Andrei Rublev (1966): trivia & fun facts

Fun facts

• The film was re-edited from the 1966 film titled The Passion According to Andrei by Tarkovsky which was censored during the first decade of the Brezhnev era in the Soviet Union.
• Tarkovsky and his co-screenwriter Andrei Konchalovsky worked for more than two years on the script, studying medieval writings and chronicles and books on medieval history and art.
• The initial budget was 1.6 million Rbls, but it was cut several times to one million roubles (In comparison, Sergei Bondarchuk's War and Peace had a budget of eight and half million roubles).
• Andrei Rublev was invited to the Cannes Film Festival in 1967 as part of a planned retrospective of Soviet film on occasion of the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution.
• At first, I got the impression they were attempting to pressure my creative individuality.
• In 1971, a censored version of the film was released in the Soviet Union.
• In the end the film cost 1.3 million Rbls, with the cost overrun due to heavy snowfall, which disrupted shooting from November 1965 until April 1966.
• When the film was released in the U.S. and other countries in 1973, the distributor Columbia Pictures cut it by an additional 20 minutes, making the film an incoherent mess in the eyes of many critics and leading to unfavourable reviews.
• According to Tarkovsky's sister, Marina Tarkovskaya, one of the editors of the film, Lyudmila Feiginova, secretly kept a print of the 205-minute cut under her bed.
• The Village Voice ranked the film at number 112 in its Top 250 "Best Films of the Century" list in 1999, based on a poll of critics.
• In the 2012 Sight & Sound polls, it was ranked the 26th-greatest film ever made in the critics' poll and 13th in the directors' poll.
• In the earlier 2002 version of the list the film ranked 35th among critics and 24th among directors.
• In the critics' poll by the same magazine it ranked 11th and 24th in 1982 and 1992 respectively.
• In 1961, while working on his first feature film Ivan's Childhood, Tarkovsky made a proposal to Mosfilm for a film on the life of Russia's greatest icon painter, Andrei Rublev.
• The film is loosely based on the life of Andrei Rublev, a 15th-century Russian icon painter.

Source: Wikipedia

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