Solaris

Andrei Tarkovsky came to Stanislaw Lem’s novel partly out of need: Andrei Rublev had gone unreleased and he wanted work. In a 1970 interview he called Kubrick’s 2001 phoney on many points, even for specialists, and a lifeless schema with only pretensions to truth. Natalya Bondarchuk did not get the part at once: at the 1970 audition Tarkovsky judged her too young for Hari and recommended her to director Larisa Shepitko, then cast her after watching Shepitko’s film. The station walls carry full size reproductions of Bruegel’s Months cycle, and the planet’s ocean was made from acetone, aluminium powder and dye. In January 1972 the state cinema committee asked for a more realistic future and for references to God to go; Tarkovsky refused the large changes and the film passed after small ones. Lem never liked the result and said Tarkovsky had made Crime and Punishment in space. Tarkovsky called it a failure himself in 1983, for staying inside the genre. At Cannes it won the Grand Prix Spécial du Jury, in a year when the top prize was split between two Italian films. A good fit if you want science fiction argued through grief and guilt rather than hardware. Not for anyone waiting for the story to pick up speed; the 1976 American release cut 30 minutes from it.