The Master and Margarita - News

News from the movies

February 10, 2020

Three years ago, the American film producer Scott Steindorff announced that he would not use his exclusive rights to make a film version of The Master and Margarita. Shortly thereafter, two new groups emerged who wanted to take up the challenge.

In the United States, two female producers, the American Grace Loh and the Russian Svetlana Migunova-Dali announced in February 2017 that they wanted to make a feature film in Hollywood.

About a year and a half later, we were told from Moscow that, together with some co-producers, the television channel Kanal 1 and the production company Mars Media wanted to do the same in Russia. They also said that director Nikolai Lebedev (°1966) had already prepared a script for the film. Kanal 1 is the channel which produced the successful TV series Master i Margarita by director Vladimir Bortko in 2005. Mars Media has a slightly less solid reputation. In August 2014, they had announced with all bells and whistles that they were preparing a ten-part TV series about Mikhail Bulgakov under the title The Life and Temptations of Mikhail Bulgakov, but it never happened.

Baz Luhrmann enters

Both announcements were followed by a deafening silence for a long time. But on December 11, 2019, the news site Deadline Hollywood suddenly reported that Migunova-Dali and Loh had signed a agreement with the Australian director Baz Luhrmann. Luhrmann is known for his films Romeo + Juliet and The Great Gatsby, both with Leonardo DiCaprio, and Australia and Moulin Rouge!, both with Nicole Kidman. He was also previously suggested as a possible director for The Master and Margarita when the aforementioned producer Scott Steindorff acquired the film rights for the novel in 2010.

The news that Baz Luhrmann will direct the American film provoked very diverse reactions from both supporters and opponents. And it did not leave the Russians untouched neither. On February 3, 2020, various Russian news media reported that Nikolai Lebedev's Russian project would be stopped for a while because the Russian makers would not want to compete with Luhrmann.

The Russian news channel Mash, which disseminates its information mainly through the telecommunications app Telegram, went even further. Mash not only reported that the Russian producers would be afraid to endure the comparison with Luhrmann, they also wrote that there would be copyright issues. Mash is one of the most popular Telegram channels in Russia, more than 700,000 people have subscribed to it, but they do not score high in terms of reliability. Mash was created by former employees of the LifeNews channel,which was notorious for spreading fake news and for frequent flagrant violations of journalistic ethics.

Two unrelated projects...

Initially, Nikolai Lebedev did not wish to respond to these messages. He said that his contract did not allow him to comment on the project publicly. Last year, however, he did so. In an interview with Radio Sputnik he had said that the production would start with a year and a half delay. Normally he should have started shootings in April 2019, but that would now be mid-2020.

On February 6, 2020, producer Igor Tolstunov denied the rumours about a possible suspension of the Russian project. He told the RIA Novisti news agency that the Hollywood project has no influence on the Russian film plans. «These are two unrelated projects. What they do abroad does not affect our film. Our shootings will probably not start in March, but we are continuing to work steadily», he said. Irina Danilova, responsible for Public Relations at Mars Media, added that Mash was «once again spreading fake news», and that the company would soon provide more and reliable news on the progress of the project.

...which seem to be related

Is it fake news, as Danilova said, or is there really something going on with relation to the project in Russia? The latter may well be the case, because during the checking of the above messages we made some curious observations.

One of the producers of the Russian project is Amedia Productions, a company owned by Leonard Blavatnik. This billionaire born in Odessa (Ukraine) is the owner of Warner Music, one of the world's largest music publishers. Blavatnik, number 27 on the Forbes list of the world's richest people, is a co-producer of the Russian film project together with Ruben Dishdishan (Mars Media), Igor Tolstunov (Profit) and Konstantin Ernst (Kanal 1) .

And please, pay attention now: one of the producers of the American project is Baz & Co, a company with which Baz Luhrmann also made his film Moulin Rouge! And... who do we find as the founder of that company? Yes, indeed, the same Leonard Blavatnik who is also involved in the Russian project.

So, Leonard Blavatnik has financial interests in both projects. We don't really care zabout this, he does what he wants with his money, but perhaps the projects are more related than Igor Tolstunov wanted to admit.

Vladimir Bortko also has an opinion

In the meantime, director Vladimir Bortko also got involved in the debates. With the TV series A Dog's Heart (1988) and Master i Margarita (2005), he has made two of the most successful and highly appreciated adaptations of the works of Mikhail Bulgakov.

In an interview with internet newspaper Ridus, Bortko said on February 3, 2020, that he estimated the chances of Baz Luhrmann's to succeed to be very low. He expressed a particularly condescending attitude towards producers Svetlana Migunova-Dali and Grace Loh, and said that, according to him, «Americans are unable to understand the story of 'The Master and Margarita'».

However, in that regard, it is highly questionable whether Vladimir Bortko himself still understands the novel. The Master and Margarita is, after all, a satire on communism from the time of Joseph Stalin, superbly filmed by Bortko himself in 2005.

But not long after that, Bortko himself joined the Communist party and was elected as a communist in the Duma, the Russian parliament. There he is now the advocate of a political system that Mikhail Bulgakov has been fighting in all his writings all his life. And Bortko is sometimes sharp in his statements about present-day Russia. In 2011 he said, for example, that «Russia nowadays is only able to export oil, gas and prostitutes».

Click here to read more on Baz Luhrmann's film
Click here to read more onNikolai Lebedev's film