History
The director, Vladimir Motyl, said such films as Stagecoach and High Noon influenced him and he has described the film as being a "cocktail" of both an adventurous Russian folktale and a western. Initially several directors, including Andrei Tarkovsky and Andrei Konchalovsky, were offered the film but they turned it down, Motyl claims, for two main reasons. Firstly, Konchalovsky thought only American actors could pull off the part of a lead role in a western, and secondly the screenplay was considered weak. Motyl was offered the screenplay and decided to make the best of his chance. He consequently rewrote a large part of the screenplay, and all the dialogue for Pavel Luspekaev's character, Vereshchagin, was written immediately before shooting began. The screenwriters published a book under the same title. A Russian computer game was released based on the film. In 1998, the creators of the film were awarded the 1997 Russian Federation State Prize in Literature and Arts, nearly 30 years after the film left the silver screen.
Read more about this topic: White Sun Of The Desert
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“What is most interesting and valuable in it, however, is not the materials for the history of Pontiac, or Braddock, or the Northwest, which it furnishes; not the annals of the country, but the natural facts, or perennials, which are ever without date. When out of history the truth shall be extracted, it will have shed its dates like withered leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The greatest horrors in the history of mankind are not due to the ambition of the Napoleons or the vengeance of the Agamemnons, but to the doctrinaire philosophers. The theories of the sentimentalist Rousseau inspired the integrity of the passionless Robespierre. The cold-blooded calculations of Karl Marx led to the judicial and business-like operations of the Cheka.”
—Aleister Crowley (1875–1947)
“If man is reduced to being nothing but a character in history, he has no other choice but to subside into the sound and fury of a completely irrational history or to endow history with the form of human reason.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)