions with great care, and realized that there were two ideas that were very important for him. The first was the idea that the owners of the estate had been given everything — a wonderful orchard, a marvelous house… They had squandered it all through their own negligent behavior, their mismanagement and thoughtlessness. The orchard, the estate, their people, and if you read more into it, their country, they had lost the lot. And the second idea is where Chekhov hints that we are dealing with a classic Italian comedy about sly servants who have got out of hand, who suddenly have their own lives and loves. It is a comedy in which the masters and the servants go their separate ways. And it is only Fiers who remains in the ruined house, the man who nursed not only all the characters alive today, but their parents, and possibly even their grandparents. He has always been, and therefore he is present in almost every shot. Fiers is the central hero of our film. But my favorite character is Lopakhin. The fact is that our Lopakhin is very different from the one that we got taught in school — he is a creative and responsible man. Yes, and he is madly in love with Ranevskaya. Read it, Chekhov says it all: Lopakhin works from five in the morning till late at night. He paid Ranevskaya for the estate, he paid off her debts, and gave her an additional 90,000 rubles, which at that time was 180,000 dollars. And that was when a car cost just 200. And you mustn't think that he will chop down the cherry orchard and divide it into smaller plots. In actual fact, he is very upset about the orchard, the landed gentry, and the whole country; he is the only one who actually tries to preserve anything.
We involved serious theatrical actors from St. Petersburg to work on the picture, people for whom acting in The Cherry Orchard would be a serious and important step in their lives. There are no media faces. They simply would have been unable to have worked in our rhythm. It was terribly difficult to work. Sergei Ovcharov's work with the actors was very thorough, and rehearsals often lasted from dawn till dusk. The filming day draws to a close, and Sergei literally films in the last hour what he has spent all day rehearsing. He also spent six weeks working with the actors before filming even started. They were on set every single day. The actors agreed to an incredibly tight schedule, and I take my hat off to them for that. It was very demanding and challenging work. Ranevskaya fainted at one point. Everyone started shouting: "Take her outside, take her outside." They took her out into the artificial cherry orchard which we had "grown" in the studio. Can you believe how natural it looked? Even for the actors. This orchard was our real pride. We couldn't have filmed on location because there are very few cherry orchards left in Russia. And what's more, it turned out that cherry trees are in blossom for less that a week. If we had set up a camera and started filming, in less than a week we would have had to pack up and go home. The studio provides immeasurably more scope. And it wasn't just the artificial cherry orchard that we had, there was also fake grass that can be seen through the fallen trees. Real grass would have withered after just a week. And we would have needed new grass. It was a serious problem. The soil and the gravel were real, and more than twenty tons needed to be brought in. On the last day of filming, we arranged a public chopping down of the cherry orchard. There was definitely a meaning behind this action, a sort of message. We wanted to demonstrate again that what we have should be looked after, what has been created should be preserved — whether it is a hand-made cherry orchard, a film studio, a city, or our souls and those of our children.»

Sergey Ovcharov  on Andrey Sigle:

When working on Chekhov's Cherry Orchard we agreed that the music would be a "counterpoint" to the visuals of the film: it would reproach the characters for the past, foretell the future, sympathise and discredit, forgive and justify. Despite the seriousness and careful thought behind Andrey Sigle's music, it came out light and airy — it carries one off, entertains, tugs at the heart-strings and delights. At times I find myself humming one or other of the tunes."

Anna Vartanyan (Ranevskaya)
Ranevskaya looks at everything trough her love. She is love herself and all the tragedies, experiences and emotions should be thought about in accordance with sensuality and sensitiveness. Nevertheless she is self ironic I think. She can laugh more at the situation than at the man. This helps her to hold on in the place where everything hurts her. Nothing could be changed and she could not stay. The problems are to be solved.  Ranevskaya feels the imminence of these problems very well…

Svetlana Schedrina (Anya)
The essential part of my heroine’s character - youthful maximalism. She is only 17, all her feelings burst out of her: her jealousy is JEALOUSY, discontent is DISCONTENT. She is extremely arrogant. A girl with a character.

Evgeniy Baranov (Epikhodow)
Epikhodow is the most modern hero in this play. Who is a clerk nowadays? He is an office worker. A man without a face. Ha always had a lack of love and now can not understand, what it is. He can not feel it, only think about it.

Roman Ageev (Lopakhin)
Lopakhin loves Ranevskaya. He loves her for all his life – passionately and unhappily. He is among all these people because of her. He is a stranger here – he does not know where to put his hands, he can not speak this perfect way they could. He earned a lot of money, payed someone to tell him how to act the right way, read some books. Everything for her, for she could look at him and say: “What a man!”

Evgeniy Filatov (Simeonov-Pischik)
He looks like a mercantile person, always searching for the source of money.  He is a nobleman but extremely poor, he has to eat nearly the leavings and that’s his life. He is a really touching man, a peacemaker for everyone. Here is his home, which he had never had, his family, which he had not either. Everything breaks down around him, everyone moves somewhere, and he goes after them – he has no other place to go.

Boris Dragilev (Jasha)
Jasha is a very devoted person, a kind of a young Feers. He has a work – to be with Ranevskaya – and he is fully overtaken with it. For the sake of this work he discards even love, even his own mother. He can not afford himself to love anything.

Andrey Feskov (Petia Trifimov)
Petia Trifimov  is ideologically educated. He seems to be stronger than his passions. But getting the gate from the woman he loved he acts as a hero of a bad romance story. He is being pulled apart with the contradictions: he is the revolutionary, he should cope with everything and go on. But there is love – a weakness he hates himself for. A weakness which he can not cope with.

Igor Yasulovich (Firs)
He is a patriarchal person in all ways. I have seen such peole: My grandmother was of this kind, my mother and aunt too. He lives in a world with a certain way of life. There it seems a catastrophe when a man was not fed.