A steady stream of former extras and fired PAs talked of the shoot in terms usually reserved for survivalist camps. The director, Ilya Khrzhanovsky, was a madman who forced the crew to dress in Stalin-era clothes, fed them Soviet food out of cans and tins, and paid them in Soviet money. Others said the project was a cult and everyone involved worked for free. Khrzhanovsky had taken over all of Kharkov, they said, shutting down the airport. No, no, others insisted, the entire thing was a prison experiment, perhaps filmed surreptitiously by hidden cameras. Film critic Stanislav Zelvensky blogged that he expected "heads on spikes" around the encampment.
I have ample time and incentive to rerun these snatches of gossip in my head as my rickety Saab prop plane makes its jittery approach to Kharkov. Another terrible minute later, it's rolling down an overgrown airfield between rusting husks of Aeroflot planes grounded by the empire's fall. The airport isn't much, but at least it hasn't been taken over by the film. And while my cab driver knows all about the shoot—the production borrowed his friend's vintage car, he brags without prompting—he doesn't seem to be in the director's thrall or employ.
I'm about to write the rumors off as idle blog chatter when I get to the film's compound itself and, again, find myself ready to believe anything. The set, seen from the outside, is an enormous wooden box jutting directly out of a three-story brick building that houses the film's vast offices, workshops, and prop warehouses. The wardrobe department alone takes up the entire basement. Here, a pair of twins order me out of my clothes and into a 1950s three-piece suit complete with sock garters, pants that go up to the navel, a fedora, two bricklike brown shoes, an undershirt, and boxers. Black, itchy, and unspeakably ugly, the underwear is enough to trigger Proustian recall of the worst kind in anyone who's spent any time in the USSR. (I lived in Latvia through high school.) Seventy years of quotidian misery held with one waistband.
The twins, Olya and Lena, see nothing unusual about this hazing ritual for a reporter who's not going to appear in a single shot of the film—just like they see nothing unusual in the fact that the cameras haven't rolled for more than a month. After all, the film, tentatively titled Dau, has been in production since 2006 and won't wrap until 2012, if ever. But within the walls of the set, for the 300 people working on the project—including the fifty or so who live in costume, in character—there is no difference between "on" and "off."
One of the twins admiringly touches my head. Before coming to wardrobe, I'd stopped in hair and makeup. My nape and temples are now shaved clean in an approximation of an old hairstyle called a half-box. All to help me blend in on the set. Only, from here on, I can no longer call it that. According to a glossary of forbidden terms posted right in front of me on the wall, the set is to be referred to as the Institute. Likewise, inside the Institute, there are no scenes, just experiments. No shooting, only documentation. And there is certainly no director. Instead, Ilya Khrzhanovsky, the man responsible for this madness, is to be referred to as the Head of the Institute or simply the Boss.
Khrzhanovsky greets me in wardrobe dressed in a black vest over a dark gray shirt, tousled 1950s hair, and decadeless Ray-Bans with a strong prescription. He leads me down one of the endless hallways of the Dau compound to the Institute and, en route, spots a female extra being made up in one of the many makeup rooms.
"Tear off her eyelashes," he says without breaking stride. "She looks like an intellectual whore."
"Well, that was the idea!" the makeup artist yells to his back.
"Sure," says Khrzhanovsky, pivoting on one heel like an ice dancer. "But try to make her look less whorish. Impossible, I know..."
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