Reportage“Hollywood in Franco’s Spain” (3/6). In the winter of 1964, filmmaker David Lean transposes Boris Pasternak’s Russian fresco. The reconstitution of Moscow, on 4 hectares on the outskirts of Madrid, then constitutes the largest set ever built in Europe. The film is also one of the biggest successes in the history of cinema.
That damn snow that doesn’t happen. However, the teams are ready to go to the filming location from the first snowflake. Snow is long overdue in this winter of 1964 in Soria, a small town in the province of Castile, just over 200 kilometers north of Madrid, where winters are usually unforgiving – the temperature can drop to minus 10 ° vs. It is for this reason, among others, that the British filmmaker David Lean chooses to shoot Doctor Zhivago (1965) in Spain instead of going to Sweden, Yugoslavia or Finland. Thanks to the snow of Soria.
The sets have been there for months to transpose Boris Pasternak’s bestseller, published in 1957, to cinema, which won the Russian writer the Nobel Prize for Literature the following year, to the chagrin of the Soviet regime. These sets recreate the family home in Varykino, in the Urals, where the doctor and poet Yuri Zhivago (Omar Sharif) and his wife, Tonia (Geraldine Chaplin), fled Bolshevik repression. They reconstitute Youriatine, the neighboring village where Lara (Julie Christie), mistress of the hero, lives with her daughter. The stations along the route between Moscow and Siberia are transposed onto a railway line connecting Valladolid and Soria. At the bottom of this Hispano-Siberian steppe, the snow-capped peak of Moncayo, one of the highest on the Iberian Peninsula, symbolizes the icy region of the Urals.
You have to imagine the thousands of daffodils imported from the Netherlands and planted months before in Spain, in order to shoot a spring scene
“It was like in a military operation”, wrote about this Tedy shoot Villalba, one of the production assistants, in his Memoirs, Un hombre de cine (“Un homme de cinéma”, 2016, Pigmalion, untranslated). You have to imagine the thousands of daffodils imported from the Netherlands and planted months before in Spain, in order to shoot a spring scene to the legendary music of Maurice Jarre. Putting snow and flowers together, Tedy Villalba writes: “The team members had received specific instructions. Our suitcases were ready. At the slightest snowflake or from the first flowering of the daffodils, we left Madrid immediately. Everyone knew which car to take, in which hotel to stay. Dozens of rooms had been rented to accommodate staff as there were only two hotels in Soria. They sat empty for months. “
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