In July, at the Cannes Film Festival, Petrov’s Fever was presented in competition, but in the noticeable absence of its director. Internationally renowned director Kirill Serebrennikov, accused of embezzlement, suffered the last fallout from the long judicial soap opera which had just opposed him to the Russian authorities. Long under house arrest awaiting trial, from which he left on June 26, 2020, sentenced to a three-year suspended sentence, the former director of the Gogol Center in Moscow has, in the meantime, been denied. never stopped working, through thick and thin. His latest hallucinatory feature film is the fruit of this stormy period.
How does this idea, a priori crazy, of adapting to the cinema “The Petrovs, the flu, etc.? », By Alexeï Salnikov (Editions des Syrtes, 2020) did it come to you?
I had heard about this wonderful book, but one which completely discourages the use of images. It was a bestseller with many awards. I had therefore decided to embark on an adaptation, but for the theater. At the same time, my producer, Ilya Stewart, bought the rights to the book. He knew I was working on it and suggested that I draw a script from it. I was then placed under house arrest and had no possibility of filming. So Ilya started looking for another director. When I was released, he still hadn’t found any. I said to myself : “Let’s try! “
How did you manage to shoot the film at the same time as your trial in Moscow was taking place?
We shot the movie at night, as soon as I could get out of the trial. It was a difficult time in my life, but also a very happy one, because every day I waited for the moment when I could escape to go and shoot.
The film never ceases to mix dream and reality. How did you deal with this complexity?
Technically, the film was quite difficult to make. The first day of shooting, we started with an eighteen-minute sequence shot without any cuts or patch. People sometimes ask me why I take such long takes: it’s to weave special relationships between space and time. They gain a form of autonomy if we take the risk of not cutting. In such a film, where the viewer receives a lot of information, the absence of a cut proves to him that all this is not chic. We don’t have the impression that everything was compressed during the edit. I wanted all the dimensions, physical, psychological, past, present, future to blend together, to feel like we were holding them in our hands, touching them with a finger. Petrov, this is the DIY version ofInterstellar !
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