Director Nikita Mikhalkov’s Declaration of Independence

Russian film director Nikita Mikhalkov is a large man with large ideas, compelling ideas about freedom and independence, truth and artistic integrity. He understands and speaks some English but prefers the freedom that comes with using an interpreter--it allows him space to move about, to stretch, to emphasize his points with massive swings of his arms, to cope with metaphors. His voice is a free range, from whispered descriptions of a future project to shouted challenges to competitors.

In many ways, the 47-year-old director and actor symbolizes the changes that have come to filmmaking in his country. At the same time, he is a reflection of how film business is done both in his and this country.

He is not in Los Angeles to make a movie, he makes that clear. That he leaves to his brother, the director Andrei Konchalovsky (“The Inner Circle,” “Tango & Cash’), nee Mikhalkov. This Mikhalkov may be here to nurture his latest movie, “Close to Eden,” which opens Friday, but he is more interested in the ironies that come with new artistic and economic freedoms.

Before he went to Mongolia to make “Eden” there was a possible movie project, “Barber of Siberia,” involving Meryl Streep. But that, as the interpreter says, “is holding.” The experience remains a sharp fragment to Mikhalkov. “I want always to make my movies my way,” he says, “but I guess I didn’t earn Hollywood’s trust. For me a script is just a reason to start a movie. For them (the interpreter shrugs uncertainly), it’s a bible.”

That may be part of the freedoms Mikhalkov talks about. His latest film didn’t have a script when he started and scenes were written from day to day, hardly a practice cherished or encouraged by American studio bosses.

In one respect, Mikhalkov is capitalistically very American. He owns his own Moscow film company, he goes abroad to find investors and to line up distributors, his facilities are offered to foreign film companies to produce needed revenues.

Until recently in the Soviet Union, he says, you had a certain conditional freedom to make movies, which he accomplished with such movies as “Dark Eyes,” “Slave of Love” and “Oblomov.” “Then,” he says, “the state provided the money and we had no reasons not to finish a movie. Today it is a different situation. We have to find the money first. We have more creative freedom but the situation still comes down to the same thing, whether it’s the state or a Western producer. We have a saying, ‘Those who pay can order the music.’ ”

Mikhalkov, unlike many other Russian directors, especially that country’s youthful new wave, straddles art and commerce, directing his films his way but co-producing with Western companies through partnerships. While most Russian filmmakers know their art, they know little about the market place. They have had little experience in foreign distribution.

“Close to Eden” in many ways exemplifies for Mikhalkov the new economic and creative realities of filmmaking. He had only a five-page treatment and a title, “Urga, Territory of Love.” No script. No stars. Only an idea about a love story set on the steppes of Inner Mongolia, an isolated area where social and environmental changes were coming.

What he needed was a capitalistic partner. His bare-bones treatment attracted French producer Michel Seydoux, whose company, Camera One, underwrote the Mongolian venture.

The treatment and some filming equipment were all Mikhalkov had when he and his crew left for Mongolia, a region he had never visited. Most of the actors were unknowns recruited for the film.

“We wrote the script as we shot the movie,” he says. “By the time we stopped, we had a completed script. We shot blindly, never able to see the rushes.

“There are many ways to make a movie. One way is make all the preparations in advance, study the conditions, get your fax machine ready, your hotel rooms, then start shooting. But there is another, freer approach. Forget all the amenities. Let us just make a movie, one where we don’t violate the natural way of life, where you don’t control life or tell others how to do things. Their lives will show in the film.

“During shooting we had no cinemas or equipment for seeing the film even if it was sent back to us from Paris where it was being processed. We shot 65,000 meters of film for ‘Urga’ without seeing anything. It took me two weeks just to look at the rough footage after we left, then seven months to edit the finished film. Beyond that we had to spend only one day on some redubbing.”

The film’s urga refers to a lasso-like object that has two purposes: one, for rounding-up horses and, two, when planted in the ground it becomes “a love stick, a fertility symbol” signaling a private territory for rural Mongolian lovemaking.

“Nobody within 400 square meters of an urga goes in,” the interpreter says.

Even with “Urga” winning the Golden Lion Award for best film at last year’s Venice Film Festival, Mikhalkov received a surprise lesson in getting his film shown. It was retitled for Americans. “Urga” was out, “Close to Eden” was in. “The U.S. distributors, Miramax, surprised me with the change,” he says. “They think ‘Close to Eden’ says something more, to them maybe more about the territory of love.”

Beyond enterprising filmmaking and co-productions, Mikhalkov has become a key player in other changes in Russia.

He is adviser to the vice president on culture and foreign cultural relations, a new position in Boris Yeltsin’s government. “It’s an official post with absolutely no official point of view,” he says with a certain self-effacement. “All rulers and kings have their clowns to tell them the truth, people who can say anything.

“I am valuable because I am completely independent from the leaders and I can give them my subjective point of view. I can do that because I do not do it for money or for privileges. They understand that.”

When the Russian government was considering privatizing libraries and museums, Mikhalkov strongly advised against it. “I told them it would be a big mistake and the libraries and museums should be left as a government entity. If they were changed, our priceless art and books might be sold or could be used as part of some criminal attempt to launder money.”

The libraries and museums stayed public.

It’s his freedom thing.

Mikhalkov’s position may also come from a family heritage. His father wrote the country’s national anthem and was for years the head of the Communist party’s writers union. His mother is an acclaimed poet. Works by several family members hang in museums.

Two new projects now command most of Mikhalkov’s attention. One is a TV series on Russian art and artists. As he begins to describe it he suddenly stands on a sofa and cups his hands over a small area of a landscape painting--the director is setting up the shot. “Try to imagine,” the interpreter’s voice follows Mikhalkov’s. “Just this part is seen first for three or four minutes. The camera focuses on this small area as I talk about the artist, where the painting was done. Slowly the camera starts to back off, slowly, slowly, we see a bird and hear its sounds, we see a figure and hear the talk of that period, that place. The camera moves back and I talk about the history of the picture, the people.”

Mikhalkov returns to his chair. He now talks of his next film, “Anna From 6 to 18,” a work he has been shooting for 12 years, each year since his daughter was 6, placing her before the camera and asking the same questions: What do you like? What do you dislike? What are you afraid of? In the film he will fill the periods between the questioning with news footage of Russian events during his daughter’s growing up. In the final scene she is 18 and is to leave for studies outside of the country. He asks her, the interpreter says, “You are leaving. . .?” “Are you going to return?”

Anna asks, “Return, where?”

“Here. Russia,” Mikhalkov says.

“Of course,” she says.

There is, he says, silence as the camera stays on her face. Then Anna begins to cry.

Mikhalkov leans back into his chair. He has made his next movie without a script this time, one lacking even a five-page treatment. He has that freedom now. Finding a partner may be another matter.