69 Facts About Andrei Tarkovsky

Andrei Tarkovsky is widely considered one of the greatest directors in cinema history.

Andrei Tarkovsky's films explore spiritual and metaphysical themes and are known for their slow pacing and long takes, dreamlike visual imagery and preoccupation with nature and memory.

Andrei Tarkovsky died later that year of cancer, a condition possibly caused by the toxic locations used in the filming of Stalker.

Andrei Tarkovsky was born in the village of Zavrazhye in the Yuryevetsky District of the Ivanovo Industrial Oblast to the poet and translator Arseny Aleksandrovich Tarkovsky, a native of Yelysavethrad, and Maria Ivanova Vishnyakova, a graduate of the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute who later worked as a proofreader; she was born in Moscow in the Dubasov family estate.

Andrei's paternal grandfather Aleksandr Karlovich Tarkovsky was a Polish nobleman who worked as a bank clerk.

Andrei Tarkovsky's wife Maria Danilovna Rachkovskaya was a Romanian language teacher who arrived from Iasi.

Andrei Tarkovsky was married to Ivan Ivanovich Vishnyakov, a native of the Kaluga Governorate who studied law at the Moscow State University and served as a judge in Kozelsk.

Andrei Tarkovsky's father left the family in 1937, subsequently volunteering for the army in 1941.

Andrei Tarkovsky returned home in 1943, having been awarded the Order of the Red Star after being shot in one of his legs.

Andrei Tarkovsky stayed with his mother, moving with her and his sister Marina to Moscow, where she worked as a proofreader at a printing press.

In 1939, Andrei Tarkovsky enrolled at the Moscow School No 554.

Tarkovsky continued his studies at his old school, where the poet Andrei Voznesensky was one of his classmates.

Andrei Tarkovsky studied piano at a music school and attended classes at an art school.

Andrei Tarkovsky still managed to graduate, and from 1951 to 1952 studied Arabic at the Oriental Institute in Moscow, a branch of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union.

Andrei Tarkovsky did not finish his studies and dropped out to work as a prospector for the Academy of Science Institute for Non-Ferrous Metals and Gold.

Andrei Tarkovsky participated in a year-long research expedition to the river Kureyka near Turukhansk in the Krasnoyarsk Province.

Andrei Tarkovsky was in the same class as Irma Raush whom he married in April 1957.

In 1956, Andrei Tarkovsky directed his first student short film, The Killers, from a short story of Ernest Hemingway.

Andrei Tarkovsky submitted the script to Lenfilm, but it was rejected.

Andrei Tarkovsky had inherited the film from director Eduard Abalov, who had to abort the project.

Andrei Tarkovsky Rublev was not, except for a single screening in Moscow in 1966, immediately released after completion due to problems with Soviet authorities.

Andrei Tarkovsky had to cut the film several times, resulting in several different versions of varying lengths.

Andrei Tarkovsky had worked on this together with screenwriter Friedrich Gorenstein as early as 1968.

Andrei Tarkovsky had worked on the screenplay for this film since 1967, under the consecutive titles Confession, White day and A white, white day.

The last film Andrei Tarkovsky completed in the Soviet Union was Stalker, inspired by the novel Roadside Picnic by the brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky.

Andrei Tarkovsky had met the brothers first in 1971 and was in contact with them until his death in 1986.

Furthermore, Andrei Tarkovsky had a heart attack in April 1978, resulting in further delay.

Andrei Tarkovsky returned to Italy in 1980 for an extended trip, during which he and Guerra completed the script for the film Nostalghia.

Andrei Tarkovsky returned to Italy in 1982 to start shooting Nostalghia, but Mosfilm then withdrew from the project, so he sought and received financial backing from the Italian RAI.

Andrei Tarkovsky completed the film in 1983, and it was presented at the Cannes Film Festival where it won the FIPRESCI prize and the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury.

Andrei Tarkovsky shared a special prize called Grand Prix du cinema de creation with Robert Bresson.

Soviet authorities lobbied to prevent the film from winning the Palme d'Or, a fact that hardened Andrei Tarkovsky's resolve to never work in the Soviet Union again.

Andrei Tarkovsky spent most of 1984 preparing the film The Sacrifice.

Ironically, at the end of the year Andrei Tarkovsky was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer.

Andrei Tarkovsky was buried on 3 January 1987 in the Russian Cemetery in Sainte-Genevieve-des-Bois in France.

Andrei Tarkovsky became a film director during the mid and late 1950s, a period referred to as the Khrushchev Thaw, during which Soviet society opened to foreign films, literature and music, among other things.

Andrei Tarkovsky was, according to fellow student Shavkat Abdusalmov, fascinated by Japanese films.

Andrei Tarkovsky was amazed by how every character on the screen is exceptional and how everyday events such as a Samurai cutting bread with his sword are elevated to something special and put into the limelight.

Andrei Tarkovsky has expressed interest in the art of Haiku and its ability to create "images in such a way that they mean nothing beyond themselves".

Andrei Tarkovsky was a deeply religious Orthodox Christian, who believed great art should have a higher spiritual purpose.

Andrei Tarkovsky was a perfectionist not given to humor or humility: his signature style was ponderous and literary, having many characters that pondered over religious themes and issues regarding faith.

Andrei Tarkovsky perceived that the art of cinema has only been truly mastered by very few filmmakers, stating in a 1970 interview with Naum Abramov that "they can be counted on the fingers of one hand".

In 1972, Andrei Tarkovsky told film historian Leonid Kozlov his ten favorite films.

Andrei Tarkovsky liked Pier Paolo Pasolini's film The Gospel According to St Matthew.

The reason is that Andrei Tarkovsky saw film as an art as only a relatively recent phenomenon, with the early film-making forming only a prelude.

Andrei Tarkovsky was not a fan of blockbusters or science fiction, largely dismissing the latter for its "comic book" trappings and vulgar commercialism.

Andrei Tarkovsky equally liked George Lucas's Star Wars according to his son, Andrei A Tarkovsky.

Andrei Tarkovsky incorporated levitation scenes into several of his films, most notably Solaris.

Andrei Tarkovsky developed a theory of cinema that he called "sculpting in time".

Up to, and including, his film Mirror, Andrei Tarkovsky focused his cinematic works on exploring this theory.

Andrei Tarkovsky claimed that in everyday life one does not consciously notice colors most of the time, and that color should therefore be used in film mainly to emphasize certain moments, but not all the time, as this distracts the viewer.

Andrei Tarkovsky is for me the greatest, the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream.

Andrei Tarkovsky worked in close collaboration with cinematographer Vadim Yusov from 1958 to 1972, and much of the visual style of Andrei Tarkovsky's films can be attributed to this collaboration.

Andrei Tarkovsky would spend two days preparing for Yusov to film a single long take, and due to the preparation, usually only a single take was needed.

Andrei Tarkovsky wrote Sculpting in Time, a book on film theory.

Andrei Tarkovsky then directed Andrei Rublev in 1966, Solaris in 1972, Mirror in 1975 and Stalker in 1979.

Andrei Tarkovsky was personally involved in writing the screenplays for all his films, sometimes with a cowriter.

Andrei Tarkovsky once said that a director who realizes somebody else's screenplay without being involved in it becomes a mere illustrator, resulting in dead and monotonous films.

Andrei Tarkovsky wrote the screenplay during his entrance examination at the State Institute of Cinematography in a single sitting.

Andrei Tarkovsky earned the highest possible grade, "excellent" for this work.

In 1974, an acquaintance from Tallinnfilm approached Andrei Tarkovsky to write a screenplay on a German theme.

Andrei Tarkovsky planned to write the script during the summer of 1974 at his dacha.

Andrei Tarkovsky finally finished the project in late 1974 and submitted the final script to Tallinnfilm in October.

In 1984, during the time of his exile in the West, Andrei Tarkovsky revisited the screenplay and made a few changes.

Andrei Tarkovsky considered to finally direct a film based on the screenplay but ultimately dropped this idea.

Under the influence of Glasnost and Perestroika, Andrei Tarkovsky was finally recognized in the Soviet Union in the Autumn of 1986, shortly before his death, by a retrospective of his films in Moscow.

In 1996, the Andrei Tarkovsky Museum opened in Yuryevets, his childhood town.

The Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski commented that: "Andrei Tarkovsky was one of the greatest directors of recent years," and regarded Tarkovsky's film Ivan's Childhood as an influence on his own work.

Andrei Tarkovsky walked out of a screening of Solaris at the halfway point, and stopped a VHS tape of Mirror at a similar juncture.