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MOTION PICTURE & PRO-VIDEO cover story
ICE COLD IN
ARCHANGEL
Dark secrets from
the Stalinist terror: how they turned a Robert Harris best-seller into the BBC’s Easter blockbuster
is books, like Fatherland, Enigma and, more recent- ly, Pompeii – which vivid- ly re-created the cata- strophic events of AD 79 – blend exhaustive research with some
intriguing fiction and a generous help- ing of What if?
And it’s no different with Robert Harris’s 1998 bestseller, Archangel, which, mixing flashback and contem- porary action, posits the potentially shocking consequences to the new Russia following the discovery of Stalin’s secret diaries.
Boasting a script by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais – whose Auf Wiedersehen, Pet finally concluded at Christmas after more than twenty years of building site shenanigans
around the world – Archangel aims to give the BBC the same kind of ratings boost at Easter.
Helmed by Jon Jones (The Alan Clark Diaries, When I’m 64), it stars Daniel Craig in a rare TV role between recent films like Layer Cake, Sylvia, The Mother and Enduring Love. He plays hard-drinking historian ‘Fluke’ Kelso, who’s suddenly nursing the scoop of a lifetime after a fateful meeting with one of Stalin’s former bodyguards.
The cast also includes Hollywood’s Gabriel Macht (The Recruit), together with a pair of Russia’s finest actors, Ekaterina Rednikova (The Thief) and Konstantin Lavronenko (The Return).
“The first thing I did was jump on a plane to Moscow,” said producer Christopher Hall (Pride, The Hound Of The Baskervilles, The Lost World), who
first became involved with the project early last year. “Part of the thesis behind the script is to show people what Moscow is really like now, and you can’t do that purely by make- believe; you have to take your camera and actors to the Russian capital.
“We’d been warned by many peo- ple that this would be a difficult and tricky thing to do. In the event, it was fine; it was guerrilla film-making. But it really worked and helped give us enor- mous production value.”
Both cinematographer Chris Seager BSC (Sex Traffic, State Of Play, The Young Visiters) and production designer Michael Pickwoad (Poirot, The Deal) would say “amen” to that.
But Moscow was only going to be, quite literally, part of the story. The second half of the tale, and much of its
H
Photo main: Setting up in the snow on Archangel; above left: Director Jon Jones checks a shot
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