Background
The director and screenwriter of this adaptation is Vladimir Bortko. It was his second attempt to make a screen adaptation of Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita. In 2000 he had already been solicited by the Kino-Most film studio, associated with the competing channel NTV, but at the last moment the company did not reach an agreement with Sergei Shilovsky, grandson of Mikhail Bulgakov's third wife Elena Sergeevna Shilovskaya, the self-declared owner of the copyrights. In 2005, an agreement was found with Telekanal Rossiiya.
This TV-epopee of more than eght hours was heavily criticized, or at least regarded with much skepticism. The first broadcast on December 19, 2005, was preceded by months of controversy in the media. Opponents feared that filming this for television would sacrifice the layered narrative of the novel and the complexity of the socio-political and metaphysical themes to the popular demands of the broadcast medium. Director Bortko followed the dialogues of the novel carefully, and the series became the most successful series ever on Russian television. Most of the criticism stopped after the first appearance on screen. On December 25, 2005, 40 million Russians watched the seventh episode.
Despite the fact that the city of Moscow plays an important role in the novel, director Vladimir Bortko opted to shoot the 1930s scenes in Saint Petersburg. “Saint Petersburg today is much more like Moscow in the Stalin period than Moscow today,” he said. The biblical scenes were shot in Bulgaria.
Unlike previous screen adaptations, director Vladimir Bortko followed the novel meticulously. The setting of a TV-series appeared to be an ideal format to elaborate the complicated, multidimensional work with many different characters. “Bulgakov wrote the novel almost like a screenplay”, Bortko said.
Read more about this topic: The Master And Margarita (TV Miniseries)
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